Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Simplifying his guitar work turned his mind to other matters. Everything Lennon learned from Hamburg’s mean streets made its way right into the act, although there was a curious disconnect between some of his offstage moods and onstage provocations. Pete Best remembered a particular fascination with cripples, and howling impersonations of them onstage, which managed to offend even some in this tough crowd. Offstage, however,

  the mere sight of deformed or disabled people sickened him physically and he could never bear to be in their company. More than once I was with him in a Hamburg café when suddenly he would discover that the occupant of a nearby table was a war veteran, minus a limb or disfigured in some way. John would leap up from his seat and scurry out into the street. . . . He never tried to explain this odd behavior or his reasons for devoting so much of his artistic talent to depicting distorted characters. Somewhere deep down I felt that perhaps he nursed a sort of sadness for them.20

  The Beatles quickly became a popular local attraction, complete with groupies, both professional and amateur. Open flirtation and conquest became inseparable from the musical banter:

  The more brazen of the girls . . . would simply stand up and point at the Beatle she wanted and give the well-known sign. You know—the bending of the elbow of one arm across the wrist of the other in a sharp upward movement that suggested an erection. “Wheee!” the girl would shout at the same time. Or later, as they got to know us more intimately, “Gazunka!,” which was the Beatles’ own war cry. We would fall about on stage whenever a fraulein gave out this routine, but she was never kidding.21

  Within the first few weeks of their Indra stint, a Hamburg art student named Klaus Voormann was out walking off an argument he’d had with his lover, Astrid Kirchherr. They had been on again, off again for several months, and Voormann took his sour mood down to the St. Pauli district to drink off some resentment. Perhaps he’d done this bar crawl before and knew the Reeperbahn as an excellent source of distraction. For whatever reason, on this evening in the fall of 1960, the sounds pouring out of the Indra drew Voormann down inside. Here he encountered full-throttle rock ’n’ roll of the kind he heard on Radio Luxembourg. He was astonished to chance upon such a thing in Hamburg, an underworld rearing up in his backyard.

  Rory Storm was onstage, and Voormann sheepishly took a chair by a band of leather-clad boys waiting to go on: the Beatles. He was drawn in by the Hurricanes, but stuck around to hear the whole Beatle set, and couldn’t stop talking about it to Astrid the next day. She refused to go back with him, so he returned alone with a record sleeve: a musician hobbyist, he wanted to design original album covers with art that captured the spirit of the music, and he carried an example of a sleeve he had designed for the Ventures’ “Walk—Don’t Run.” “He gave it to John,” Pauline Sutcliffe wrote, “who instantly handed it to Stuart.”22

  The third night Voormann brought another art buddy, Jürgen Vollmer, and afterward the two of them pestered Astrid to join them. When Astrid finally trespassed and descended the Indra’s steps, in early October 1960, she was quickly swept up in the same magical roar that had seduced Voormann.

  “I fell in love with Stuart that very first night,” she told Philip Norman. “He was so tiny but perfect, every feature. So pale, but very, very beautiful. He was like a character from a story by Edgar Allan Poe.”23 Astrid was a stylish blonde, and there was some internal jockeying over who would win her over, but Stuart was clearly her favorite. Pauline Sutcliffe regards Kirchherr’s sense of style as key to the band’s whole development: “Astrid was much more than a girl we all fell in love with. She was a catalyst; her effect on everybody was such that it brought out the best in them, musically as well as personally. It was a very, very magical atmosphere in Hamburg at that time.”24

  Within days Kirchherr took the band to the Dom, an empty fairground, to pose them for her camera. Her photos framed the Beatles in leather jackets and slicked-back hair, their baby faces and worldly expressions looking as though they’d already conquered something frightening and majestic. This aura of cool certainty became the shadowy subtext of their cheery mop-top image, their unfazed expressions already confiding unfathomable mysteries. Lennon and Sutcliffe (in shades) posed alone and together, hard stares concealing their insecurities, with Lennon hugging his new Rickenbacker. The certitude in their eyes is inescapable: the sense that for them, rock ’n’ roll was fated, fraught with significance, that it would dishonor the music not to adopt its attitude in all things, even as unknowns. Like the most eccentric, self-absorbed art students’, their expressions announced how every other pursuit paled by comparison. That Astrid and Klaus saw so much in the Beatles’ image this early on speaks to their artistic foresight; imagine the sound that inspired these looks, and her pictures, and you get an inkling of their early authority.

  Afterward, Astrid invited everyone to her family home in suburban Altona for tea. Once she developed her photos, the Beatles raved about her eye. She “captured the very quality,” wrote Norman, “which attracted intellectuals like Klaus and her—the paradox of Teddy Boys with child faces; of would-be toughness and undisguisable, all-protecting innocence.”25 Of course, Kirchherr and Voormann had no idea that Liverpool’s Teddy Boys were thugs—from their vantage, these guys were simply Brits adopting Americanesque rock poses, pretenders to Presley. But somehow the leather, the ducktails, and the formidable expressions gave them the confidence to transcend their circumstances. Astrid and the band quickly bonded, ventured off into more photo shoots, and she began learning English, the better to make her feelings known to Stuart. All of them became lifelong friends, wrote Cynthia Lennon. “During their stays in Hamburg, Astrid shot reel after reel of film of the boys. . . . I think only Paul ever smiled, the diplomat as ever. John wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want to, but Paul even in those early days could have earned a living in public relations.” George was as “hungry-looking, with a broad, toothy grin . . . very quiet.” But Lennon “emerged as the leader whenever a leader was wanted. He wasn’t elected, he just was without question.”26

  At twenty-two, Astrid played big sister to most of the band. Just as she had done with Voormann, she gave Stuart a “French” hairstyle with bangs—a cut she herself wore, which made her look indescribably chic and self-possessed. How apt that Sutcliffe’s girlfriend should model the band’s haircut.

  Within a few days they were all experimenting with their hair—except for Best. Now, instead of tough Liverpool Teds, the Beatles resembled the mod European art-student elite. This added another layer to their mystique. “Lennon moved from wearing a rock hairstyle to shock the art school world to wearing an art school hairstyle to shock the pop world,” wrote Simon Frith.27 Like the “duck’s arse” haircut among Woolton grammar schoolers, this image trickled down from Hamburg’s suburban middle-class art students who longed to be perceived beneath their station—who heard the art in the flash and bravura of sweaty rock ’n’ roll filtered through Liverpool expats for Kraut sailors, and discovered the most exciting part of themselves through the Beatles’ humors and desires. By November of 1960, a month after meeting, Stuart and Astrid had become engaged, and the Kirchherrs invited him to move into their Altona home, turning the attic into a live-in studio.28 “We fell in love very quickly,” Kirchherr remembered many years later. “It was very simple, and very powerful.”29

  The Beatles’ adoption by the Hamburg art scene can’t be overstated. This small band of arty types read philosophy, called themselves the “Exis” (for “Existentialists”), and Voormann, Kirchherr, and Vollmer heard these esoteric values in song—to their ears, rock ’n’ roll was a supreme act of aesthetic defiance, the aural analog to all the rebelliousness they admired in modernism, Dada, surrealism, conceptualism, and pop art collage and painting.

  Of course, strictly speaking, theirs was a “student” brand of Nietzsche’s God-is-dead, existence-is-meaningless, we’re-alone-in-the-universe philosophy. The subversive spirit of the idea rang truer than its par
ticulars: their middle-class upbringing seemed out of phase with the world they came of age in; what their parents dubbed “immoral” was far more complicated and intriguing than they’d expected. Like the rest of the Beatles’ audience, they had grown up absurd, to use Paul Goodman’s phrase, with a gnawing sense that there was more to life than the war-weary stoicism of their parents.30

  Here was another group of listeners who fancied themselves privy to a private joke, an absurdist-arty experiment in rock ’n’ roll pretension mixed with rebel politics that set the Beatles apart. Here in Hamburg, as early as the fall of 1960, you have the alchemy of the band’s success: high-minded and arty rock ’n’ roll performed amid squalor, adored by both sides of the cultural divide—the working stiffs who eked out a living busting up bar fights, and the educated students who found the music and persona overwhelmingly appealing as art. Iain Softley’s 1994 film Backbeat, based in part on Pauline Sutcliffe’s memoirs, carves out this high-low turf and presents the Beatles as mini-celebrities in the Hamburg subculture they helped create. This art influence fed Lennon’s ambition and gave him growing confidence—it confirmed his strong intuition that rock ’n’ roll was a new kind of poetry, exploding with ideas that “respectable” aesthetes simply hadn’t noticed yet. It also seeded the puzzlement at the gulf between high and low culture that he expressed throughout his career.

  Although he wrote to Cynthia every week, reporting on their growing repertoire and circle of friends, Lennon played the single man in Hamburg: he put together an implacable macho façade. And as a restless teenager with oceans of testosterone rolling off him daily, he was just as quickly out of his depth. One evening, a huge German sailor started sending drinks up to the stage and motioned the band over to talk between sets. A waiter brought the message that he loved the music and wanted to treat the band to a late dinner after their set. Now here was a perk: a free meal with drinks sponsored by a wealthy patron who enjoyed spending. As he excused himself for a trip to the john, Lennon and Best agreed to jump him and filch his fat wallet on their way home. “Drunken sailors had always been considered fair game in Hamburg amongst the pickpockets and waiter fraternity in the early hours of the morning,” Best recalled. “If ever there was a suitable case for mugging—this sailor was it.”31

  Sutcliffe had already gone home with Astrid, and after dinner McCartney and Harrison peeled off to head back to their bunks. Lennon and Best kept walking with their mark. Once they worked up the nerve, Best and Lennon pounced on the sailor and pinned up against a car park gate. He sobered up quickly and began fighting back. A Lennon punch felled him to his knees, and Best dove for the mark’s wallet. But the man fought back, of course, much harder than the two amateur thieves had anticipated.

  Finally, once Best finagled the wallet, the sailor pulled out a pistol and waved it threateningly. There was no way of telling whether it was loaded, so they charged him one last time as he fired into the air while falling back. They lashed him as hard as they could and then scrambled off, happy to be alive. Once that gun appeared, they forgot their thievery.32

  Recounting the story back at the Bambi Kino bunks, McCartney and Harrison howled at their nonexistent spoils. That didn’t stop them from worrying furiously about whether the sailor might reappear to have his revenge. He never did, but this incident provided fodder for people who wanted to believe Lennon kept murder as his darkest secret. This would be difficult to prove, but still more difficult to believe that any cops who found a dead sailor on the street wouldn’t have traced his steps back to the restaurant and the club where he’d started out his evening, the band that played that club, and the long list of witnesses who’d spotted them dining together afterward. This incident joins a long list of might-have-happened things on Lennon’s docket that get so easily inflated into actuality to prove a fatuous psychological profile, as if a robbery-turned-accidental-manslaughter might help explain the psychic gnarl of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Lennon was more confessional than the most melodramatic singer-songwriters he inspired; he recounted lapses of taste and morality in reams of interviews. The likelihood that he told an L.A. session guitarist like Jesse Ed Davis his guilt over such an incident—and nobody else, not Cynthia, Yoko, or even McCartney—is beyond remote.

  Like most bands, the Beatles made their musical strides alongside increasingly thorny ensemble politics. Pete Best stuck to the remote drummer’s role—moody and distant, a passive charm to contrast with John and Paul’s antics. But by this point, Best stood aloof from the others in several ways: he didn’t partake of pills; he was the first to wander off alone instead of hitting the after-hours clubs. His adventure with Lennon was atypical. He met the constant chatter and one-upmanship with nonchalant quiet. Lennon and McCartney dominated as lead singers; Sutcliffe and Harrison settled into supporting roles. Sutcliffe got piled on as the least adept with his instrument, chided mercilessly both onstage and off.

  While Lennon obviously carried deep feelings for Sutcliffe, many remember him as cruel toward Sutcliffe’s playing. It became a rift in their relationship: Sutcliffe had joined the band out of friendship for Lennon, but Lennon and the others had long since outpaced him musically. McCartney began to treat Sutcliffe coldly, out of both rivalry and his own booming musicianship; Paul came alive onstage, where Sutcliffe had to work at his public face. “When John and Stu had a row,” Astrid said, “you could still feel the affection that was there. But when Paul and Stu had a row, you could tell Paul hated him.”33 Still, Norman’s idea that McCartney wanted to play bass is stretching things—the bass still had a stigma, not the guitarist glamour McCartney lusted after. Hounding Stu out of the band would have meant a dicey game of straws as to who would have to give up guitar, and McCartney must have known it wouldn’t be John—after all, he had a new Rickenbacker.

  Lennon folded his rivalry with McCartney right into the act. Pete Best recalled: “John would play seriously for a while as Paul gave his emotional all to the song: then John would suddenly start to pull a grotesque face or adopt his wicked hunchback pose against the piano, head tucked into his shoulders, features contorted. Eyes in the audience would begin to stray from Paul and some laughter would follow, gathering pace at John’s antics.”34 This would anger Paul at first, but then he’d join in the clowning, dousing the song’s sincerity. Lennon would also sabotage McCartney numbers with intrusive squawks and wrong notes from his guitar, feigning innocence as Paul became distracted. Where Best delighted in such larks, Sutcliffe began to tire of them. He found all the self-indulgence wearisome, as his letters home detailed: “Hamburg has little quality, except the kind you would find in an analysis of a test tube of sewer water. It’s nothing but a vast amoral jungle.”35

  Hamburg has a distorted space in rock history because of the Beatles. “What you have to remember also is that there were more Liverpool groups going to the American bases in France than there ever were to Hamburg,” Bill Harry told music writer Paul Du Noyer,36 including Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who worked in France for several stretches in between Hamburg gigs. “We’d heard about musicians getting gigs in Stuttgart,” said George Harrison, “where there were American army bases. We knew that those kinds of gigs were available around Germany, so it was an exciting thought.”37 In this larger context, Hamburg was actually a small pond where the Beatles grew to be big fish. After the Beatles came Gerry and the Pacemakers and a few others, but the Liverpool connection seems to have been limited to Koschmider and Williams’s acts, and operational for only a couple seasons, especially since the Beatles wrested themselves free from Koschmider’s contract the first chance they got.

  The Hurricanes, by this point, were a gimmicky act, complete with dance steps, a proper song set list, and matching outfits and handkerchiefs. (Tony Bramwell likened the Hurricanes’ act to an unironic Sha Na Na, mired in stage patter.)38 They also had a drummer who oozed confidence to the point where the Beatles were wary of him at first. “I was still a Teddy Boy and I only found out later from John
that they were a bit scared of me,” Ringo Starr remembered in the Anthology.39 “There was another thing,” Harrison recalled. “Pete would never hang out with us. When we finished doing the gig, Pete would go off on his own and we three [John, Paul, and George] would hang out together, and then when Ringo was around it was like a full unit, both on and off the stage. . . . With Ringo, it felt rocking.”40 Sutcliffe wrote home: “We have improved a thousand fold since our arrival and Allan Williams, who is here at the moment, tells us that there is no band in Liverpool to touch us.”41

  The power struggle within the band suddenly collapsed under St. Pauli’s neighborhood politics. At the end of November, the police closed the Indra due to noise complaints from an elderly neighbor and the church across the street, so Koschmider installed his promising young band at his Kaiserkeller, where they succeeded the Seniors during the second week in October, in time for Lennon to celebrate his twentieth birthday on October 9. Where the Indra resembled the Cavern—low-ceilinged, with space for 150 patrons at most—the new room was spacious, boasted a large dance floor, and the band traded sets with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes for twelve hours, alternating one-hour sets back and forth, six hours apiece. This must have felt like an early arrival: busting out of the back streets onto the main stage, holding their own with an established St. Pauli act, and gaining more and more listeners in a competitive market.

  But later that month things fell apart when a new rival challenged Koschmider. An Englishman named Peter Eckhorn recruited bouncer Horst Fascher from the Indra to help remodel his father’s large underground warehouse, the Hippodrome, which had enjoyed a prewar heyday by featuring nudes on horseback. Soon other Koschmider employees defected: first Tony Sheridan from the Kaiserkeller, then Mutti, the Indra’s WC attendant, and finally the Beatles. At first they simply appeared onstage backing Sheridan at Eckhorn’s Top Ten Club soon after its grand opening in November 1960. Koschmider quickly lectured them on the finer points of their contract, which forbade performances at any competing club even without billing. He threatened physical harm if it happened again, but with Fascher on their side, and a large contingent of disgruntled Indra workers, they made the leap: there were no sentimental feelings about ditching the Indra. From the Beatles’ perspective, Koschmider was only getting what he deserved: the lodgings he’d provided hadn’t earned him any special allegiance, and he’d managed to lose more than half his staff once Eckhorn opened his new club. The Top Ten Club was huge: it held five times as many patrons as the Indra, so its cash take was thicker, and its aura was more “respectable,” in St. Pauli terms. There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to bash down this stage, whereas at the Indra it was a matter of pride.