by Tim Riley
PART TWO
BEATLEHOOD
1960–1969
Chapter 6
Well Well Well
In the postwar years, before the Beatles arrived, Hamburg sprang back to life fitfully. The city had been virtually obliterated by RAF raids and was occupied by British forces until 1951. Hamburg was then, as now, known for its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, which sprawled for a mile along its port; locals called it “die sündige Meile” (the sinful mile), or simply “der Kiez” (the ’hood). By 1960, the Marshall Plan reconstruction provided for Germany and France in ways that must have stumped British youth—suddenly, they felt less like victors than victims. Up to this point, most had had no perspective on how far behind Britain lagged.
Hamburg’s dock culture rang familiar to Liverpudlians, but these hard-bitten German lives, playing out the endgames of losing a disastrous war, were of a different breed than they probably grasped. Its decadent nightlife economy made Liverpool seem coy. Gangsters fleeing Communism in the East controlled the rackets, and neon signs flooded streets lined with brothels and gambling dens. While the Beatles grew up with bomb craters, and endless tales of national sacrifice and rebuilding, a huge portion of Germany nursed its war shame and twenty million casualties through profligacy; Hamburg, the northernmost major city, was its pre-Castro Havana. In the first few weeks of their first major club gig, these five teenage boys took young gulps of easy sex, weekly cash, and pills by the fistful. Unlike Amsterdam’s De Wallen, Hamburg’s red-light district was closed off with a large gate; juveniles and nonworking females were forbidden entry. As employees, the Beatles waltzed right through. “I might have been born in Liverpool,” goes Lennon’s famous quote, “but I grew up in Hamburg.” Many of his remarks regarding his club days reek of a piercing self-awareness about both his lack of street smarts and how Scouser dock culture had shaped his outlook: “We were scared by it all at first,” Lennon reflected, “being in the middle of the tough club land. But we felt cocky, being from Liverpool, at least believing the myth about Liverpool producing cocky people.”1
Bruno Koschmider met Williams and the five Beatles on the Reeperbahn in the “St. Pauli” district the evening of August 17, 1960, and installed them in living quarters barely above impoverished: two rooms nested adjacent to the Bambi Kino, the B-movie theater he ran next door to his club the Indra. “We were put in this pigsty, like a toilet it was, in a cinema, a rundown sort of fleapit,” Lennon recalled.
We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We would go to bed late and be woken up the next day by the sound of the cinema show. We’d try to get into the ladies’ first, which was the cleanest of the cinema’s lavatories, but fat old German women would push past us. We’d wake up in the morning and there would be old German fraus pissing next door. That was where we washed. That was our bathroom. It was a bit of a shock in a way.2
Rosa, the Indra’s basement “custodian,” took a shine to the boys and pampered them with clean towels and “Prellies,” diet-pill uppers (nonprescription Preludin).
Like many in this closely knit nightlife circle, Rosa became a fast friend. The backstage crew of barmaids, thugs, and prostitutes were daily acquaintances, and they dubbed the Beatles “Peedles,” affectionate street slang for “penis,” punning tribute to their budding appetites. Like most red-light subcultures, this Hamburg scene was an extended family and a reliable grapevine about rough customers. The boys dubbed Rosa “Mutti” (German slang for “Mother”), and Prellies circulated like candy. Pills fueled Beatle stage antics as they revved up song tempos. Horst Fascher, a towering ex-boxer, worked as Koschmider’s heavy, a bouncer skilled at tossing out the louder drunks once the booze animated their fists; the Beatles charmed Fascher into being their protector as well. After six to eight hours of playing, the Beatles burned off alcohol and amphetamines on through morning before collapsing in their bunks.
Williams stayed on for a week getting the boys settled, which quickly tilted him into their father-protector, a blurring of roles the Beatles assigned most of their future business partners. He made at least one trip back, in the fall of 1960, when his ten years’ further experience in such matters had him holding the boys’ urine up to the light to check for discoloration, the poor man’s STD test.3 An early Williams-Koschmider negotiation included blankets for their beds. Lennon remembered Koschmider approaching him as the band’s leader to get the mood pumping:
And of course whenever there was any pressure point I had to get us out of it. The guys said, “Well, OK John, you’re the leader.” When nothing was going on they’d say, “Uh-uh, no leader, fuck it,” but if anything happened, it was like, “You’re the leader, you get up and do a show.” . . . So I put my 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.4
Whoever coined it, Koschmider adopted “Mach schau!” (“Make a show!”) as his refrain if ever a crowd lacked enthusiasm; it became the withering lash that propelled their music on several levels. On an off night when business was slow, Koschmider reminded his musicians from the floor why he had hired them in the first place: to keep the drinks flowing. That was a basic of bar-band life: earn your fee by holding customers’ attention and selling ale. Hacks take their cue from the audience and adopt a listless affect if the crowd isn’t buzzing. The stern subtext of “Mach schau!” is “Earn your keep!” The only reason club owners hire bands in the first place is to sell drinks. “We all did ‘mach shauing’ all the time from then on,” Lennon said.5
Any working musician will tell you that playing a club nightly is grinding, unmerciful work. Their Hamburg gigs forced the Beatles to fall back on literally every song they could think of, whether they had rehearsed it or not. So Koschmider’s “Mach schau!” doubled as a musical directive: stirring up the crowd could mean any number of things, from turning up the amps to hitting the drums harder, crashing the cymbals more often, speeding up tempos, baiting the audience, or coaxing requests if nobody responded to the numbers they’d already played. “Eventually, out of this, we built a little audience,” McCartney remembered.6 Within a few weeks, the Beatles were commandeering off nights and making them rousing affairs. Necessity turned them into pros.
Encouraging Lennon in this direction was probably redundant. Rock lore bulges with stories of his soused charades, performing with a toilet seat around his neck, goading the Germans by calling them “Nazi murderers,” and pissing from the roof onto nuns on the street.7 While mythic, enough of them come from credible sources to assume most are true—most of them are too good not to be. Howie Casey, saxist for Derry and the Seniors, who were playing Koschmider’s larger room down the street, the Kaiserkeller, showed his Liverpool mates the ropes: places like the British Seaman’s Mission on the docks, where they gathered most early afternoons for a corn-flake “breakfast.”8 “We were corn-flake buffs,” Pete Best recalled. Casey vividly remembers Lennon vomiting in the same spot on his bedroom floor for weeks on end, building up a bizarre, putrid sculpture of regurgitated ale as a squalid protest to their condition.9
The peculiar theater he found himself in sharpened Lennon’s nose for the absurd: performing American rock ’n’ roll for drunken Krauts, his stage patter wove thick sarcasm into crass non sequiturs. Imagine a British band performing brash Yankee tunes to an Iraqi audience today and multiply it by the Holocaust, bomb-crater playgrounds, Hamburg’s Marshall Plan fruits, the UK rationing and national debt the Beatles grew up under, and you’ll sense the volatile cultural tensions between band and audience. Since the crowd barely understood the band’s thickly accented English, Lennon taunted them: “This is a record by Chuck Berry,” he declared, “a Liverpool-born white singer with bandy legs and no hair!”10
Aware of their cocky Liverpudlian image, the band lived up to some idea of dockside bravado while flexing their rock muscles. Realizing that Williams had installed them at the smallest club on the bottom of the loca
l circuit’s food chain, they immediately set their sights on the top-ten venues down the street, where Casey introduced them to the local legend Tony Sheridan (née Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity), another Brit, whom Lennon remembered from the TV show Oh Boy! Sheridan drew crowds with guitar flash and cantankerous showmanship, cursing his backup band, the Jets, onstage. Beatle historian Bob Spitz quotes musicians comparing Sheridan to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Duane Allman, a showboating virtuoso ahead of his time.11 In Sheridan’s act, the Beatles glimpsed the next rung on Hamburg’s ladder. Copping a lot of what worked for him, they earned a steady stream of regulars at the Indra, jumped about until they had demolished its rickety “stage,” charmed their way into the local art clique, and broke their first contract.
If Liverpool socialized the skepticism and humor in the Beatles’ attitude, their five stints priming Hamburg’s brazen bar scene echoed through their records for the next eight years in both sound and attitude (McCartney’s “Helter Skelter,” a grinding, dead-of-night orgy, or Lennon’s “I’m So Tired,” a grinding, morning-after hangover). In his piercing reevaluation of their catalog, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, Devin McKinney opens with an extended metaphor: “The Beatles music,” he says, “is the very sound of the toilet.”12 The raucous St. Pauli clubs shaped Lennon’s approach to the stage in defining ways, sharpened both his cynicism and his charm, and fueled the barely contained euphoria—of youth, possibility, and change—that the Beatles unleashed on the world. Winning over these hard-core ruffians on these terms made much that came after seem both easy and relatively deserved.
As a culture, Hamburg was a netherworld, a lawless haven where they could defy their parents’ Victorian sexual ghosts. Of course, Lennon might not have been as shocked by this scene as the average American: his mother had set a high bar for snubbing convention; still, he worked hard to maintain his bad-boy status among his peers. For most Liverpool teenagers, Hamburg signified liberty of a style unimagined by their parents. Set loose on the playground of the former enemy, who had shot and bombed their fathers and uncles in the war, these children saw abundance where their parents saw vice; freedom where their parents saw excess; and joy and exuberance in behavior their elders could only think of as immoral. In a parallel Lennon would have hated, he was living the life of a young jazz player in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, when Scott Joplin’s ragtime was played in brothels, and syncopation was a rhythmic metaphor for loose morals. Plunging headlong into rock ’n’ roll in Hamburg, Lennon and his Beatles were playing out similar fantasies unimagined by their emotionally remote, and quite literally absent, parents: of freedom to indulge in all manner of appetites, and of teenage life as a testing ground for exploring all manner of identities.
At first, the sexual candor and promiscuity must have felt like joining a cosmically libertine frat house; pills and beer fueled their all-night rants, and the Beatles proved themselves equal to the appetites of the swarthiest sailors. To frequent the Reeperbahn was to confront hard living on a daily basis, ward off hardened criminals, and come back for more. Entertainers were minor celebrities in this milieu: freebies were frequent from working girls, and the seventeen-year-old George Harrison lost his cherry as his bunkmates pretended to be asleep.13 (As McCartney says in the Anthology, “Can you imagine the peer pressure?”) To teenagers turned loose in this world, rock ’n’ roll’s glorious contradictions suddenly made surprising, persuasive sense, while at the same time the music seemed suddenly tame, even harmless, compared to the behavior of its hard-core audience. Like the young Presley taking the stage at the Hi-Hat and Bon Air clubs in downtown Memphis, Lennon and the Beatles were carried along by the music as the most redemptive aspect of a brutal subculture.14 Far from corrupt, rock ’n’ roll was easily the least harmless of Hamburg’s vices.
The Beatles’ original Indra Club booking had them as opening act for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Liverpool’s steadiest working band. Bonding as expatriates do in a foreign country, and sharing the same stage with the goal of literally bashing its wooden platform to bits, players swapped instruments, shared arrangements and tunings, and sat in with one another as needed. Down the street, Derry and the Seniors also backed up Sheridan, and the Beatles became part of this loose pool of alliances and favors, joining in the musical chairs. To Lennon, Sheridan was a god, even though he was playing Hamburg on the way down: with no chart success, his middling popularity in Britain had waned. All these players became drinking buddies after finishing their sets in the wee hours, and once the Seniors learned the Beatles were in town, they visited their friends’ sets as well.
As the set list grew, the Beatles padded out standards with the flair the audiences hungered for. “What I’d Say,” the Ray Charles smash from 1959, began with a tantalizing, understated Wurlitzer electric piano and got stretched out into a half-hour set piece, with Paul singing lead and Lennon leading the audience up and down to elongate the song the way they imagined Charles did with his audience. Somewhere along the line, they learned how trading vocal leads let them save their voices. Eventually, Pete Best handed the drums over to McCartney to sing lead on “Peppermint Twist”; Stu Sutcliffe did “Love Me Tender” in his prescription sunglasses, milking its sentimentality; and Harrison did Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox.” This gave Lennon and McCartney a break as it gave the audience simple variety, accented the group dynamics at work in the sound, and touted different aspects of the rock catalog the band was creating, from slick pop to hard-bucking rockabilly, Hollywood twaddle to gobbledygook outrage.
Few set lists remain from these shows, but song sequences took shape and were then tweaked from evening to evening, audience to audience. They could soon depend on Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music” or “Roll Over Beethoven” to close, and Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” became a short-fuse opener. Later, “A Taste of Honey” emerged as a McCartney set piece; he remembered joining the others in three-part harmony “on the little echo mikes, and we made a fairly good job of it.”15
Lennon learned to swim in these waters quickly and, as he had back in Merseyside, marked out the extremes his bandmates measured themselves against. Between the roughnecks, who brandished guns and sent champagne to the stage even if it was 5 A.M., and the hardening mood of a crowd as they grew collectively drunker, the scene lived up to every cockeyed rock ideal Lennon had ever dreamed of. On night after unforgiving night, charming a surly crowd into a rousing choir could mean the difference between a handful of cash and a fistfight—it was a balance he enjoyed toying with, as the best of the music had its own violent rewards. “I used to be so pissed I’d be lying on the floor behind the piano, drunk, while the rest of the group was playing. I’d be on stage, fast asleep,” Lennon remembered. “And we always ate on stage, too, because we never had time to eat. So it was a real scene. . . . It would be a far-out show now: eating and smoking and swearing and going to sleep on stage when you were tired.”16
Pete Best’s memoirs contain the best day-to-day detail about how the Beatles adapted to Hamburg’s nightlife, studded with incidents that would otherwise be lost. As the cold moved in, Lennon got himself a pair of baggy long johns, so when Harrison dared him to go for a stroll, “Lennon didn’t hesitate. He picked up an English newspaper he had been reading earlier, tucked it under one arm, kicked open the crash doors, strode out into the middle of the street—crowded with weekend visitors to St. Pauli—and just stood there reading the paper.”17 This primitive performance piece has a dash of Julia Stanley’s lens-free glasses. “Window-shopping” the ladies on the Herbertstrasse became a daily routine—“our morning booster,” wrote Best. The band, he said, “injected a new style of entertainment to the Reeperbahn. For the sheer hell of it we would start at the top of the street and work our way to the bottom of it—playing leap-frog. We would keep going until we almost collapsed, not even bothering to stop when a traffic light showed red.” Sometimes, the scene grew as Germans joined to create “a long trail . . . of
varying ages . . . all leap-frogging behind us: it was complete madness.”18
In the early flush of success, with one of his first paychecks Lennon bought a 1958 Rickenbacker model 325 guitar, which became a cherished Hamburg relic. Harrison remembered the two of them seeing it in a shop window and how Lennon mentioned that Jean “Toots” Thielemans, then a member of the George Shearing Quintet, used the same model. That Thielemans reference gives away Lennon’s anti-jazz rants as sheer pretension—Shearing was an English pianist who had broken into the American scene, which made him heroic to Lennon no matter what style he played. In addition, the Rickenbacker’s shortened (three-quarter-size) neck appealed to his guitarist insecurities. Playing bar chords forces your fingers all the way up and behind the fret board; playing them all night on a longer neck can make your wrists sore. Economizing that simple repetitive motion helped Lennon develop sharper, spikier attacks.19 This abbreviated Rickenbacker design turned Lennon into a fireplug rhythm guitarist (think of “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” or “You Can’t Do That”).
