Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Such lapses were understandable in the circumstances and could have been overlooked but for the fact that Pete continued to fall short for them as a drummer. John, Paul and George all spoke of this in later years, though only a little, conscious of complex personal situations, but Tony Sheridan—on the Top Ten stage with them the entire time—has no need for self-censorship.

  Pete was a crap drummer, you can take my word for it. He was just not competent, and there were discrepancies between his feet and his hands. He didn’t care—he exuded a feeling of “I’m not an interesting person, so don’t even bother.” This is not a good attribute on stage: if you’re going to play drums you have to do your best. He needed a shot of vitality; I used to scream at him. I don’t know why he was the Beatles’ drummer—they just didn’t get on. He didn’t talk much and wasn’t artistically minded or anything. They were completely different types.

  Stu’s Top Ten season was different from the others’. Hamburg was his hometown now, he was starting to pick up some spoken German, Astrid’s circle was becoming his, and they were considering a June wedding, perhaps at the British Embassy. Also, having failed or sabotaged his interview in Liverpool, he was inquiring about enrolling at a Hamburg art school. It was clear to all that his time in the Beatles was drawing to a close, so he was less involved in the everyday laughs and stresses, turning up to play and then going home again. Beyond his usual problem in the group—Paul’s jealousy and the associated moans about musical crappiness—Stu’s main concern was that he was still suffering from his grumbling appendix and persistent headaches. They won him little sympathy from the others. As Pete recalls, “He would complain he had headaches and we said ‘Tough luck.’ That was our attitude.” The spotlight still dwelled on Stu once a night for “Love Me Tender,” his moment in the sun. He’d pass the bass to Paul, light a cigarette, stand at the microphone, stare straight at Astrid and sing one for his sweetheart. Such performances were spiked, inevitably, by a babble of bandmate backchat, and one time it got too much to bear. Tearing his gaze from his fiancée, quiet Stu spun around and screamed, “For Chrissake shut up!”22

  Stuart so enjoyed Astrid’s black leather suit—the tight trousers and jacket—that she arranged to have an identical pair tailor-made for him. This was done at Hamburger Ledermoden, a smart, expensive leather store downtown, and it cost her DM1,500 (about £128). The moment the other Beatles saw it they wanted the same, for wearing off and on stage. The price was beyond them but they learned of a St. Pauli Schneider, a tailor, who could make the trousers for about DM250 (£21). All this happened within the first two weeks of their return: they ordered black leather trousers and black velvet shirts.

  The Beatles’ leather look was started on their first Hamburg visit and completed on the second. From head to toe, they wore pink twat ’ats (occasionally) on top of greased quiffs, black leather jackets on top of black velvet shirts or black round-collar T-shirts, and black leather trousers down to pointy black winkle-pickers or tucked at the calves into gold and silver Texan boots. They were a sight: wild leather boys, pumped up on Prellies and stomping with Sheridan through the small hours at the Top Ten. John, Paul and George—buddies, friends and pals, to use their own expression—went up on the roof and posed for photos with the new look. Nine months earlier, they were down on their luck, playing in Williams’ and Woodbine’s Liverpool strip club: they’d come a long way very fast.

  When the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, they gave out their business cards to everyone. They’d had no such status symbol on the first visit and liked the way it conferred the sheen of professionalism. This was the card that named A. Williams as provider of the Beatles’ “Sole Direction”—he was their manager. Only, he wasn’t. He’d been chopped, and knew it. He’d received Stuart’s letter, informing him they weren’t going to pay his weekly commission, and he was furious. On April 20, he sent them a letter by airmail Express Delivery:

  May I remind you, seeing you are all appearing to get more than a little swollen-headed, that you would not even have smelled Hamburg if I had not made the contacts, and by Law it is illegal for any person under contract to make a contract through the first contract.

  If you decide not to pay I promise you that I shall have you out of Germany inside two weeks through several legal ways and don’t you think I’m bluffing.

  I will also submit a full report of your behaviour to the Agency Members Association of which I am a full member, and every Agent in England is a member, to protect Agents from artistes who misbehave and welsh out of agreements.

  So if you want to play in Liverpool for all the local boys you go straight ahead and welsh on your contract. Don’t underestimate my ability to carry out what I have written.

  I don’t want to fall out with you but I can’t abide anybody who does not honor their word or bond, and I could have sworn you were all decent lads, that is why I pushed you when nobody wanted to hear you.

  Williams had actual as well as moral right on his side. The second contract had been made through the first, which by law entitled him to continued involvement; moreover, the Beatles’ Hamburg return would not have happened without his efforts. All the key documents that brought it about—from Paul and Pete’s post-deportation appeals, to the Top Ten contract that helped convince the authorities to allow them back—originated on the same machine as this letter, typed by his secretary, his sister-in-law Val Chang. The last words in the last letter he’d sent to the German Consul on their behalf had been “they have a watertight contract.” He’d not counted on the Beatles’ ability to spring a leak.

  Williams was well placed to carry out at least one of his threats. If he reported the Beatles to the Agents’ Association they’d be barred from employment at that level of business throughout Britain. The Beatles didn’t think he was a member and reckoned that Liverpool promoters operated outside of the association … but they couldn’t be certain in either case. By ignoring the letter—which is what four of them did—they were hard-nosed enough to risk their very future when £2 each a week would have avoided it.† Being at odds with Williams would also mean being barred from his Blue Angel nightclub and, more vitally, from the Jacaranda coffee bar, their social hub since schooldays.

  In their own minds, it didn’t matter what Williams might do to them in the future, any more than they were “grateful” for what he’d put their way in the past. They were here now, and tough luck. And they’d always managed to have a good moan at his expense, taking the mickey out of his voice (making it out to be higher-pitched than it was) and laughing at his baffling inability to get their names right, calling Paul John and John George and George Paul. But it had become hollow laughter, and Williams’ cause was not helped by the envelope that enclosed his Express Delivery letter, which was addressed to “The Beetles.” It’s not hard to imagine them saying “Even now he can’t get our bloody name right!”

  It isn’t clear at what point in the Beatles’ Top Ten engagement it was agreed they would stay longer, but it may have been now, as a means of locking themselves into a deal Allan Williams might try to undo. They’d gone to Hamburg for a month, perhaps two, and while here it was extended to three. They would be in Germany until the start of July.23

  In 1960, Astrid Kirchherr shot some superlative photos of the Beatles in Hamburg; she then took none at all in 1961, scaling back her work to focus solely on helping Reinhart Wolf. His other assistant, Jürgen Vollmer, made up for it. Early in this second visit he asked George to go out with him for a few hours for a solo session, and George agreed, slipping into his leather jacket and greasing back his quiff. The others showed their intrigue with nods and winks. They knew Jürgen had a crush on George; he sometimes wore an I LIKE IKE badge he’d altered to read I LIKE GEORGE.‡ “It was chemical,” says Jürgen. “I liked George the most. He was very quiet and shy, like me, and also a dreamer.”

  This was an experimental day, because Jürgen had never done a photo session before. He was using a Rolleicord camera bor
rowed from Wolf, probably the same one Astrid had used for her first shoot. The results were similarly excellent. He fired off a roll of twelve black-and-white photos on the Alster ferry, and eight more frames on the landing stage at Winterhuder Fährhaus, and George’s character and youth shine fresh from the spring images.24

  George was well liked by his Hamburg friends. Klaus remembers that they were fond of his long eyeteeth, his Segelohren (protruding ears) and the seemingly involuntary way his leg twitched when he played guitar. Jürgen smiles as he recalls, “Stuart told me that when George got back to the others, after spending the day with me, he didn’t say anything except ‘Jürgen is fab.’ Just that, nothing else.”

  His bandmates’ envy over missing out quickly dissipated when Jürgen suggested a group photo session in the Top Ten. He had little chance to train his lens on Pete, whom he considered the best-looking of the five, because the drummer left early, most of the afternoon shoot taking place without him. The session produced some exceptional photos of John, George and Paul closely grouped around the Top Ten microphones, playing the Rickenbacker, Futurama and kaput Rosetti; Jürgen also took a very good photo of John and Stu together—the single existing high-quality image of these great friends—as well as John in action on his own and many more solo shots of George. Within five rolls of twelve exposures, Jürgen Vollmer produced the first set of high-caliber photographs of the Beatles in performance, stunning images that revealed much about them and also the consuming passion for rockers they inspired in him.

  When he’d taken enough in the Top Ten, Jürgen led the four Beatles to nearby Wohlwillstrasse. Here, between shops, tucked away behind a gated entrance you could walk past and never notice, was Jäger-Passage, an enclosed courtyard with tall arched doorways and graffiti chalked light on pockmarked bricks. It was both atmospheric and perfect for a shy photographer—through the lens it looked like a busy street, but hardly anyone would pass by all afternoon.

  Jürgen had a purpose for this shoot and the Beatles were his guinea pigs. “I wanted to experiment with long exposure time. I put John in the doorway because he looked the most rocker of them all—to me, he was like Marlon Brando in The Wild One—and I made him stand still, then I got the other three to pass by. I put the camera on a tripod and set a long exposure so their bodies were out of focus, but I wanted their shoes to be sharp so you could hear the hard steps.”

  Here, then, is the definitive leather-jacket Lennon at 20, leaning into the brick of a Hamburg doorway. His old Woolton gang and Quarry Bank pals are home in England—studying hard and hoping to pass, slipping into careers, getting married, settling down—but he’s out and about, causing a bit of havoc, drinking and getting pilled, upsetting people, singing for his supper, having a laff and a shout with the lads, a Lennon just like the dad he’s not seen in fifteen years, and his dad—the first John Lennon—and of course like Julia too. They were all here.

  The photos proved to Jürgen that he had talent. Shortly after this, he did a fine session with Astrid and Stuart, placing the chic couple in the ornamental doorway of a Hamburg house; and then, around August, he began to fulfill his rebel dream: he left Germany and went to live in Paris.25

  Hamburg wasn’t West Germany’s biggest city or capital, but it was the center of its recording business. Prewar, record companies had been based in Berlin, but in 1951 Deutsche Grammophon opened an office in Hamburg—primarily to build up its light/popular label Polydor—and other companies followed.26 It was to the Beatles’ eternal good fortune that Allan Williams chanced to export Liverpool groups to this same city. Talent-spotting recording managers didn’t set foot in the Indra or Kaiserkeller but they did go in the Top Ten Club—just as London A&R men scouted the 2i’s Coffee Bar. Tony Sheridan, uniquely, was signed up in both places.

  Missing information makes it impossible to fix a proper chronology of who went to the Top Ten and when, but it’s likely that the first record producer to take an interest in the Beatles was Jimmy Bowien, aged 28 and trying to make a mark in only his second year on the Polydor staff. He paid a visit around the end of April and enjoyed what he saw. “I liked the Beatles’ new attitude and the wild way they presented themselves,” he says. “I was convinced they were a very good group and really wanted to do something with them.” Bowien had a brief conversation with George and went away, but when he returned a few days later with a colleague, George told him someone else had beaten him to the punch. “He came over to me and said, ‘You’ve come too late—another man wants to sign us, Bert Kaempfert.’ ”27

  At 37, Hamburg-born Berthold “Bert” Kaempfert was a major name in his native country as both a producer for Polydor and leader of a famous easy-listening orchestra, and he’d also achieved a remarkable breakthrough in America, displacing Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight” to reach number 1 on the Hot 100 with a plodding trumpet-led instrumental called “Wonderland by Night” (Wunderland Bei Nacht); simultaneously, he’d also got top spot on the album chart with Wonderland by Night the long-player. As Capitol was always telling EMI in England, Americans rarely went for anything foreign, so this was an unusual situation. The trade magazine Billboard said Kaempfert’s success presaged a “Teutonic tune invasion.”28

  He went to the Top Ten on the basis of two personal recommendations. The first came from one of his closest associates, Alfred Schacht, a lawyer who was general manager of the music publishing firm Aberbach. Having heard that Sheridan was writing songs, Schacht went to hear them; he then told his friend Fips (Kaempfert’s widely used affectionate nickname) that Sheridan was worth seeing as a performer too, and so was his backing group.

  Another Top Ten visitor was Tommy Kent, a German boy whose American-sounding pseudonym disguised the identity of Guntram Kühbeck, a nationally known Schlager (slushy, catchy pop) singer for the Polydor label. Having just turned 18, Kent was able to frequent the St. Pauli clubs beyond 10PM and one night he saw the Beatles. “From the first second, I thought, ‘What fun they are.’ I knew they were very good.”29

  Kaempfert is said to have made several visits to the Top Ten, and he was proposing to sign Sheridan and the Beatles not to Polydor directly but to his own independent company, Bert Kaempfert Produktion, which in turn had an exclusive licensing arrangement with Deutsche Grammophon’s pop label. For the moment, however, there was no contract, and no date was set for any sessions. Sheridan and the Beatles simply waited to hear when they would be required, and probably which songs Kaempfert would tell them to do.

  How strange it was that Brian Epstein was here in Hamburg at about the same time, as a guest of Deutsche Grammophon. He was among a deputation of thirty British record dealers flown to Germany from London on April 24 who spent three days being wined, dined and shown all aspects of record manufacturing in both Hanover and Hamburg. The invitation came because Nems was one of the company’s biggest British customers. As the party also included the editor of the British trade magazine Record Retailer, a full report was published including two photos of Brian, one while touring Hamburg docks on a riverboat. “The evening was spent in a typical German beer house,” the commentary added.30

  Given the opportunity to explore St. Pauli freedoms, and his already confident familiarity with foreign exotica, Brian didn’t turn in for the night like most other delegates but went out in search of hot spots. As most of the trip’s participants were older, the few younger ones grouped together and some went out with him. Among them was Graham Pauncefort, 20-year-old assistant sales manager at Deutsche Grammophon (Great Britain), who knew and respected Brian from his occasional visits to Nems. Pauncefort clearly remembers three or four of them walking late at night along the Reeperbahn—and, tantalizingly, he’s “fairly certain” they went inside the Top Ten Club for a few minutes.31 It would have been just a quick look, he says. Had Brian ventured closer to the stage, the Beatles would have recognized him and perhaps he them, a familiar face from Great Charlotte Street and Whitechapel back home. Instead, here was a moment when—though so f
ar from Liverpool—their tracks paralleled mere meters apart but didn’t cross.

  Beyond the business visitors, the Beatles were also grabbing a local following in Hamburg for the first time. It had happened a little but not much in Bruno Koschmider’s bars. Since then they’d amassed a core of devoted fans in Liverpool and now it was happening again. Tony Sheridan, in spite of his talent and achievements, didn’t pull in supporters like this, nor did any of the other visiting groups—apart from which, these weren’t the usual St. Pauli clubgoers. Through the Beatles, the Top Ten wasn’t only full of drunken sailors, leather-clad rockers and passing businessmen; it had young men and women, typically of the upper-working and middle classes, late-teenagers, students and office workers and many attractive girls, some who commuted from beyond the city to enjoy the Beatles and dance. A Cavern-ish audience was developing on the Reeperbahn.

  Seventeen-year-old Frank Sellman was one of the Beatles’ new fans. He lived in Pinneberg, twenty kilometers north of Hamburg, where word somehow reached him and his friends, all apprentice car mechanics, that American rock and roll was being played on the Reeperbahn.

  It was nothing less than a revolution for children born at the end of the war to be out in such places, a real liberation. The strip shows in St. Pauli intrigued us, but the big draw was this American music, played by English bands.

  We were all very taken with the Beatles, their presence, dynamism and charisma. It was like an addiction: once we’d seen them a couple of times we couldn’t get enough of them. John and Paul interacted with the audience and were responsible for creating the sense of show. The other three were very much more background, the quietest being Harrison.32

  Brigitte Leidigkeit was an apprentice, just turning 18, when a couple of girls from college asked if she’d ever been to the Top Ten Club.