Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  All had striking good looks: Astrid fair-to-blonde-haired, Jürgen fair, Klaus dark. Infants during the Third Reich era, they were filled with guilt over its appalling inhumanity and so shunned everything their own country had to offer. They looked abroad, to France especially, for their intellectual nourishment and artistic direction. Jürgen led the way: he was the one who’d been to Paris, several times, modeling his entire look upon it. From his underwear to his polo-neck sweaters, everything was bought in the flea market (“The Paris flea market was huge and they had new stuff, not just rubbish”). Jürgen was Monsieur Paris in Hamburg. Expelled from the art institute for, among other reasons, drawing nudes as a single straight line, à la Cocteau, he was a young man of 21 well versed in “acts of a rebellion against the squares.” One was to fashion his hair differently from everyone else, in the modish Paris student style, combed down and a little to the side. “We called it the Caesar haircut. I always cut it myself because the barbers in Hamburg were totally square.”20 Astrid and Klaus followed suit.

  The three friends found strength through solidarity when it came to venturing down Grosse Freiheit. Jürgen recalls the first night:

  I went to the Kaiserkeller with trepidation because I always avoided that area—I was afraid of those Halbstarke [“half-strong”]—but immediately I was fascinated. It wasn’t the Beatles per se who got to me, it was the atmosphere, the sexual energy. Hamburg people always looked repressed to me, but at the Kaiserkeller the boys and girls were sexual: feminine girls, macho boys. I’d never seen a rock and roll band before and the music blew my mind. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were in suits and ties—they looked good but weren’t the same as the Beatles, who were rocker types.

  Jürgen was hooked, Klaus was every bit as amazed by the Beatles second night as first, and then there was Astrid.

  It was a dark and disturbing place for me to go, a very harsh environment. The atmosphere around us was dreadful, the typical Reeperbahn crowd—yobs and thugs with broken noses. Then there was this loud music and all the people standing round talking and drinking and shouting at one another. I saw George first, then Paul, and then John, and after John I thought, “That’s enough, I can’t take any more.” Pete was sitting in the back and you could hardly see him, and then suddenly I discovered another boy standing in the corner, and that was Stuart. He didn’t move at all, compared to the others who were jumping around and singing their hearts out. He looked delicate and fascinated me tremendously—I fell in love with him at first sight.21

  The three were dangerously out of place here—bohemians in a cellarful of oiks, beauty amid brutality, sensitivity among menace, clean blow-dried heads in an oil-slick. In St. Pauli as in Liverpool, looking different was enough to warrant a beating, and they felt it. While others danced, fought, threw beer or shouted to be heard above the music (with their new amps, the Beatles were getting louder all the time), Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen sat at a corner table they judged the safest and stared only at the stage, taking in every little artistic nuance. When the Beatles finished each number they felt moved to applaud. The Beatles couldn’t help but notice them.†

  Klaus and Jürgen spoke fractured English, not brilliant but enough to make themselves understood; Astrid spoke almost no English at all. Stuart was the one they targeted. Klaus tried John: he showed him a scraperboard design he’d done for a new record picture sleeve and was instantly redirected to Stu, “the arty one.” And so they talked, and built up a rapport. “The Beatles called us ‘the Krauts,’ ” says Jürgen, “and Stuart always asked me questions about Astrid because they couldn’t really speak much.” These Krauts were addicted to the Beatles, and they especially loved Stuart, and after this they went to the Kaiserkeller most nights.22

  Probably Stuart’s first mention of his new friends in a letter to Liverpool was sent to his ex-girlfriend Susan Williams toward the end of October, pages that also contained one other key piece of news:

  I have definitely decided to pack the band in at the beginning of January. My curiosity is quenched, as far as rock ’n’ roll is concerned anyway.

  Just recently I have found the most delightful friends in three young artists here, one girl and two boys. What intrigues me however is the fact that they found me, and not I them. Looking like typical bohemians in “real” suede jackets and jeans, they wandered into the club about a week ago … They asked me why I was playing in a rock band as I obviously wasn’t the type … Here was I, feeling the most insipid looking member of the group being told how much superior I looked—this alongside the great Romeo John Lennon and his two stalwarts Paul and George—the Casanovas of Hamburg! A little intoxicated with their praise, I was enticed into showing them some drawings I had done while here … the girl thought I was the most handsome of the lot and begged me to allow her to photograph me, which she did today. How ashamed I felt of the pleasure I experienced, of the contempt I felt for my dashing companions of rock—they who at my side had commented unanimously on her unique beauty, while I, smugly content, knew of her contempt for them … It’s somehow like a dream which I’m participating in …

  Astrid did two photo sessions with Stuart, with superb results. She was gifted, used a Rolleicord and a tripod, measured the light, considered the setting and loved the subject. Stuart, who posed every night on stage, just posed some more, unsmiling, dark glasses, guitar, quiff stacked fantastically high, the photographer’s hand-knitted scarf draped around his neck. In another letter, just before the second session, Stuart wrote of Astrid “I find I love her very much … Still, after tomorrow I will know for sure, as after a whole day in her company something’s bound to happen …”23

  It did, and it was love, mutually enthralling, artistically glorious and wordlessly expressed. The only English she articulated to him was “I am sorry that I can never say something to you”—words given her by Klaus or Jürgen, which she wrote on the back of her own photo and presented to him. It is the definitive Astrid Kirchherr image—a captivating, clean, stylish self-portrait taken in an ornate mirror, tree branches (dead but suspended in bud) pointing down to a pale and beautiful face.

  Astrid and Klaus became Astrid and Stuart, and it all happened very fast. Stuart worried how Klaus would react and felt guilty about it long after Klaus conceded the situation. This took several weeks, a period dotted with dramatic moments, but as Klaus now reflects, “I felt happy she’d found Stuart, like a brother would be when his sister finally finds a boyfriend. I was friends with them both and they were friends with me, so it was OK.”

  When John wasn’t calling Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen “the Krauts,” he named them “Stuart’s angel friends,” and Paul was more jealous of Stu than ever. Astrid was artistic, attractive, cultured, an intellectual, from a wealthy middle-class Hamburg family; she even had her own car, a Volkswagen Beetle convertible. The relationship, as Paul expressed it from his personal perspective, “peeved the rest of us like mad, that she hadn’t fallen in love with any of us. [And] it was something none of us had ever seen before. None of our parents had that sort of relationship. It was a wild scene to us.”24

  While the Hamburg trip was laced with memorable and fun moments, the personal truth for Paul was that little had gone right for him. George and Stu were still in with John at the Bambi and he wasn’t—he had to share a room with a bloke who hardly spoke but got all the best-looking birds; his guitar was failing him on stage; and now Stu had fallen into the kind of relationship he envied. Worse, because he “hated” Stu, it was inevitable that Stu’s three new friends would take against him, or at least be less comfortable with him than with the others. Paul has ruefully conceded how, for Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen, “John was number two, which is understandable, George was number three, which was a little bit miffing, because I had expected at least to get third. I came fourth, just before Pete Best.”25 It wasn’t even this. Astrid says, “In order, I liked Stuart, John, George, Pete and Paul. I liked Pete but he was so very, very shy that you tended to forget about
him. He was on his own really. Paul was so ‘nice’ you couldn’t get close. He was like a diplomat: everything had to be nice and calm. I never had a close relationship with Paul like I had with John and George.”

  It was all too much, and Paul continued to let everyone know it. In a letter to Rod Murray sent toward the end of October, Stuart detailed in black-and-white the stark truth of the matter: “Funnily enough, Paul has turned out the real black sheep of the trip. Everyone hates him and I only feel sorry for him.”

  Perhaps this contributed to John and Paul writing no songs here, despite months of closeted opportunity. Actually, it had been like this for some time, since Stu had come into the group and perhaps before that. The hot streak that produced all those Lennon-McCartney Originals when their collaboration kicked off in 1958 had long since cooled. They hardly wrote at all now. Not that new songs were needed in the Kaiserkeller: as a bar band, it was important the Beatles played songs people knew or might know. There even came a point every night when Stu stepped up to the microphone and crooned “Love Me Tender.” Sometimes the Kaiserkeller went quiet for him, and he was applauded.

  The Beatles were a long way from perfection, however. Tony Sheridan could see how far they’d come in such a short space of time, but he also identified some shortcomings: “Stuart may have looked good but the guy really couldn’t play bass to save his life. He was 90 percent image, and the most you want is 50 percent because the other 50 percent must be musical talent. It didn’t make the Beatles a good group to have a bass player who couldn’t play bass, any more than it made them a good group to have Pete in there.”26

  Pete’s erratic timing hadn’t improved, or improved enough, and was still exposed every time John and Paul wanted to vary from four-in-the-bar. Ringo was in no doubt that he had, in spades, what the Beatles lacked—“I knew I was better than the drummer they had at the time”27—but then this was only to be expected, considering the gulf in experience between them.

  As for Stuart, Klaus insists he was perfectly good enough on bass for the Beatles, but Paul thought like Sheridan: “I was always practical, thinking our band would be great, but with him on bass there was always something holding us back.”28 On the other hand, it also worried Paul that with Stuart quitting it looked like he would get the job, and Paul no more wanted to be lumbered with the bass than he’d wanted to be the drummer three months before: “We always considered bass ‘the fat guy’s instrument,’ the instrument played by the man standing at the back, and I liked the idea of being more at the front.”29

  As it turned out, the Beatles were not the masters of their own destiny. On the first day of November, Bruno Koschmider handed them thirty days’ written notice to leave. He was aborting their contract a month before its natural New Year’s Eve expiry. “The notice is given by order of the Public Authorities who have discovered that Mr. George Harrison is only 17 (seventeen) years of age,” it read, but the Beatles knew there was more to it, and there was. Koschmider had notified the Fremdenpolizei of their birth dates in August, and for that authority not to have processed the document for eleven weeks would have represented a level of inefficiency unique here. Koschmider obviously wanted shot of them, and wasn’t short of reasons. They’d been getting under his skin (and he theirs) since arrival, and it was just getting worse and worse. He also claimed their reckless flouting of his demands to play quieter at the Indra had caused the authorities to revoke his venue license, at a personal cost of DM100,000.30 Then there was the Beatles’ behavior at the Kaiserkeller. His logbook recorded antics so outrageous that he suspended their wages for a time. Koschmider even claimed the Beatles were attracting an unruly element into his bar. “We had fights breaking out every ten minutes because of the Beatles,” he said, which might have been true, but blaming the Beatles for starting Grosse Freiheit bar brawls would be like blaming the Poles for the Second World War.

  Koschmider also wanted shot of the Beatles because they openly flouted his rule about going into rival clubs. There was such a rule (though it was verbal, not in their contract) and they ignored it. Tony Sheridan was back in residence at the Top Ten Club from October 28, playing with some of the Jets, and the Beatles would leave Grosse Freiheit during their breaks to watch him—and perhaps, briefly, join him on stage. They liked the Top Ten because it was less violent and because Peter Eckhorn had installed a fantastic sound system, the best they’d ever experienced. It was a real rock club, not a bar with music. As their instruments were still in the Kaiserkeller, any performances wouldn’t have amounted to much, but Koschmider was undoubtedly hopping mad about them.

  Looked at the other way, Koschmider’s decision to serve notice on the Beatles by citing George’s age, when it’s highly likely the authorities knew it all along, suggests he’d been preventing them from taking any action until it suited him. The actual truth of the contract is that Koschmider had been in breach from the beginning: it was set down that he had to arrange working permits for them, and he hadn’t.

  Another factor, not without weight of its own, was the state of Koschmider’s business relationship with Allan Williams. He’d stopped all commission payments now and it was only a matter of time before the Liverpudlian discovered it. On November 11, the day after Williams formally offered Gerry and the Pacemakers to Eckhorn for a December season at the Top Ten, and less than three weeks from the opening of his own Top Ten Club in Liverpool, Williams wrote to Koschmider canceling the five-year arrangement they’d agreed on not three months previously. At a time when the Beatles could have had their manager urgently discussing their situation with Koschmider, he was in no position to do so.

  This supposes the Beatles wanted to stay with Koschmider, though, and they didn’t. If he wanted to end the deal early, he could. Fuck him. “Something’ll happen.” It’s no coincidence that in a letter home to his mother, undated but written during November, Stuart explained, “We go to Munich next Wednesday, for a month—more money, I think about 20 marks a week more.” Like the Berlin plan (which seems no longer to have been in the offing), this was probably one of their own fruitless dealings. They also thought they could stay in Hamburg and play at the Top Ten—it would be contrary to their Koschmider contract, but just let him try to stop them.

  The fact is, wherever they’d be working, the authorities’ knowledge of George’s age meant he couldn’t be part of it, and that he’d be making his way home.‡ The same kind of head-scratching that had brought Pete into the Beatles three months previously now turned to who could replace the lead guitarist. Despite Paul having John’s Club Footy at his disposal, and maybe George’s Futurama, he passed on the idea and they ended up trying to bring someone over from England. Pete suggested his friend Chas Newby, rhythm guitarist in previous group the Blackjacks. It was agreed Pete should write and invite him to join them. Newby replied saying he couldn’t, but if they still needed him during the Christmas vacation—in Hamburg or anywhere else—he’d gladly give them two weeks of his time.

  One final month of Koschmider meant one final month in “the pit.” Time had not warmed them to the Bambi Kino’s charms, for it had none, and conditions were harsher than ever because the weather had turned. The Beatles came to Hamburg in late summer, mid-August, expecting to stay a month, perhaps two; those were the clothes they’d brought. Now they were staying through the autumn and into the winter. October 1960 was a bitterly cold month in this part of northern Europe, the average daily temperature plunging to 4.8°C/41°F, and it was just a shade higher in November. The unheated, concrete-walled Bambi was freezing, and Koschmider provided no additional blankets; they shivered themselves to sleep every night. “Remember my gray sweater? Well, I wear it in bed, my socks too,” Stuart wrote. Worse yet, the rooms were damp, with water dripping onto their beds.

  It was definitely “brass monkey weather” the night John Lennon posed for pictures in his underpants on Grosse Freiheit. Like all good traveling Englishmen, he had a generous pair of Y-fronts about his person, as well as socks,
a pair of sandals, a pullover, glasses, an imported copy of the Daily Express and a cap on his head. At least two photos were snapped of him standing by the rear door of the Bambi Kino—and in one he divested himself of his sweater and spectacles to stand naked save for the Y-fronts, feigning intent readership of the Express small print.31

  He was dressed a few days later when the Beatles squeezed tight into Astrid Kirchherr’s VW Beetle and she drove them off for a photo session—their first, and hers too. “They couldn’t believe I’d suggested it, and I couldn’t believe they were so delighted,” she says. “They even washed for it!” Her chosen location was Heiligengeistfeld (“the field of the Holy Spirit”) in Feldstrasse, on the edge of St. Pauli, where the great Hamburger Dom funfair had just taken up its thrice-yearly residence for a month.32

  Astrid took twelve all-but-identical photos of John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete—with their four guitars and a snare drum—up against the steel of an open-sided lorry and the girders of the great roller coaster.§ The one she subsequently selected as “best” is both the abiding shot of the Hamburg Beatles and the definitive image of the group before they attained fame. “I liked the rough surrounding of the rusty steel and bits of iron, and lorries. It fits with the Beatles’ scruffiness, but when you look in their faces, compared to the rough surrounding, that’s the contrast I was after.”

  The Beatles had had maybe four hours’ sleep since stepping off the Kaiserkeller stage, and under notice from Koschmider their Hamburg experience was unraveling. All that and more is in their faces. This one photograph single-handedly defined the rock band image: young punks who think, dress and act differently to everyone else; who have ego and ambition to burn, but no future plans.

  Astrid’s other photos from the Dom are its equal. There’s John alone with his Rickenbacker, sitting on the front of a heavy lorry, and John joined there by George and Stu with their guitars. There are fine photos of George; and, best of all, some extraordinary photos of Paul and John, individually, with Stu out of focus in the background. These are high-caliber intimate portraits, free of artifice, photos that probe inside. “I didn’t have to tell them not to smile, they just knew. They only had to look straight into the camera. They were absolute professionals, even when it took a long time to get everything just right. No one got angry or said that they didn’t want to carry on.”