The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Strong—and somewhat vengeful. A few weeks earlier, Williams had participated in an intrigue whose outcome eventually cost Stuart his flat. According to roommate Rod Murray, Williams had encountered them one afternoon at Ye Cracke, trailing an entourage he introduced as “reporters from the Empire News.” They were in Liverpool, he explained, to do a survey on student grants, trying to discern how students lived and survived on such meager allowances. Oh-ho! That was all the boys needed to hear. Everyone had a hard-luck story he loved to tell. Stuart described how, when money ran out, they burned pieces of furniture to stay warm. Another friend, Rod Jones, complained that on weekends, he bummed meals off his relatives. Each story got better—and more outrageous—as the drinks flowed. Eventually one of the reporters said, “Come on, let’s go have a look at your flat. We’ll bring a couple bottles of whiskey and some beer.”

  On first glimpse, Gambier Terrace wasn’t the hole the press expected, but by the time they got done with it, Charles Dickens would have been aghast. “They got newspapers,” Bill Harry says, “crumpled them up, threw them about haphazardly. Strew empty beer bottles everywhere. Made it look a dirty mess.” Stuart posed boldly in the forefront (along with John and Allan Williams) as photographers snapped away.

  In fact, the reporters weren’t from the Empire News, considered a “respectable paper” by local standards, but the scandalmongering Sunday People, which gave the piece a proper front-page bashing. Worse, perhaps, was the headline—THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR—warning that “most beatniks like dirt… [and] dress in filthy clothes” and bemoaning the conditions of “the decaying Gambier Terrace.” That latter tidbit especially caught the attention of the building’s residents association, which wasted no time in having the students evicted.

  John and Stuart were livid. Williams had used them in order “to suck up to the press,” and now Stuart was calling in a chit. He demanded more consideration from Williams in booking the band, specifically when it came to Hamburg. Though he remained unconvinced of the Beatles’ artistic ability—“I wasn’t altogether happy about their stagecraft,” he wrote rather unctuously—Williams agreed to book them overseas, provided, of course, that they find a competent drummer. Williams no doubt figured that bought him precious time; in all likelihood, they’d be unable to satisfy that condition for the Hamburg gig, by which point he’d have found a more qualified band.

  Now fate intervened. With their Wirral residency prematurely ended and nowhere else to play, the band bumped around town, scouting the competition. One of their stops was the Casbah, from which they had unceremoniously stomped off six months earlier. Mo greeted them warmly at the door, casting an especially heartfelt smile at George, who had remained in touch, occasionally stopping by the club with his brother Peter.

  Inside, the Blackjacks were playing at one end of the complex. Sitting behind the drums was Mo’s son Pete Best. As far as they could tell, he was consistent, a “real pounding rock ’n roll drummer” who lashed his foot to the bass and, in a sober, mathematical manner, spanked out four beats to the bar—which drummers call “playing fours”—instead of the usual two, which gave off “a powerful effect.” He seemed to know most of the standards; his movement had a certain nice economy to it. He owned an impressive new kit and it probably also didn’t hurt that he looked good. A pale, stiff boy with a dusty mop of hair, eyelids all but shuttered, and a languid, adolescent smile carved from a lower lip that was saucily retracted, girls were drawn to him in a visceral way. Later, observers labeled him “moody,” but there was nothing in his personality that marked him as remotely temperamental. Rather, Pete seemed adrift and forlorn in a milieu of small-time characters and egotists—quiet, perhaps fortified to the point of indifference, dispassionate maybe, but not moody.

  There are several versions of what happened next. Best told one interviewer that an offer to join the Beatles came through his mother, who pushed him toward the group. He later amended the account, saying that Paul called, dangling a job opportunity in Hamburg that would pay £15 a week. In neither version did he hesitate to accept. “I’d always liked them very much,” he allowed of the Beatles. Shunning a spot at the teachers training college, he said, “I decided [instead] to persevere with the music.”

  John, meanwhile, had to come up with something good enough to divert Aunt Mimi’s attention from a more damning piece of news. It had recently come to his attention that he would not be welcomed back to art college in the fall. Too much messy baggage had accumulated on his record, and it all finally piled up on him. “He was absent too much,” says Helen Anderson. “He never produced any work. The tutors blamed him, in general, for misbehaving, disrupting classes, making trouble, and telling people to bugger off. And they eventually got fed up with it.”

  If Mimi found out, he’d never hear the end of it. Furthermore, it would mean having to get a job, which was anathema to John; he’d never worked a day in his life, aside from playing music for a few bob here and there. Rather than risk all that, he presented Hamburg to Mimi with inflated fringe benefits, claiming he’d earn £100 a week. A hundred pounds! It was an extraordinary figure in a country whose average weekly wage was almost half that figure, and it should have tipped her off to the bluff. Much later, Mimi told Lennon biographer Ray Coleman that she “feared the worst,” which may have meant that she suspected the story all along; but even if she had, there was nothing she could do to keep John from going. He was nineteen, of legal age and well outside his aunt’s grasp.

  Paul’s strategy was—like Paul—more subtle and cunning. A promising if erratic student, he had another term left at the Liverpool Institute and a father for whom education was the one sure route to social betterment. For the most part, Paul had cooperated; he’d even sat his A levels in June and was awaiting the results.* But music was biting into those plans. Over Jim’s objections, Paul devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to the band. “I didn’t want to go back to school, or college,” Paul later told Hunter Davies. Yet he knew that Jim would not tolerate idleness.

  The only way around that was, of course, convincing Jim that there was opportunity in Hamburg. First, brother Mike would be needed to help promote the cause. Mike, Paul knew, would be able to soften up his father in an unassuming way. In exchange for this support, Paul promised to “buy… lots of things” for Mike, who worshipped his elder brother and would have done anything to help him, even without bribery. Jim was moved by his sons’ eloquence, not to mention Paul’s fiery intensity, and no doubt drew a parallel to his own dashed musical ambitions. Paul invited Allan Williams to the house to further plead his case. One can only imagine how Williams described Hamburg to Jim, but it can be assumed with some confidence that the promoter laid it on thick. He assured Jim that there would be no problems, that Bruno Koschmider would look after them. Somehow, Jim took his word that it would be a good place for the boys to play, and before the get-together was over Jim had given his consent.

  Williams also went to bat for Stuart Sutcliffe, whose parents (incredibly) considered Williams a role model for Liverpool boys, “a respectable and kind person” just enterprising enough to combine art and commerce in a viably successful manner. Stuart, they reasoned, would do well to follow that formula. Even so, they were still fuming from the Johnny Gentle tour. Not only did they have to send Stuart money so he could get home from Scotland, but the tour had interrupted—and almost thwarted—his submission for the National Diploma in Design. As a result, Williams’s sales pitch became more delicate—and somewhat misleading. “Allan didn’t entirely tell [our parents] the whole truth about going to Hamburg,” Pauline Sutcliffe recalled. “It was presented… as an interesting venture. It would be a good experience for [Stuart], being abroad and traveling. It was very much dressed up as an interlude in his life” as opposed to a job, which they never would have permitted.

  Eventually, Millie Sutcliffe relented. She was never very good at denying Stuart anything he wanted, and with the Harrisons’ and the Bests’ a
pproval—both families were enthusiastic from the start—the deal was sealed.

  Very quickly thereafter, the gears began to crank. Birth certificates were produced, along with passports and visas; bags and equipment were packed and properly labeled for transit. It all came together with remarkable speed. Four days later, on August 16, 1960, the Beatles left for Hamburg.

  [II]

  The Beatles had been out of England before—to Scotland, which they considered a pleasant enough place. But Hamburg was a different world altogether. Maybe even a different planet. The city itself was as familiar as their own modest backyards. A port with a thriving shipping trade conducted under a blanket of perpetual fog, it not only looked, felt, and smelled like Liverpool, the cafés even served a “typical” dish of gruel called labskaus that stood up to their brackish minced-meat stew. The sooty streets were narrow and mazy, studded with ancient crumbling cobblestones, and ran between the pitted redbrick facades of surviving neo-Gothic warehouses whose musky scents defied all insulation. The marine stench of the waterfront mingled with tangy notes of coffee, tea, tobacco, spices, even the sharp chemical trail of petroleum, and smelled much like Bootle or Garston.

  They’d arrived at dusk, driving through the Mönckebergstrasse, whose wide tree-lined sidewalks were crowded with well-dressed pedestrians on their way home from work. On either side of their van, observed in dizzying perspective, the scene was surpassingly normal: couples dawdled at cafés, spun in and out of stores, stopped to peer in windows featuring lavish end-of-season sales. The Alster lakes, a glinting aqueduct speckled with rowboats and swans, shared a ledgy rise with an office complex that bisected the center of town. They passed the Rathaus, dark and ominous, where the Senate and city Parliament convened; the market square; and St. Michael’s Church.

  All perfectly normal, until Allan Williams swung the van around a concrete divider and into the corridors of the St. Pauli district, where they would be working.

  Alas, Babylon! If ever a stage designer tried to create a set for depravity, this was it. St. Pauli rushed in on them from every direction. It resembled a carnival midway, only gaudier and more vulgar. The action was shoulder to shoulder, back-to-back: bars, nightclubs, cafés, luncheonettes, clip joints, arcades, dance halls, saloons. And lights—miles of lights—blazed with such dizzying, high-toned intensity that colors simply melted into one another. Slender girls, nude but for cowboy boots, blinked in neon above open doors. Floodlights lit the sky and arc lamps, suspended on poles, washed the street in a sublunar light that made all cars cruising by appear purple. Indifferent to time, the night seemed pushed back a few blocks. Here it was bright around the clock, a daylight for vampires.

  Allan Williams knew what to expect, but he hadn’t prepared the boys. Nor had he told them about the district’s overriding theme, which wasn’t music but sex. Its two main streets—the Grosse Freiheit and the Herbertstrasse—formed the city’s infamous “mile of sin,” and it was there, along with the intersecting Reeperbahn, that men flocked to behave as they might at a Roman orgy. “It was an ‘anything goes’ kind of place,” says Adrian Barber, who turned up there later, as a member of the Big Three, but stayed to work for nearly a decade. There existed an ethos of hedonism that stretched back to the Middle Ages, when Hamburg was a member of the Hanseatic League, a free port, and therefore an essentially lawless haven—“kind of a Dodge City of the open seas,” says Barber—where bad behavior was overlooked by the local authorities. Throughout history, the tradition was preserved as a foil to the rigid German culture, which was built around regimentation and power.

  The place looked just right to the Beatles, who could hardly believe their eyes. It was all out there in front of them: girls prowling the streets, sitting provocatively in brothel picture windows, leaning just so against cars; music blaring from every open doorway; drunken sailors stumbling along the sidewalk, lofting steins of beer.

  “That’s the club!” Williams shouted, pulling to the curb outside a squat building on the Grosse Freiheit.

  The Kaiserkeller, on the corner of Schmuckstrasse, was everything they imagined it would be. The club was bigger, brighter, louder, and groovier than anything they had seen before. Its decor alone left them practically speechless: a long boat-shaped bar, fishing nets stretched tautly on the ceilings, banquettes built to resemble a ship’s galley, with portholes sunk into the walls and shiny brass fixtures salvaged from the port. The sweet smell of beer filled the room like a perfumed boudoir. The Kaiserkeller was posh compared with the saltcellars in Liverpool, and wired for rock ’n roll. The sound system was first-rate. And four microphones had been placed at intervals across the small stage, where Derry and the Seniors rocked the house.

  Bruno Koschmider must have detected their excitement. Even so, he barely paused long enough to hear their praise before rushing them off to another club several hundred yards down the street, where the Beatles were scheduled to play.

  The Indra “was depressing” by comparison. “We were crestfallen when we saw [it],” said Pete Best. It was a lounge—a girlie lounge—and deader than dead. A few bleary-eyed tourists sat glumly sipping beers. Along one side of the small rectangular room stood five spare banquettes, all empty, as were four of the six tables placed strategically on the floor. The heavy, worn red curtains and carpeting made the place seem even more shabby than it already appeared.

  There was hope. It was explained through an interpreter that Kosch-mider planned to turn the Indra into a balls-out rock ’n roll club, optimally another Kaiserkeller. All the place needed was a hot British band to generate a buzz, and the owner had been assured that the Beatles were up to the job.

  But the Beatles were as stiff as the punters who trickled into the club. Accustomed to playing a few songs to a houseful of teenagers, they were oblivious to the demands of a difficult crowd. They had no act to speak of, knew almost nothing of stagecraft, and as musicians they weren’t terribly engaging. Stuart still struggled woefully to follow the melody lines, on top of which, they’d had no time to work Pete into the band. By contract, the Beatles were required to play a staggering four and a half hours each night, six hours on the weekend. “You can’t imagine the work that took,” says Ray Ennis, who showed up in Hamburg sometime later, with the Swinging Blue Jeans. (They had modernized the spelling of their name beginning with this gig.) “All the Liverpool bands were used to playing twenty-minute sets back home. Suddenly we had to go all night. That meant coming up with the material, not to mention the stamina.”

  The Beatles had material. John, Paul, and George were a walking encyclopedia of rock ’n roll songs, to say nothing of the skiffle tunes and pub standards still shuffled into their act. If necessary, they could put together an hour of material without repeating a song. But somehow it didn’t click with the crowd. People would poke their heads inside the Indra doorway to check out the scene, then do a quick about-face. Certainly some blame could be laid to the place itself, which wasn’t exactly inviting. But as far as creating excitement went, the Beatles weren’t cutting it.

  Angrily, Koschmider contacted Allan Williams and expressed his dissatisfaction. Hastily, Williams raced to Hamburg to size up the situation and run some interference. Much to his chagrin, he found Koschmider’s objections justified. The Beatles were performing at the Indra in an unexceptional manner. Their sets “were… far too deadpan,” he surmised; they just “stood still and strummed.” This was a bigger problem than it had seemed. Williams had a good thing going with Koschmider. He didn’t want a group like the Beatles to louse up the arrangement.

  According to Williams, he gave “the boys a really rough lecture” and followed up with another visit to gauge its effect. Exasperated, he found it hadn’t made the slightest impression. They were playing “almost motionless [sic],” scarcely even trying to complement the inescapable beat. It baffled him. How could they churn out manic rockers like “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” without giving it any oomph? In his interpretive stud
y, Tell Me Why, Tim Riley nails it when he calls rock ’n roll “the sexiest music of all—it makes you want to move.” Even Williams, who had no love for the form, felt its physical tug. “C’mon, boys,” he exhorted them, “make a show.”

  Make a show.

  It was like something a teacher might say before the start of school speech day or the class play. Make a show: it sounded completely inappropriate for rock ’n roll. John couldn’t stop snickering. He lurched around the stage in mock-theatrics, diving toward the mike and duck-walking like Chuck Berry or dropping into a split. Williams, who didn’t realize John was taking the mickey out of him, cheered on the antics. “That’s it! Make a show! Make a show!”

  Koschmider, too, took up the chant, barking at the band in a kind of quasi-militaristic chant: “Mach Schau! Mach Schau!”

  The Beatles thought that was a scream. A German shouting, “Mach Schau!” To them it sounded like the Goons doing a hilarious take on the Nazis—the shrill accent, the jerky hand motion, the bugged-out eyes. However frivolous, it did the trick. They had finally found the stimulus that freed their inhibitions. “Mach Schau!” The entire band got into the act, imitating John’s happy horseplay. Paul raised his guitar, as though fencing with John, repeating this gesture until his partner responded. He made pass after pass, speeding up, slowing down. In no time, George chimed in, stamping and scrabbling his feet like a demented Cossack. Stuart, though saddled with the bass, contorted his body as though he were dodging bullets. A cyclone of rhythmic unrest swept across the Indra’s stage, synced to Pete’s ferocious beat.