Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Koschmider fired off a letter to Allan Williams, urging him to make his group see sense or else they might be sacked, and in the meantime Limpinsel did his best to spark them properly into action: “Mach Schau!” he roared. The Beatles may have narrowly escaped National Service and the spiteful ranting of regimental sergeant majors, but here they were in Germany being barked at by (for all they knew) a former Nazi. Mach Schau! Do something! Make a show, come on!a At such decisive moments, all eyes would turn to John.

  When nothing was going on they [the other Beatles] were saying “There’s no leader, fuck it,” but if anything happened, whenever there was any pressure point, I had to get us out of it. [When] they said mach Schau I put me guitar down and I did Gene Vincent all night, banging and lying on the floor, and throwing the mike about and pretending I had a bad leg. That was some experience. So the Germans kept saying mach Schau! mach Schau!23

  Any of the Beatles could mach Schau, but John was the original and the best, taking it several goosesteps further. And because he was often out of his skull, anything could—and did—happen.

  All the nightly rocking and stomping and mach Schauing took its toll on the gear. Mr. Richards’ lilac jackets “melted” (to use George’s word), and those shoes, the crocodile-skin ones? Cardboard, letting in water. Ever the sharpest dresser in this group, George was the first to get new clothes, buying an envied leather jacket from a waiter for a fiver; John and Pete followed by purchasing new leather jackets with a fur inside collar, while Paul and Stuart held back for the moment. George also bought new drainpipe jeans and managed to find some black winkle-pickers to complete a whole new outfit, again with John and Pete close behind. These clothes weren’t just for outdoor use, they were also stage gear; for a while again, the Beatles discarded their uniform appearance—not their usual territory. Another piece of gear was also failing to take the strain: Paul’s new Rosetti Solid 7 guitar. Beneath the gloss, it was just “a plank of wood with strings”24—one that was now regularly letting down its player and his bandmates.

  One of the initial Soho rockers to break British rock in Hamburg, the Jets’ Peter Wharton, is adamant that colleague Tony Sheridan was paramount to its development. “The first night we played there, in June 1960, there were twenty to thirty people in the Kaiserkeller, but by the end of that week the place was packed. Tony Sheridan made it. He was the guv’nor. Without Sheridan the Hamburg scene would not have happened.”

  Sheridan was the first star the Beatles ever befriended, and they were thrilled to sometimes share a stage with him. They’d often watched him on Oh Boy!, when Jack Good made him the first man on British TV to sing and play electric guitar together, and he’d opened the Cochran and Vincent show at Liverpool Empire in mid-March. He was the musicians’ musician and everyone learned from him. He had a particular way of standing at the mike, with attitude, legs planted apart and vibrating; he didn’t smile like a pop star but sang like a rocker and was a fine guitar player. George was thrilled when Sheridan shared some of the techniques taught him just six months earlier by Eddie Cochran. It was like a lesson from beyond, Eddie to Tony to George, three steps from heaven. As Sheridan remembers:

  George latched on to me as soon as we met, asking, “Why this chord and not that one?” We were obsessed with what we were doing, enthusiasm way out of proportion to the gig. It was good to be keen, but George was no virtuoso player and never a “heavy rocker.” When he played “Honey Don’t” he was Carl Perkins, a country singer who rocked a bit, and I was always trying to get him to play bluesy notes, telling him, “Even if it’s a pop song, George, make it southern States.”25

  Having started with the Jets at the Kaiserkeller, Sheridan had moved on to the new Top Ten Club and was now on the verge of quitting there to play at yet another place, a strip joint called Studio X, next door to the Kaiserkeller. Rock and roll was the new business in St. Pauli; following Koschmider’s lead, other bar and club owners were looking at it. The man behind some if not all these moves was one of the little tough guys, Horst Fascher. A champion amateur boxer, he was barred from the ring in 1959 after killing a man in a St. Pauli street brawl, and spent nine months in jail for “grievous bodily harm resulting in death.” Born in 1936, Fascher loved the rebellion of rock and roll and the company of British musicians. He knew a little English, spoke like a machine gun, and steadily edged his way toward the center of the action, a mover and shaker, a musician’s friend and protector. In St. Pauli, you needed one.

  • • •

  Selected highlights of all these Hamburg lives made their way into letters back to Liverpool. George wrote to his family and to Arthur Kelly. His best mate, on £4 a week at Cunard, was deeply impressed when, in a postcard sent on August 25, George said the Beatles were on “£18 a week each and free bed!”

  Whatever the rate that converted Deutsche Marks into sterling, the total was bound to impress. Soon after arriving in Hamburg, Paul had a letter from his dad giving news of his A-Level results: as expected, he’d failed Art and passed English Literature. Fine, good, but what Paul wanted to do didn’t require A-Levels. Having officially left his education in a state of limbo, he relished his letter to The Baz, in which he coolly informed the headmaster he’d formally left the Institute and wasn’t going on to college or university. It’s a letter Paul has paraphrased in interviews as “Dear Sir, I’m sure you’ll understand, I’m in Hamburg playing with a group, and we’re on £15 a week, so stuff you.”26

  Dot wrote often to Paul, and he wrote often back. He sent her a set of the publicity photos taken first night at the Indra, lovingly inscribed on the reverse. Lonely in Liverpool without their young men, Dot and Cyn got together, got themselves all dolled up, went into a photo booth, pulled some seductive poses and sent them the strips of snaps. John sent Cyn a photo-booth sequence as Quasimodo. His gift on her 21st birthday, September 10, was a telephone call, Hamburg to Hoylake—expensive and not easy to arrange. Cyn says John kept his promise to write every day—“true to his word he didn’t once let me down.” He covered envelopes with hearts and kisses and wrote Postman, postman, don’t be slow, I’m in love with Cyn so go man go. These were steamy letters, full of sex, passion and cripples. He wrote that he’d bought her a pair of leather pants, adding “they’re not trousers, they’re knickers.” Something to be enjoyed on his return.27

  All five Beatles sent money home for their families, enough to make the occasional repayments on the guitars and amp, and maybe a little extra on top. Documents show that Mimi went into Hessy’s to make a payment on John’s Club 40. She was still livid with him, but he always knew how to butter her up. He sent a postcard, addressed to “Mimi Mendip,” that said “Don’t worry about me, I’m eating and sleeping well and keeping out of trouble,” and she too received a booth photo, John’s head tilted to the side and back, his eyes fixed deep into the lens. On the reverse side he captioned it his “come hither type look.”

  There was much in all these letters about food, expressing distaste at its foreignness. Cornflakes mit Milch was their Hamburg staple, sometimes eaten several times a day, especially by Paul. (Pete recalls that if one of them admitted to becoming tired during sex, the advice was “eat more cornflakes.”)28 Their favorite café was Harald’s, on Grosse Freiheit—here and in other places they fell into the habit of stubbing out cigarettes in their food. They also went to Chug-ou, a very cheap Chinese place at Schmuckstrasse 9, which made Pfannkuchen (pancakes). It wasn’t only the transvestites the Beatles had to watch for here, but limbless war veterans—Hitler’s bequest, men lacking arms or legs, or blind or deaf, down-and-outs in some or other filthy uniform. Even John Lennon would have been hard pressed to crack jokes at their expense.

  It was with relief that the Beatles heard about the British Sailors’ Society, at Johannesbollwerk 20, down by the pier. Though dispensing little religion, it was essentially a mission, a shelter for seamen and anyone else from the old country who happened to wander along. It wasn’t only a little piece of B
ritain right here in Hamburg, but a big slab of Liverpool: the building was right underneath an overhead railway, the rattle of its trains drowning out the cawing seagulls and the hammer and grunt from the still bomb-damaged docks, with a dirty river slipping by just beyond … except it was the Elbe, not the Mersey. Only a few minutes’ walk from Grosse Freiheit, they could eat full fried British breakfasts, read the papers, enjoy familiar accents and play games. The Society even offered accommodation, very cheap at DM4 each per night, but the Beatles—as much as they loathed the Bambi Kino—didn’t want to pay, and it wouldn’t have been as handy as “the pit” was for nipping off with a Fräulein during their half-hour Indra breaks.

  Most of the time, the Beatles got on well. Though full of drink and exhaustion, they could rap on any subject under the sun. Paul’s care with money was noted—Pete says that while they all passed their ciggies around, Paul would “sneak one of his own to himself”—and he was still needling everyone about the Bambi sleeping arrangements, made all the worse now because he was jealous of Pete getting the best girls. George had to process more reminders about being “nine months younger,” and Paul still couldn’t stand Stuart. He “hated him,” John said.29 Still, Paul wasn’t the only one to pick on Stu. Attacked much of the time in Scotland by all of them, it continued here in Hamburg. John still taunted and belittled his great friend, and all of them had a fair old crack at Pete.

  When he wasn’t off with his girlfriend, Pete seems to have enjoyed the Beatles’ company, but they were chalk and cheese in terms of personalities. They wouldn’t shut up, he wouldn’t open up. Asked five years later if he got into any arguments with the other Beatles, Pete replied, “No violence [but] we used to have what we’d call our ‘sparring round session’—everyone would just have a roughhouse, but it was all good-hearted fun”; when asked what they argued about, Pete mentioned girls (“I seemed to be very popular with the girls, and if there was any dating to be done I’d be the one they’d aim for”) and “tempos of numbers.”30

  And of course, every Tuesday to Sunday, no matter what else was going on for them, they boom-boom-boom-boomed all night long, sharpening with every session and held back only by what they called “Hamburg throat,” when the hours of singing wiped out their voices.

  Three pieces of news reached the Beatles toward the end of September. The first was that their refusal to keep the noise down at the Indra was forcing Koschmider to cut out the rock. The old woman had won the night. The Beatles’ last Indra performance would be Sunday, October 2, and the final fortnight of their contract was to be fulfilled at the Kaiserkeller, on Broadway.

  The second was that there would be a new contract—their Hamburg experience was being extended. Despite the fractious relationship with Koschmider, the Beatles were now a real attraction for him, bringing in business from young men and women, Hamburg’s rockers in their zipped, studded leather. Allan Williams was coming back to seal the deal, but it’s clear from letters home that the Beatles already knew they’d have the chance to stay longer and had decided to do so.

  The third item of news was confirmed in a letter Williams sent to the Beatles on September 21: Derry and the Seniors were returning home on the expiry of their contract and he was sending another group to replace them. From October 4, the Beatles would be playing split shifts in the Kaiserkeller with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

  Alley Oop!

  Butlin’s had been a blast: three full months of good hard rocking and all that this entailed. A week before the season’s end, a newspaper interview with Ringo was published in the local Liverpool Weekly News—his first proper “press.” RICHARD REALISES A BOYHOOD AMBITION was the headline, and was he ever. The youngster who’d had “twelve operations, several of them major ones” was having the time of his life. “ ‘It’s as good as a holiday and we get paid for it,’ said twenty-year-old Richard Starkey—he lives in Admiral Grove, Dingle. His suntanned face broke into a smile as he added: ‘It’s fabulous.’ ”31 The article ended with the news that, after the Butlin’s summer finished, the Hurricanes were hoping to play on the Continent, and in Ringo’s considered view this was the right move to make. “There is too much competition here. Rock and roll is beginning to wane. But I like the life. I certainly don’t want to give it up.”

  That second sentence was how things looked in Britain at the time and is only laughably wrong with hindsight; the fourth spelled the end of his engagement to Gerry McGovern. It had been hanging by a thread since the end of May, and soon after Richy’s September 4 return to Liverpool it was cut, finished, Goodnight Vienna. Wedding plans were abandoned and with them any talk of his conversion to Catholicism. He kept the engagement ring that had helped fashion his stage name, but switched it to a different finger.

  Gerry was missing out on high times, because Richy had come home loaded. The first thing he did was put money down at Hessy’s on a handsome and expensive £125 Premier drum kit—the act of someone for whom drumming was now definitively a profession. The second was to dispose of his old handmade car and buy a three-year-old Ford Zephyr Zodiac, cream and eau-de-nil. His Butlin’s savings were boosted by the money he’d put aside for marriage, and he blew the bundle on the dream machine. Still bold about not having a driving license or insurance, he drove it down to Speke, parked it outside Hunt’s and flashed the mouthwatering status symbol at his former factory colleagues and bosses, the chaps in oily overalls who’d thought him mad. Nice blokes, most of them, but get this!32

  Post-Butlin’s and pre-Hamburg, Rory and the Hurricanes took a holiday together, a week in “the smoke.” It was Ringo’s first time in London since the age of 15 and now he could enjoy it as an adult. The north/south divide—always evident in Britain—was felt often but most acutely when they went to a dance at the Lyceum Ballroom, just off the Strand. “No one would dance with us,” Ringo says. “As soon as we asked, in our Liverpool accents, a girl would say, ‘Piss off!’ The only one we danced with was French.”33

  On their return home, the Hurricanes played a couple of local bookings and obtained passports—and Ringo was overjoyed to see his occupation given as “musician.” On September 29, after he put his new car into a “lock up” garage for safekeeping, they all left Lime Street station for Hamburg. As well as making their own way, they also had to pay their own fares, for which Allan Williams reproached Bruno Koschmider in a letter. After just one month, the impresarios’ five-year business arrangement was beginning to crumble.

  At Christmas 1956, Harry Graves had struggled with an old secondhand set of drums from London’s Liverpool Street station around to Euston, en route to encouraging his stepson Richy’s sudden zeal for tapping everything. The consequence of his efforts was the reverse journey taken by “Ringo Starr” under four years later, carting his new and best-yet kit around from Euston to Liverpool Street with a little help from his Hurricanes (themselves laden with guitars, amps, suitcases and Rory’s gold comb). They caught the train to Harwich, the night ferry to Holland, the express rail to Hamburg and arrived on September 30. The next day, they too joined in the fun on Grosse Freiheit.

  * * *

  * Little is known of the Beatles’ fellow traveler to Hamburg, except that after translating Derry and the Seniors’ contract three weeks previously, Bruno Koschmider offered him a job in Hamburg and it was arranged he could have a lift.

  † Ecclesiasticus 44:14—“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”

  ‡ Local pronunciation guide. St. Pauli: Zankt Powlee, Grosse Freiheit (also written as Große Freiheit): Grorza Fryhite, and Reeperbahn: Rayperbarn.

  § Including pauses, the Beatles had to be in the Indra for six hours Tuesday to Friday, eight hours on Saturday and eight and a half hours on Sunday. The exchange rate was DM11.70 to the pound, so DM30 a night was £2 11s (now £2.55). Earned for six nights, Monday to Saturday, the weekly wage was just over £15 each (which was £3 less than expected, possibly because they’d assumed a seven-night working week)
. Pay was collected every Saturday from Koschmider’s office at the Kaiserkeller—often the only time they saw him—and was free of taxation; it was up to the Beatles to declare their earnings for tax when they returned to England.

  The contract called for £10 to be paid to Allan Williams every week, seemingly by Koschmider. However, by a separate accord the two men signed six days later, Koschmider agreed that Williams’ commission would be 10 percent of the Beatles’ earnings, deducted from their wages and paid into an account Williams opened in St. Pauli with Commerzbank. This meant each Beatle pocketed DM162 a week instead of DM180—a shade under £14.

  In that same August 23 contract—drawn up just before Williams returned to England with Beryl and the others—the two businessmen also agreed to be bound exclusively for five years, Williams providing whatever entertainment Koschmider might need from England.

  ‖ Germans of a certain age, unfamiliar with English, tend to pronounce English Bs as Ps, so “Beatle” sounded, to some ears, not unlike piedel, an old-fashioned juvenile word for “willy” or “dick,” more silly than rude even though it formed one of the many German slang words for the condom, piedeltüte (literally, “willy bag”). The widespread assertion that “the Beatles” means “pricks” in German is evidently exaggerated, and piedel is so little used today it doesn’t appear in the main German dictionary, the Duden.

  a Mach Schau is literally “make a show” in German, and similar to mach schnell, to hurry up, do it now.

  SEVENTEEN

  OCTOBER 1–DECEMBER 31, 1960

  A CELLARFUL OF OIKS

  The Beatles knew all about the Hurricanes but the Hurricanes didn’t give the Beatles a thought, yet. “We played one club and they were playing in another,” Ringo recalls. “It was ‘hello,’ that’s all. We didn’t know them. It was just ‘Hi, you from Liverpool?’ ”1 Beyond these greetings, the first Beatle Ringo spent any time with was Stuart: they bumped into each other in Grosse Freiheit when Ringo, not yet familiar with the area and not relishing the look of all that foreign food, was seeking something that wouldn’t offend his delicate stomach. Stuart took him to Chug-ou for Pfannkuchen, which meant walking past the odd transvestite soliciting on Schmuckstrasse. They didn’t have those in Pwllheli.