The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Onstage, however, that was about as wild as things got. There was lots of clowning and immature antics, obnoxious jokes, the occasional outburst. A musician remembers John picking a fight with a drunken sailor who heckled him from the dance floor—“the guy tried to climb up onstage after Lennon offered to flatten his nose”—before the waiters hustled the culprit outside. For years, stories circulated about how the Beatles did horrible things while playing at the Kaiserkeller. Several scenarios were concocted by Allan Williams, who dined out for years on tart, black commentary about the boys, John in particular. But eyewitnesses indicate that wasn’t the case at all. They were simply undisciplined kids away from home for the first time, engaging in as much rude behavior as they could get away with.

  Of course, that was fueled in no small way by a constant liquid diet. Everywhere in Hamburg, beer flowed like water, but nowhere was it as copious and affordable as in the Kaiserkeller, where the bands drank for free. To working-class Scousers, free beer was a jackpot, “like winning the lottery.” First, being paid a decent wage to play rock ’n roll, and now downing beer as a job benefit! They could hardly believe their good fortune.

  Like the Seniors before them, the Beatles went on a bender from the moment they unpacked. Hardly an hour went by without a beer of some kind. Mostly, they feasted on the cheap watered-down variety, which came in little stubby bottles, and later, after one of the musicians slipped Bruno Koschmider’s Danish cellarman a few extra bob, “he fixed [them] up with the good stuff.” During those first weeks in Hamburg, they drank as much as quickly as possible, not believing it would last. One after the next, they downed bottles, fortifying themselves through the overheated sets. And after a series of hard, raunchy numbers, when the dance floor was jumping, club patrons would send drinks up to the stage, big trays balanced with foaming steins that the band was expected to chug. “German customers would say, ‘You must drink, boys, you must finish the drink,’ ” Pete Best recalled, “and there’d be some sessions, especially at the weekend, when the drinks were coming up faster than our playing.”

  Musicians had to be careful about what and whom they refused in St. Pauli. In some cases, fear replaced common sense when they were offered yet another round of drinks, especially when it involved the club owners or their associates who were regarded—and rightly so—as violent “gangsters.” Paul McCartney remembered how the mobsters “would come in late at night… and send a little tray of schnapps”—called doppelkorn—“up to the band,” demanding that they drink it down straightaway. At first, the Beatles were reluctant, desperately trying to talk their way out of it without offending anyone, but it was hopeless and certainly not worth provoking a confrontation. “There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren’t messing around here,” McCartney recalled. “So we’d drink the schnapps and they’d occasionally send up pills.”

  The pills, of course, were amphetamines. They were available over the counter in the form of diet pills, called Preludin, and favored by overweight housewives, but most were repackaged for recreational use by the German underworld, which controlled the market with an iron fist. “Prellies” and Purple Hearts, another form of speed, were the drugs of choice on the Reeperbahn. Within the next three years, they would be joined by virtually the entire line of narcotics, with Hamburg eventually becoming the gateway for heroin into Russia. But during the Beatles’ stay there, it was limited to speed and just about every musician put it to good use.

  The Beatles had fought fatigue from the outset. Even after playing their initial marathon session, “they were so exhausted they could barely move.” Beer wasn’t the answer; too many drinks made the musicians feel bloated and sluggish. But a highball—a potent combo of stimulants—fired the backup jets. According to Ray Ennis, “Once you had a few beers and the odd pill, you could stay awake for days and didn’t give a shit.”

  With little else to sustain them, the Beatles relied more and more on Preludin to maintain their stamina through the endless weeks of performances. John, already struggling with alcoholism, “gobbled them down” like candy, and George, in a long, disjointed letter to his friend Arthur Kelly reported “eating Prellie sandwiches” as a supplement to battle the twelve-hour nights. Stuart and Paul also experimented with speed, although to a somewhat lesser degree. Ever cautious, Paul determined that the quick high “was dodgy… you could get a little too wired on stuff like that” and managed to keep his edge sharp with only the occasional pill or two. Only Pete Best abstained, further setting his own beat apart from the rest of the band.

  With speed to lube their engines, both the Beatles and the Hurricanes cranked the energy into overdrive. Songs grew more aggressive, convoluted, and unpredictable, the volume eventually peaked out, and the boys gyroscoped on and off the stage, working themselves into a frenzy and leaving everyone exhilarated—and exhausted. “We tried any number of crazy things out of boredom,” Byrne says. The bands traded members; they traded repertoires; they traded instruments and even their mock-insults with the audience, eventually turning their attention to the rickety stage.

  It wasn’t a proper stage by any stretch of the imagination, just a few planks of warped wood supported by empty Schweppes crates. It had always slumped to one side, thanks in no small part to the forcible Seniors, who had busted through it one night shortly after the Beatles arrived in Hamburg. Bruno’s promises to have it fixed rang hollow, and there things stood.

  But not for long. Busting the stage was too much of a temptation. In no time, wagers were made, and a foolproof method proposed: the aptly named stomp. Using the heels of their new cowboy boots, the guitarists would mete out a savage beat to each song, torturing the planks of the stage. The Beatles tried it out first, with an extreme rendition of “Roll Over Beethoven” that was almost Russian in its execution. A friend who watched from the side of the stage recalled how when John launched into the chorus—“roll over Beethoven…”—Paul, George, and Stuart answered: stomp! stomp! stomp! Again and again, the trio converged near stage center, deemed the most fragile spot—stomp! stomp! stomp!—bashing the soft planks with their heels. When Rory tried leaping off the upright piano, same thing. Toward the weekend, a hairline fracture appeared in the planks. When a musician put any weight at all on them, he could see the boxes underneath and knew the end was near. Friday night, they vowed, was it.

  When the big night arrived, the Beatles gave the stage several good beatings, but as Pete Best recalled, “it hung on and we were getting frustrated.” After four sets, they gave up in disgust and went across the street for breakfast. According to Johnny Byrne, “We went on and saw it was really getting ropy. Then, about two o’clock in the morning, Rory summoned up enough energy and leaped off the piano right onto a weak spot. There was a loud crack and all the planks went up in a v shape as the center caved in. Moments later, the amplifiers toppled over and slid into the hole, along with the mikes and Ringo’s cymbals.”

  Bruno Koschmider was furious. He came running from his office to inspect the damage, shooing Rory and the Hurricanes from the stage. One glance was all it took for him to determine that it was hopeless. Live music was replaced by a jukebox, and the Hurricanes joined the Beatles in Harold’s across the street to celebrate.

  All seven boys crammed into two adjoining booths, laughing and telling war stories over bowls of cornflakes and pints of freezing cold milk. A toast was in order! They were about to clink glasses when the front door burst open and Koschmider and his bouncers flew in with an all-too-familiar look on their faces. “They had their koshes, and they started setting about us,” says Byrne, who was wedged in a booth against the wall. The boys managed to scramble up and over the tables, sending cornflakes and milk flying, but not before the thugs got in a few bruising whacks.

  The next night, everyone got to the Kaiserkeller early to inspect the new stage, but to their collective dismay, not much had changed. The old stage had been repaired in the most makeshift manner, with a few new planks slapped across t
he crates and chairs wedged underneath to hold everything in place. Otherwise, it was even more treacherous and unstable, “like a waterbed.” But to the bruised and battered Beatles, it would make no difference.

  [IV]

  It had never occurred to the Beatles that they might have fans. Girls were certainly no indication of their musical talent—at least, not the girls who chased them in Hamburg. Most were what Pete Best regarded as “high-class call girls,” strippers or hookers who worked the district and took a fleeting fancy to young English musicians. Nor did the Kaiserkeller regulars show any real interest in the band. They either danced or talked among themselves. “Nobody really looked at the stage,” recalled an observer. “The Beatles were just like background music.”

  In the ever-shifting bad light, it seemed unlikely that any of the Beatles noticed the trio sitting rigidly upright near the front and to the left of the stage. Each night they came into the club about nine o’clock—two extraordinary-looking young men and a woman who did everything in their power not to draw attention to themselves. Even so, they stood out like sore thumbs, dressed rather exotically as they were, in suede jackets, wool sweaters, jeans, and round-toed slippers. Although they were largely ignored by the black-leather-jacket-and-boots crowd, there was an inherent sense of danger to their presence, their fey appearance being enough of an excuse to warrant a beating from the German teds, whom they referred to as “rockers.” Eventually, during a break, one of the young men approached John rather meekly and, in fractured English, introduced himself as Klaus Voormann, a Berlin-born graphic artist, pressing a crumpled record sleeve he’d designed into John’s hands. John was uninterested and shunted him off on Stuart, whom he referred to somewhat backhandedly as “the artist round here.”

  Stuart didn’t share John’s reservations. In fact, Stuart had spotted all three from the stage, mistaking them for “typical bohemians.” Embarrassed and flattered, he discovered them staring at him in an openly seductive manner and, in a letter to a friend, admitted an instant mutual attraction, acknowledging that it was “extremely difficult to keep my eyes off them.” He’d even searched for the trio during a break, trying to make some kind of contact, but concluded that they had left before the show was over.

  Introduced at last, he was “completely captivated.” The three, it turned out, were former students at the Meisterschule für Mode, a kitchen sink–type art college in Hamburg not unlike the art college back in Liverpool, and had zeroed in on the lithe, theatrical Stuart as a fellow traveler. For everyone concerned, it was love at first sight. Stuart was immediately drawn to both “boys”—Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer—who, with their exquisitely handsome faces and unself-conscious flair, cast a striking presence in any crowd. The woman was in a category all to herself. At almost twenty-two, Astrid Kirchherr already had little in common with the other German fräulein who shared her blond good looks. Strong and willowy like Jean Seberg, with a wide, flat forehead and distant ice-blue eyes, she captivated men with attitude rather than beauty. “The minute she walked into a room all heads immediately turned her way,” says Bill Harry, “and she was in full control of that room.” Neither outwardly personable nor particularly well read, she relied more on an aura of mystery and dreamy sophistication that found a receptive audience among young, frustrated artistic misfits who sensed in her a kind of Circean eminence and for whom she became a guiding force. Gibson Kemp, who later played drums for Rory Storm and eventually married her, credits Astrid’s beguiling influence to an almost innate—and wildly eccentric—visionary style. “She had a tremendous feel for shape and form,” he says, an unerring eye for the aesthetic, the unconventional, even the kinky, born out of a preoccupation to model herself after avant-garde Left Bank intellectuals.

  Despite the difficulties of their often impenetrable accents, the vulnerable Sutcliffe was clearly entranced. He wrote a friend immediately after meeting the trio, explaining in no uncertain terms how their energy was irresistibly addictive. “I had never met anybody like them…,” he gushed. “It’s somehow like a dream which I’m still participating in.”

  The young Germans were equally in thrall of their Liverpool darling. To them, he not only looked different from the other Beatles but seemed introspective and “refined.” Jürgen Vollmer recalled, “My impression was that Stuart just didn’t fit in. He was strange when compared to others in that group. He wasn’t [a] part of the Beatles; he was always like an outsider… dreaming all the time that he played wrong notes and got looks from Paul and George.” The young Germans felt an immediate affinity and confessed as much. “They asked me why I was playing in a rock and roll band as I obviously wasn’t the type,” Stuart wrote to a friend. He also admitted being delighted that they’d pegged him as an artist (unaware that John had already tipped off Voormann to that fact):

  They could see immediately, they said… Here was I, feeling the most insipid working member of the group being told how much superior I looked—this along side the great Romeo John Lennon and his two stalwarts Paul and George—the casanovas [sic] of Hamburg!

  The trio—whom John dubbed the “exis” as a gibe to their existentialist affectations—knew practically nothing about rock ’n roll. Like most college students, they’d been fans of traditional jazz, with a bit of Nat King Cole and the Platters sifted into the mix. They were not alone. Rock ’n roll was still an anomaly to most of Germany, whose contact with the outside world lagged in the process of being repaired. None of them had ever seen rock ’n roll performed live, ignorant of the heated excitement it inspired, its racy suggestiveness. Not knowing what to expect, they were “totally and immediately fascinated by rock. That was it [for jazz].” From that point on in their lives, rock ’n roll delivered the gospel, and the Beatles were its perfect missionaries: entertaining, sexy, unpredictable. “We were totally fans, totally in awe,” Vollmer remembered. “The quality, the chemistry, the way they interrelated was… marvelous.” After seeing them that first time, the exis were overwhelmed, perhaps none of them more so than Astrid. She said, “It was like a merry-go-round in my head….They looked absolutely astonishing…. [M]y whole life changed in a couple minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.”

  Astrid’s way in to the Beatles was with her camera. An enthusiastic photographer (although an assistant to a well-known fashion and product lensman, she was nothing more than an amateur enthusiast), she offered to take pictures of the band in various casual poses around Hamburg, and the Beatles eagerly accepted. To the band, this was an unprecedented offer. Even among the longer-established groups like Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, it was rare to receive anything more than fuzzy snapshots taken by friends. By Astrid’s calling the outing “a session,” it elevated the shoot to something of more consequence, to the extent that they took it very seriously.

  The photographs taken that afternoon in der Dom—a municipal park close by the Reeperbahn—show no ordinary group of musicians of the type available for weddings, church fetes, and socials. On the contrary, they resonate powerfully in ways that struck down all former conceptions. Astrid, in her enthusiasm, captured the grittiness, attitude, energy, and easy confidence that distinguished the Beatles from their slick, simpering counterparts. Hardly a show band or “teddy boys,” as they’d been described by previous chroniclers, they projected a cool, postured identity, and in the process established the classic iconography for rock ’n roll bands for the next forty years.

  Looking at these photos nearly half a century later, it seems extraordinary how effortlessly they took to this new identity. There was no precedent for it, no mentor to teach them how or what to project. Nevertheless, the Beatles show an acute awareness for individualism and style. Historians have said they basically adapted mannerisms gleaned from The Wild One—more specifically, its enigmatic star, Marlon Brando—but that seems limited. In a sense, what the Beatles conveyed was evolutionary, a shaping power, extending the cultural pose of the young. In one frame, taken against an old fa
irgrounds wagon, their whole aura is firmly in place: strength, scorn, rebellion, danger, mystery, sex appeal—presence. The Beatles appear almost eerily detached, insouciant, perhaps even a little threatening. John and Paul already look like the modern image of rock stars, with faces as composed and striking as the chords they played on their guitars. George, a gangly stick of a kid, stares directly, defiantly, into the camera, while Pete and Stuart flank the nucleus as a pair of oddly mismatched bookends. In another, posed in an overtly arty way on the hood of a tractor, George, Stuart, and John practically assault the lens with stares of frank, consuming heat. It’s an explicit look of such hip, intense power—the new face of rock ’n roll.

  Intuitive, ambitious, aroused, Astrid was not about to let a treasure like the Beatles slip through her fingers. Following the session in der Dom, she drove the band (minus Pete Best, who chose not to accompany them) straight to her mother’s house in the rather posh suburb of Altona, where she entertained them with afternoon tea. To a man, the Beatles were properly impressed and taken by surprise. The sight of Astrid’s handsome, solid-looking house and fashionable neighborhood was totally alien to the four boys, who had seen nothing of Hamburg outside of its grungy red-light district. Flowers and shrubs hugged the front steps, with a welcoming sweep of lawn. Children raced bicycles along the freshly paved street. Cars gleamed at the curb. It was tasteful, without being what local people referred to as spiessbürger, or grossly bourgeois, with a curl of the lip. It reminded the band of Childwall, in Liverpool, a suburb of impeccably manicured homes and estates, housing the city’s upper crust.