Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  ‡ To Ringo and the rest of the Hurricanes, “Alley Oop” was just a song. Americans knew it as a syndicated newspaper comic strip, a caveman from one million years BC having time-machine misadventures. The strip led to the song, a novelty number 1 on Billboard and Cash Box (and a smaller hit in Britain where it was issued on the London label). The recording session was a happily drunken affair produced in Los Angeles by Kim Fowley.

  § There are so many conflicting (and missing) details about why Koschmider went to London that the truth will never be known for certain, but it’s reasonably safe to assume that if Williams hadn’t pricked his interest in the first place it wouldn’t have happened.

  ‖ Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity, born Norwich, May 21, 1940.

  a The local dance promoter was Les Dodd of Paramount Enterprises, based in Wallasey. He paid the Beatles £10 for the Monday date and £9 every Thursday at Neston Institute. As fees went in Liverpool at this time, these were above average, and Williams didn’t always take his 10 percent commission.

  b It might have been four. George’s sister-in-law Irene has said “the idea was, they were all going to live in this flat”—which seems to suggest Paul also had the option of joining them. Paul already spent most weekends here but stayed at home in the week. There is no further information about this, and there’s also no definitive knowledge regarding when George stopped living here and returned to Speke, but he did, probably a week or two into July. He reverted to his previous routine: Monday to Friday at home, weekends in John and Stu’s room with Paul and sometimes Cyn.

  c Norman Chapman, born Liverpool, December 31, 1937. The other Beatles never publicly spoke about him and there are no photos of them together. He died aged 57 and was interviewed only once about it, by Spencer Leigh, the source of the quotes and information used here.

  d John first smoked marijuana in this period. The only knowledge of this comes from an interview he gave fifteen years later: “Some guy was showing us pot in Liverpool in 1960, with twigs in it, and we smoked it—we didn’t know what it was, you know, we were drunk.” (Interview by Jean-François Vallée for French TV, April 4, 1975.) It’s not clear who John meant by us and we but it probably wasn’t Paul and George, one or both of whom first smoked dope with John in 1962.

  e Rory was sorry his birthday was January 7 because he wanted the fuss of a Butlin’s celebration, so he moved it six months to July 7. Ringo never got to be the sole focus there on his special day, and Rory also changed his year of birth from 1938 to 1940, again matching Ringo. By way of revenge, Ringo counted both Rory’s yearly birthdays toward his age, which was why, in a 1964 radio interview, he wished his pal “a happy twenty-ninth.”

  f George once referred to Royston Ellis as “a bearded guy from a suburb of London” (Fifty Years Adrift, p95), knowledge that could indicate he too made the long journey to Hatch End.

  g Koschmider was looking for another group because the Jets had walked out on him. They found him dictatorial and bloody-minded, and he’d made them sleep in the Kaiserkeller, locked into a tiny office. They were offered more money and a better experience by a rival entrepreneur, Peter Eckhorn, a younger man who closed the Hippodrom, his family’s old Reeperbahn circus, and on July 9 reopened it as a rock club, the Top Ten.

  h The stripper’s name has been reported as Janice, Janine and Shirley. For the sake of convenience, she is Janice here.

  i Pat liked embroidery and she and Paul joked that she might make a sweater with Beatles and No. 1 Fan sewn into the front. (It never happened.)

  j Barry Chang had been a year ahead of Paul and two ahead of George at the Institute.

  SIXTEEN

  AUGUST 15–SEPTEMBER 30, 1960

  “MACH SCHAU!”

  Beyond the A41, their route was the A5. When he could, Allan Williams put his foot to the floor and eked 55mph out of the laden bus, but it wasn’t often, what with all the traffic lights, roundabouts and town centers to be negotiated on the way south. This was the old Roman road, built seventeen hundred years before the motorcar; as would soon become apparent, the Second World War’s vanquished had roads much superior to its victor’s.

  Freshly issued this Monday morning, August 15, 1960, John Lennon’s passport was grabbed by everyone—and then they were all out and passed around, photos laughed at.

  John Winston Lennon, student, born Liverpool, October 9, 1940.

  James Paul McCartney, student, born Liverpool, June 18, 1942.

  George Harrison, student, born Liverpool, February 25, 1943.

  Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe, student, born Edinburgh, June 23, 1940.

  Randolph Peter Best, formerly Randolph Peter Scanland, student, born Madras, November 24, 1941.

  Pete Best has spoken of how they took the mickey out of his name.1 The boy was Randy and not entirely Best. It was something he never volunteered and already they knew … but this group was no place for secrets, less still anyone sensitive to being laughed at. John had crucified Tommy Moore; how would he be this time? Sizing up the personalities bouncing before his very eyes, Pete must have sensed he had to be careful, but then he was patently no lightweight.

  Where we going, Johnny? Beyond even Hamburg, John announced, they were going to the toppermost of the poppermost! The trip dovetailed perfectly with the arrival of this new tagline for their two-year-old chant. It came courtesy of producer Dick Rowe and his colleagues at Top Rank Records, who, from August 5, marketed a series of Toppermost LPs with that slogan, “Toppermost of the Poppermost.” John and the others saw this as their divine destination, and couldn’t get over the stupidity of the catchphrase, a dumb line cooked up by some suit-and-tie toff in London who, as per usual, didn’t have a blinkin’ clue.

  The Beatles now skirted that London world for the first time, waving (metaphorically at least) hello, goodbye. The A5 routed southbound traffic down the Edgware Road, and as Williams drove them along Maida Vale they passed, unknowingly, seven hundred yards from Abbey Road. At EMI Studios the following afternoon, Cliff Richard (toppermost beyond dispute) was booked in for a session with the Shadows, the four talented and besuited young 2i’s rockers who were suddenly bursting out from under Cliff’s wing: “Apache,” their first own hit, reached number 1 in the NME on the presses this same day. It would become the sound of the late summer and autumn, inspiring a glut of groups to play precision-perfect twangy instrumentals, point their guitars upward and outward in unison and do choreographed footsteps, left-stop-right-stop. This was the Britain the Beatles would return to after playing hard rock and roll for thirty hours a week in Hamburg. This was the fashion they happened to skip.

  The Beatles caught their first glimpse of the 2i’s, and of Soho, when Williams eased the minibus down to Old Compton Street and it somehow admitted yet another Hamburg-bound passenger, the bilingual waiter (probably named Steiner) from the coffee bar Act One—Scene 1.* They all got out to stretch their legs, but there was no time to linger if they were going to catch the night boat from Harwich, eighty miles distant.

  They met with a setback at the quay. The roll-on/roll-off ferry was a recent invention in 1960, little used as yet. Boats had no direct platform access for vehicles—each in turn had to have its fuel tank emptied and battery disconnected before being hoisted by crane and lowered into the cargo hold. Allan Williams says the stevedores refused to handle his bus. “They said the crane wouldn’t lift it with all that gear on top. I really had to plead with them. If it hadn’t gone on we would have been in Shit Street.”2

  Williams was nothing if not a good Spieler. He got the men to give it a try, though at his own risk. Barry Chang took some photos of the delicate operation: one happens to catch John Lennon, in his glasses, watching as dockers maneuvered the vehicle—with their precious guitars, amps and drums on board—up into the air, over the side and down onto the ship. The crane held fast, and also worked fine at Hook of Holland (Hoek van Holland), but there was an irritating four-hour wait while Dutch immigration raised questions about
the musical instruments. The officials believed the gear was being brought into the country for resale and insisted import duty was due—if it wasn’t paid, everything would be confiscated. Again, Allan Williams was the hero of the moment, insisting these crazy boys were students, just as their passports said: they were going on holiday to Germany and they just loved playing.

  The peril of driving on the “other” side of the road was matched by the confusion of navigation and they went wrong instantly. Intending to head north toward Amsterdam, they drove east, straight through the center of Rotterdam. This direction advanced them toward Arnhem, the scene—sixteen summers earlier, in September 1944—of one of the last big battles of the war. Williams had a cousin who was injured here and spoke often of his fallen comrades; he wanted to pay respects on his behalf.

  The Allied cemetery is in nearby Oosterbeek. In a wood, a quiet space where wind shushes through trees, a clearing gives way to the graves of more than 1,750 fallen soldiers. Barry Chang got out his camera and clicked the shutter as the Liverpool tourists paused at the main memorial tablet. The picture freezes a vital moment, a turning point: it’s the Beatles en route to Hamburg—and, as if by magic, a caption is etched into its very center: THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE.†

  Chang’s photo is particularly good of George: his face is full of character, he’s wearing the matelot T-shirt that attracted Royston Ellis, and his quiffed hair is toppermost, remarkably so after twenty-seven hours on the road. Pete Best looks happy and comfortable, a nice lad, visually a perfect fit. Paul is smoking, and eating something probably made by Beryl; his quiff, in a state of collapse, hasn’t fared as well as George’s. Spirits seem good. Stuart—skinny, now clean-shaven and wearing dark glasses—is evidently more adult than Pete, Paul or George. He’s standing in a group to the side with Allan, Beryl and Woody. Allan, with a mop of black hair and heavy black beard, is wearing an expandable shirtsleeve armband, possibly doubling here as a memorial armband.

  As well as Barry Chang, two other passengers aren’t in the photo: Herr Steiner, for whom Arnhem may have been a bridge too far, and John Lennon. He never explained his absence, nor was he asked, so it cannot be confirmed if Allan Williams is right when he says John stayed on the bus because the sight of so many graves, so many people his own age killed in combat, sickened him inside out.

  Nonetheless, here were the men who’d fought for their sort; here was what the Beatles were, so far, lucky to have escaped; and here again is a reminder of life’s slender threads: among the rows and rows and rows of small white headstones is one for a Private Peter Best, aged 19.

  Afterward, they drove into Arnhem itself, for a look around. Wandering the city streets, the Beatles’ first time in a foreign place, they found a music shop and piled in, keen to see the guitars … and, while here, John “slap leathered” a harmonica. He slipped it into his pocket and showed it to everyone outside; Allan Williams was genuinely appalled—“I thought, ‘What sort of loonies have we got here? We’re not even going to make Hamburg!’ ” Three of them—Paul, George and Stu—knew exactly what kind of a loony they had here, and it was another sharp insight for Pete into the company he was keeping. He remembers John being “supremely confident … he knew what he was doing,” and he says John cheerfully played his new instrument—and pulled faces—as the bus bumped along.3

  Finally, after midnight, more than thirty-six hours since departing Liverpool, the happy wanderers reached Hamburg, located St. Pauli, and the Reeperbahn, and turned up Grosse Freiheit.‡

  The narrow old cobbled street might have reminded them of Liverpool, though only for a second. Strip. Sex. Bars. Clubs. All neon life was here. Eyes stared wide and hard through the dirty windows of a Morris J2. And there, on a corner, was the Kaiserkeller they’d heard about. Pulses raced faster still. They parked, trotted downstairs and exchanged Liverpool greetings with Derry and the Seniors … who were distinctly unwelcoming. All they knew of the Beatles was what they’d seen at the Billy Fury audition, when they’d been far from impressed. They were sure the Beatles’ arrival would spoil the good scene they had going.

  Next, the Beatles met Bruno Koschmider. He led them back up the stairs to show them where they would be playing—it was farther down the street. Much farther. Grosse Freiheit darkened, the places of entertainment thinned, the noise of action became a distant echo, until here, at 64, was the Indra. A neon Indian elephant and the words Indra Cabaret marked the spot, stretched high and impressively across the street, big enough (necessarily) to be seen from afar. The club itself was closed, dark, quiet. They were off-Broadway.

  Bruno’s interpreter explained: tomorrow the club will open and they will play, and in the meantime they will spend the night. While Allan, Beryl, Barry and Woody drove off to a hotel, the five Beatles were left in Koschmider’s care. Oddly, there’s no certainty where they slept this first night. Paul says it was inside the Indra, curled up “in the little alcoves, on red leather seats.” George said it was in Koschmider’s apartment—“all in the one bed,” amazingly. Still, they’d arrived … and to prove it, they were here.4

  Before playing, there was business to be done. All five Beatles put their signatures to contracts in German and English—the first they ever signed. Hamburg being no place for Messrs. Ramon, de Staël and the like, they used their real names. This really was The Big Time, and these were the stage hours they agreed to:

  Tuesday to Friday, 4½ hours. 8:00–9:30PM, break ½ hour, 10–11, break ½ hour, 11:30–12:30, break ½ hour, 1–2AM.

  Saturday, 6 hours. 7:00–8:30PM, break ½ hour, 9–10, break ½ hour, 10:30–11:30, break ½ hour, 12–1AM, break ½ hour, 1:30–3.

  Sunday, 6 hours. 5–6PM, break ½ hour, 6:30–7:30, break ½ hour, 8–9, break ½ hour, 9:30–10:30, break ½ hour, 11–12, break ½ hour, 12:30–1:30AM.

  The contract was for two months, August 17 to October 16, with Mondays off, and it paid each of them DM30 (Deutsche Marks) for every night of work. It defined the Beatles as a five-piece group and stipulated they couldn’t play in any rival venue in Hamburg for thirty weeks after the contract’s end. Both parties warranted that if they broke the terms they would compensate the other in full, and Koschmider agreed to obtain the Beatles’ work permits.§

  There were lots of bureaucratic forms to complete—no easy task because they were in German. John had brought a pocket German-English dictionary from home but never bothered to open it, Stuart spoke no German, and Paul and George knew a little from school (which “wasn’t madly useful,” according to Paul).5 Pete was the most adept because he’d passed German O-Level. Koschmider noted the Beatles’ particulars, including their ages, and notified them to the Fremdenpolizei (“aliens police”). One thing he didn’t do was apply for work permits.

  The contract made no mention of accommodation, and this swiftly became a source of trouble between the Beatles and Koschmider. He wasn’t bound to provide them with anything, but paying for lodging would have left them with little or no money to live. With ein bisschen (a pfennig’s worth) of sympathy, Koschmider offered what he felt was a more than generous solution: the Beatles could stay free of charge in rooms at the rear of a tiny cinema he leased, the Bambi. They’d be able to come and go through their own back door, just across from the Indra. (As he’d done with the Jets, Koschmider let Derry and the Seniors bed down in the Kaiserkeller, in an office locked after them for fear they’d steal from the bar. Their lavatory was a communal chamber pot.)

  The Bambi was a dump. They had two rooms that weren’t much more than storage spaces: a small one that could accommodate three and had an electric light, and—off the first one—a second, tiny room that could take two, without electricity. Both reeked of the adjacent toilets used by the cinema’s customers, which served as the Beatles’ washroom. There was no other plumbing, no heating and no decoration of any kind, just unpainted concrete walls thick with dust, and ceilings so low they had to duck their heads. There were no drawers, so they had to live out of suitcases, an
d only one small window set very high (overlooking a courtyard), so the rooms were dark. Koschmider provided two little camp-beds for the tiny room, and two little beds and a miniature couch for the small room, with hardly any bedcovers. As no one ever came in to clean, the place soon resembled Stu and John’s studio at Gambier Terrace.

  It was particularly grim for Paul. As usual in first-come-first-served Beatles situations, John had the broadest shoulders and sharpest elbows. The leader bagged the best bed in the marginally better room, followed swiftly by Stu and George, continuing their Gambier arrangement, so by the time Paul got in—and he may have been only seconds behind—he and Pete had to go into the second room. It was a triple-blow for Paul: he was in a dump, he had the wretched feeling of being left out of the fun, and he was lumbered with the new boy, quiet Pete, never unfriendly or unpleasant but monosyllabically shy. It was massively irksome and the cause of a prolonged jealousy here in Hamburg, often expressed (to the irritation of others) but never resolved.

  Bambi-Filmkunsttheater was the venue’s real name, but the Beatles called it “the Bambi Kino,” and “the pit,” and hated it from the start. Though closed by midnight, the Bambi screened films at 4, 6:30 and 9PM, the sound from the 4PM film disturbing their late-late sleep, the 6:30 film irritating them Tuesdays to Fridays when they didn’t start work until eight. They also had to contend with the noise of people passing by their rooms when exiting the cinema through the back door, and customers using the toilets.6

  It was at this point that the Beatles’ working and leisure hours turned upside down, which was how they’d always remain. With their working day not finishing until up to 3AM, and their winding down and social time only starting then, day became night and night became day. As Paul explained in a letter to his dad and brother (like all of them, he wrote home often), “I’m writing now at 10:30, before I go to sleep”—this was 10:30AM.7