Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  On the upside, mostly, they were playing with Tony Sheridan, not having to shoulder these marathon sessions alone. Though never a Beatle, Sheridan seemed like one—they backed him when he sang, he often backed them when they sang, and there were usually six musicians on the Top Ten stage. The London 2i’s rock sound married the Liverpool rock sound—a fascinating and sometimes fiery shotgun wedding.

  But if the Beatles believed they were getting better money, they were mistaken. In 1960, Koschmider paid them DM30 a night each; Eckhorn paid 35, but then, to the Beatles’ anger, Lohnsteuer and Kirchensteuer were knocked off at source—income tax and church tax—the last being a tithe given by the state straight to religious organizations. “Balls to that,” they probably said, because they soon got rid of it; nevertheless, it meant that, to begin with, they pocketed 215 marks a week each when they were counting on 245.

  Eckhorn was sticking to his original agreement and wouldn’t pay the Beatles the DM40 per night indicated in the March 2 contract prepared by Allan Williams; in turn, the Beatles confirmed they wouldn’t pay Williams any commission—the “man with a beard cut off” was now the man with his money cut off. Back in Liverpool, Bob Wooler had understood the Beatles to be thinking this way, even before the tax business affronted them, but, whatever the case, two weekly deductions were already two more than enough and they wouldn’t countenance a third. As Stuart was Williams’ closest friend, he was put upon to write the difficult letter.2

  Quite right too, because Stu had it cushy. He was living in the lap of luxury at the well-appointed Bergmann house in Altona—hot water, a mother’s meals, a girlfriend’s love—while John, Paul, George, Pete, Tony and Tony’s St. Pauli girlfriend Rosi Heitmann were crammed into free accommodation above the front of the club, bunk beds and a couple of army camp beds in a small attic considered by George “a really grubby little room.”3 This was the place from which, at the start of the winter now ending, Paul and Pete had been picked up by the Polizei. First time here, Hamburg had grown colder and darker while the Beatles stayed; this time, warmer longer days were coming.

  The Top Ten was a cut above what they’d had before: there were fewer louts on the dance floor and the place was a degree less violent than the Kaiserkeller, just as the Reeperbahn—the main drag in St. Pauli—was a shade more respectable than Grosse Freiheit. There were still fights, just not quite so many, though the waiters would start one when things became too calm. A small section of seats and tables by the stage were reserved (unspoken) for VIPs and friends of the band, particularly Jürgen, Astrid and Klaus. “We went to see the Beatles every night,” says Jürgen, “every night. It actually got embarrassing, so one night we went to the movies instead, but at the end of the film we thought ‘Let’s go!’ and went. It was like falling in love, when you want to see the person every day. I’d been into jazz before but not anymore—I was now completely a rock and roll fan. It had become the expression of my own rebellion.”

  The club was one room, big but not overly so, a comfortable space with the stage set along the side wall and raised only slightly off the ground, in front of which was die Tanzfläche, the dance floor. The bar was to the musicians’ right, along the back wall, and white-jacketed waiters bustled back and forth with trays of beer bottles and Coca-Cola with straws. There was no distance between the performers and their audience, no hiding place, full exposure.

  The Beatles were thrilled to use the Binson echo system installed by Eckhorn on the microphones. They’d spurned the opportunity to buy guitar echo, but this was different, giving them vocal reverb like all the heavenly American records. Beyond council-house bathrooms and Mendips’ porch, this was the first place the Beatles heard their voices with reverb, and it was a deep and lasting joy. They feasted anew on everything from Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House” to Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and from this moment John Lennon was definitively sold on vocal echo, wanting only to hear his voice dressed this way, and actually uncomfortable when it wasn’t.

  For these and other reasons, the Top Ten would stick in the Beatles’ minds as the best Hamburg club they played. As George reflected in 1969, “The Top Ten is probably the best one. It was fantastic! Echo on the microphones—it was really a gas.”4 Tony Sheridan played an electric-acoustic Martin guitar; George played lead; John rhythm; Stu bass; Pete drums; Paul piano. He’d gone to the trouble of bringing his clapped-out Rosetti to Hamburg but had to set it aside after just a week or two. Instead, Paul sat side-on to some of the audience and with his back to most (ironically, just how he’d instructed Stu to stand a year earlier) and hammered out tunes from the Top Ten’s not-very-good upright. “It was a terrible old piano,” he’d recall, “so to be able to even pick out anything was an achievement.” For Paul, the downside of not buying a new guitar was, as Pete would remember, being “the target of some good-natured ribbing about being a bit of a meanie,” but the upside was a great advancement in his piano skills.5 Playing up to thirty-eight hours a week added greatly to his natural flair and talent, confirming him as easily the Beatles’ best pianist. John was self-taught to a pleasingly basic level and George could pick out some chords, but Paul was now just like his dad: unable to read music but a fine, confident and inventive player.

  Then, at one, two, three in the morning, St. Pauli’s gangsters would walk into the Top Ten: swaggering, loudmouthed, big-shot bastards, drunk and belligerent, with floozies on their arms. They’d sit down next to the stage, their voices bellowing, and send drinks up for the band with the imperative they be drunk. They were. Then, invariably, a gangster would get up and sing. These were men to avoid at all costs, but here they were with the Beatles for a few minutes. “I’d pretend to be busy and try not to get involved,” says Tony Sheridan, “but Paul always did this thing with them, a syrupy, wide-eyed, extra cooperative attitude, on the basis of ‘If I’m nice to this guy he’s not going to hurt me.’ You want to sing?! What would you like to sing?! OK!! I was never into that and I didn’t respect Paul for it.”6

  There are no photos of the Beatles at the Kaiserkeller and only posed publicity pictures taken first night at the Indra, but several sets exist to show the Beatles in the Top Ten in spring 1961. Among them is a shoot by photojournalist Gerd Mingram, who caught the Beatles in a mach Schau moment: Paul stands with the microphone, laughing and singing to John, who’s down on one knee and reacting in kind with his Rickenbacker—two Liverpool lads bonded tight through the beat, six-hundred-plus miles from home, watched by an amused George and Stu.

  Mingram’s camera also caught one of those occasions when a gangster sang with the Beatles. Tony Sheridan was sensible to keep away (he’s not in these photos), and harsh to criticize Paul for fawning, for the man is Walter Sprenger, remembered by Sheridan as “a butcher, a hard-punching man, with arms like thighs.” His police mug-shots were published in Bild-Zeitung this same summer under the headline BERÜCHTIGTE ST PAULI-SCHLÄGER BEDROHTEN GÄSTE [INFAMOUS ST PAULI THUGS THREATEN PATRONS]—by which time he had fifteen convictions for grievous bodily harm, though he was still roaming free.7 Also in the photos is Wilfrid Schulz, the undisputed king of the Hamburg underworld, a beefy bully the press nicknamed Der Pate von St. Pauli—the Godfather of St. Pauli. He was a known murderer but the police could never make any charges stick. “Schulz was an animal,” says Sheridan, “an ultra-violent man known for his bestiality—I saw him in action and he enjoyed hurting people.”

  The Beatles had good protection at the Top Ten in the small but feisty shape of Horst “Hoddel” Fascher. They’d come to know him to some degree on their first visit and now he became part of their circle. Horst had two younger brothers also on the scene, Uwe and Manfred (Fredi), and they were all tough little guys, boxers, cheery hard-fighting men remembered by some Top Ten regulars more for causing trouble than calming it. “We really got to know these people very, very well,” says Paul, “and they loved us like brothers.” So they did … and this time it was George’s turn to steer clear. As friendly a
s Fascher was—and he seemed to love nothing more than being happy pals with the musicians—he had a reputation. “Horst Fascher was very rough,” George would recall. “He was known for being in prison for manslaughter. I saw his brother once kick somebody in the head so hard I heard the crack of the guy’s skull from about a hundred yards. I kept well out of it, well away from that.”8

  The Beatles were young to be consorting with such adult bruisers—Stu and John were 20 (the same as Tony Sheridan), Pete 19 and Paul and George 18—so it was necessary they sought kinder company away from the stage. There were frequent visits to Astrid’s house, to get themselves and their clothes cleaned, and to sit down politely and entertainingly, as Beatles always could, to another of Frau Kirchherr’s white-napkin meals. Everybody went except Pete—he never showed up, maintaining an almost complete detachment from the group when they weren’t playing.

  One of Paul’s off-stage friendships was with the Top Ten’s Toilettenfrau. A little bespectacled 60-year-old, Rosa Hoffman was known to her extended family of St. Pauli clubgoers by at least four affectionate names: Mutti, Mama, Tante Rosa and Röschen.* She was a maternal figure to many, and though she didn’t speak English (Paul talked to her in schoolboy German) she was a willing listener, glad to dole out care, consolation and paper towels. Her place of work in the Top Ten was downstairs—one floor below the loud music, dancing and violence—inside the men’s lavatory, sitting at a small table with a plate on which customers dropped a few pfennigs. Paul was always kind and solicitous to her and she became very fond of him, making sure he was looked after.9 And Rosa didn’t only manage the toilets, she was part of the St. Pauli supply-line. Uwe Fascher marveled at her ability to secure whatever anyone asked for: she found him some particular pornographic books he was after, and she sold the Beatles their drugs.

  Tony Sheridan had just been introduced to Preludin when he offered it to the Beatles.10 The Top Ten nights were very long, especially the eight-hour weekend sessions, and Preludin the surest way to last the distance. The Beatles went through their first Hamburg trip stimulated only by alcohol and momentum, but now most people in the clubs were taking pills: the waiters, the owners, the underworld gangsters and the musicians. “I never saw any hash[ish] or grass or cocaine or heroin in St. Pauli,” says Sheridan, “it was just pills that you could get from a waiter or the Toilettenfrau.”

  Preludin was an appetite suppressant, an anorectic drug introduced into West German society in 1954, when commercial pressures were making women become more image-conscious. Users maintained an appetite but quickly felt full when eating, and the reduced intake brought about weight loss. Preludin’s primary ingredient, phenmetrazine, was not an amphetamine but an upper, giving the user a euphoric buzz. It was soon sold internationally and used recreationally, and though available in Germany only with a doctor’s prescription, obtained from a pharmacist in small round metal tubes of twenty, supply thrived on the black market. In the Top Ten Club toilets, Tante Rosa kept a great glass jar full of them which she freely sold for 50 pfennigs apiece. They looked like little white sweets … but these were no mint drops.

  Ten months earlier, the Beatles had experienced their first taste of amphetamine, chewing the Benzedrine card inside the nasal inhaler. John, George and probably Stu took it with enthusiasm, and so did they take to Preludin in Hamburg. George spoke graphically of how they would be “frothing at the mouth … we used to be up there foaming, stomping away.”11 John, as always, dived straight in, wholeheartedly grabbing another new experience with an open mouth and no thought of tomorrow. The Beatles called them “pep pills”—the commonly used British term of the period—and also “Prellies.” Tony Sheridan remembers the Top Ten edict: you took one or two at a time, swallowed with a drink in one big swig, auf ex—down-in-one. Two pills a night were more than enough for most but John frequently took four or five, and in conjunction with hour after hour of booze he became wired, a high-speed gabbling blur of talent, torment and hilarity.

  Ruth Lallemannd, a St. Pauli barmaid who knew the Beatles from 1960, recalls an occasion when “They crushed ten Prellies to powder, put them in a bottle of Cola and shared it between them. They were always wound up.”12 But this wouldn’t have been all of them. Stu certainly indulged because Astrid remembers it—she took Preludin too, and had an easy personal supply because her mother (who also took it) got them privately from a friendly pharmacist—but Pete never took them or anything else, not even once. He held strong views about drugs, perhaps associated with his sporting prowess: he was physically fit and took proper care of himself, though he could drink alcohol in prodigious quantities, especially in Hamburg.

  The introduction of Preludin into the Beatles’ world caused a problem for Paul. In the Gambier Terrace flat with Royston Ellis he’d been reluctant to chew the Vicks inhaler, knowing it was something he shouldn’t do, and hearing echoes of his parents’ warnings to be careful. Hamburg was the same only much more so, and again he tried to hold out. “When the Preludin came around I was probably the last one to have it,” he remembers. “It was: ‘Oh, I’ll stick to the beer, thanks.’ ”13

  Paul wasn’t the last … he just excludes Pete from his thinking. The five-man Beatles contained a core four, and within this a switched-on trio with their own particular brand of peer-group pressure. John and George wanted Paul to feel what they were experiencing, to share the new knowledge, to be all-in-this-together. For Pete, coercion to take the pills was light and halfhearted, for Paul it was heavy and persistent; John needled him and called him a sissy. “That was the attitude that prevailed,” Paul says.14 How long he held out isn’t known, but the view was maintained even after he conceded, when he was mocked for taking too few. “Maybe I’d just have one to last the night,” he says, “whereas John might have four or five. I was never excessive in that way.”15

  Preludin small-print advised against its being taken less than six hours before bedtime, in case of sleep disorders. Paul slept fine on just the one pill, John and George didn’t. George would recall “lying in bed, sweating from Preludin, thinking, ‘Why aren’t I sleeping?’ ”16 John simply took more: “You could work almost endlessly until the pill wore off, then you’d have to have another … You’d have two hours’ sleep and wake up to take a pill and get on stage, and it would go on and on and on. When you didn’t even get a day off you’d begin to go out of your mind with tiredness.”17

  The Beatles were also drinking like fish. “At times there were more bottles and glasses on stage than equipment,” Pete says. They drank whatever was delivered up, usually by order. Beer was on endless supply, and necessary because Preludin made them thirsty—but, when they had the choice, three of them had started to opt for something different. George really didn’t care for cold fizzy German beer, preferring the tastier English ale unavailable here, so Scotch and Coke (one of Ringo’s tipples) became his main drink, and John and Paul soon followed.

  Finally, after all that—after all the hours of playing and Schauing, all the pills and all the drink—Tony, George, Paul, John and Pete, along with Rosi and perhaps some stray females, would stagger wearily and noisily up three long flights of wooden stairs to their attic room—two painful sets of twenty-three steps and then a final, agonizing twenty-one more—rudely awakening the aging Eckhorn family members as they went. Girls climbed into bunks with boys, but, says Rosi, “Sex was done without speaking. Tony always wanted it after he finished playing and we’d try to be up there alone, arranging it to make sure it was a separate time.”18 George had no such fortune: there were several witnesses to the moment this 18-year-old Liverpool lad lost his virginity, here in the attic at Reeperbahn 136. “My first shag was in Hamburg,” he recalled, “with Paul and John and Pete Best all watching. We were in bunk beds. They couldn’t really see anything because I was under the covers, but after I’d finished they all applauded and cheered. At least they kept quiet whilst I was doing it.”19

  And then, says Rosi, when they woke, in the early hours of
the afternoon, “John Lennon would clear his throat with a big hawk, spit, and line up the phlegm on the wall, to show what they thought of the dirty hole they were made to sleep in.”

  Rosi never saw a girl in Pete’s bed because he conducted his private life privately, as was his way. He went to where the women lived, and was spending much offstage time with a stripper whose husband was in jail.20 Once again, John, Paul and George lived a disconnected existence from Pete here in Hamburg, similar to the first trip only more so, and like the Liverpool period just past. This was now the established way of things: Pete was with them only on stage, and at all other times they functioned without him, as Rosi confirms:

  Pete always went off on his own. I’d see him standing on a corner somewhere with his curly hair and his collar up, making the James Dean look for himself.

  John, Paul and George were like the Three Musketeers. They were close, and there was a bond even though they were all different. They all wanted to learn as much as they could—“Have you seen this place? Have you heard about this?” Pete was always doing something else. He didn’t fit in with the others at all. It was clear to us.

  Both John and Paul vented anger toward Pete when he fell asleep at the drums. He was living a different timetable with his stripper girlfriend, and the triple cross—not enough sleep, seven or eight hours’ rocking every night, and his flat refusal to take a Prelly to keep himself going—meant he sometimes struggled to keep pace. Paul admits he used to “get on Pete’s case … I remember during tom-tom fills turning round to shout ‘PETE!’ and we would argue as to whether he’d slept for a split-second or not, so it got a little bit fraught.”21