by Larry Kane
—Horst Fascher, on the first time he heard the Beatles
Rock, Roll, and TKO
Fate on a razor-thin margin continues to dominate our story. In retrospect, it is clear that the Beatles’ experiences in Hamburg formed a major building block in their road to ultimate success. Without Hamburg, the world may never have known the Fab Four. And their visits were given an exclamation mark by four people, not as “fab” in the mood of the time, but certainly quite fabulous. And without these four key players in Hamburg—who became supporters, friends, influences, and in one case, a lover—the Beatles may never have gotten out of Germany with their hopes alive.
In fact, they may not have gotten out alive, period, if not for one of the four: Horst Fascher, their friend, fighter, and true fan:
I ENJOYED WHAT I HEARD IN THE NIGHTCLUBS IN ST. PAULI WAS MUCH MORE EXCITING THAN ANY GERMAN MUSIC THAT I HAD EVER HEARD BEFORE. I FELT, I HAD THAT RHYTHM IN ME. THE BOXING AND THE ROCK ’N’ ROLL WAS VERY CLOSE. WHEN WE WENT TO TRAINING, I TOLD MY TRAINER [I WANT] TO BOX TO ROCK ’N’ ROLL MUSIC. JUMPING AND DOING SHADOW BOXING AND THINGS LIKE THAT. WE STARTED TO TRAIN SOMETIMES TO ROCK ’N’ ROLL MUSIC—ROCK ’N’ ROLL MUSIC ONLY ON RECORDS, WHICH YOU COULD BUY, BUT ONLY A FEW. MAYBE FROM BILL HALEY, LITTLE RICHARD, AND THINGS LIKE THAT. SO WHEN I SAW THE [BEATLES] AT THE KAISERKELLER NIGHTCLUB, I REALIZED, YOU KNOW, THAT THIS COULD BE SOMETHING SPECIAL. I WAS, WELL, YOU MIGHT SAY, A BOXER, WITH A HAND AS A HAMMER AND ROCKING FEET.
And so Horst Fascher tells his story, a story of triumph and trauma, a tale so bizarre that it includes a case of manslaughter, time in prison, and years on the run, plus a tour with British musical great Tony Sheridan in South Vietnam during the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Although he had been to sea and worked odd jobs before the age of eighteen, Fascher’s parents urged him not to go across the river to the Reeperbahn red-light district. But he did anyway, to train as a boxer and to satisfy his obsession to see “naked ladies.” There were plenty around. But the diminutive and handsome young athlete was drawn in by American rock ’n’ roll, at first from the British Forces Network, broadcasting near Hamburg for the occupying Allied forces, and later, from several eye-opening nightclub experiences, one of which is carved into his memory.
LARRY, SO IT IS ONE DAY AND I PASSED A CLUB, AND IT WAS AN AMERICAN GROUP, AND I LISTENED AND IT [WAS] REALLY GOOD, EVEN THOUGH, AT THE TIME, I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE WORDS. A WHILE LATER, I THINK 1958, IT CAME THE DAY WHEN [BILL] HALEY CAME TO HAMBURG AT THE ERNST-MARK-HALLE [HALL], WHERE HE ALSO PLAYED LATER ON AND WE WENT THERE, OF COURSE, WITH MANY OTHERS. AFTER TWENTY MINUTES THE SHOW WAS OVER, BECAUSE THEY START HAVING A RIOT THERE. THEY START DANCING. WANTED TO DANCE, ROCK ’N’ ROLL. THE POLICE CAME AND TRIED TO PUT IT BACK IN THE SEAT AND OTHERS WENT AGAINST IT, BECAUSE THE POLICE WERE STOPPING OTHERS FROM HAVING FUN. THERE WAS A BIG RIOT GOING ON AND TURNED THE WHOLE PLACE INTO PIECES. THE CONCERT ENDED IN TWENTY MINUTES AND I WAS SO MAD ABOUT IT, BECAUSE I CAME TO LISTEN TO THE MUSIC AND NOT HAVE A RIOT WITH THE POLICE.
As Fascher’s love for rock flourished, his father was angry that he was a fan of what was called “hot and tot” music. Fascher ignored his parents’ warnings. “Hot and tot” would ring in his ears forever.
When the Beatles came to Hamburg in the summer of 1960, Fascher was already a rocker at heart. He and the boys, including Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, clicked right away. In a period of a few short months, the young and wild boxer hung out and became a real friend. And when the boys left late in their gig at the Kaiserkeller club to briefly play at the Top Ten Club, and were threatened with physical harm by Koschmider’s thugs, it was Fascher who became an enforcer and protected them, except, of course, from themselves—a destructive story still to come.
But the unusual alliance with the boxer lasted for all of the group’s five trips to the Reeperbahn, even when Fascher was not available due to incarceration.
The fate that brought Fascher into their lives is a story stranger than fiction, but it is true: Horst Fascher, defiant, devoted, and unpredictable, found the time and place where the boys would graduate to a much higher plane of success.
By 1959, Fascher had become featherweight boxing champion of Hamburg and the region, making the music lover a qualifier for the German national championship. Fascination with a girl, and raw emotion, stopped his march to the amateur title.
“I had a fight on the street with a sailor,” he tells me, shrugging his shoulders, his eyes seeming to well with regret. “I had a fight because I liked a girl. . . . I knocked the guy out. He fell down on his head and broke his head. . . . He went back to his ship and he died overnight there.”
Fascher’s promising boxing career was done. He spent nine months in jail, and upon emerging he almost immediately fell in love with a woman, a prostitute. He was so much in love he even brought her home. It was a serious relationship, but one thing led to another, and the man who would later be remembered as a driving force for the Beatles in Hamburg became, for a while, a pimp.
Fighter, rock fan, jailbird, pimp—all prerequisites for his future career as a nightclub guard and, eventually, nightclub manager.
Creatively maneuvering his way through the red-light district, Fascher managed the Top Ten Club, quit the place, worked at another club in the interim, and was drawn to the Indra and Kaiserkeller. He was “turned on” by their music, and his good graces and outgoing personality provided a one-man support team for the disbelieving and doubting young musicians.
Fascher had graduated from security chief to a man with a concept for his friends from Liverpool. His concept: performing in a new nightclub with multiple bands and shorter performances. The boys’ belief in him, and his in them, would bring them to a place called the Star Club. Now, in a genuine way, his support would give their career an undeniable boost.
There was and remains between Fascher and the Beatles an emotional component, a respect and love nurtured in nightclubs, amid an air of mutual respect.
Pete Best told the original Beatles scribe Bill Harry about that friendship. Harry quotes Pete in a vintage edition of Mersey Beat as remembering that when the boys were about to leave Hamburg on their ill-fated first trip in 1960, Fascher was shedding tears, wondering if he would see them again. Fascher and the boys had become that close.
Eventually Fascher had his chance for a special reunion. He was determined to bring the boys back to a venue where they could really break through. So, he traveled to Liverpool, caught the Beatles in one of their daily concerts at the Cavern, and through the influence of his pals, the boys set up a historic meeting for Fascher with their new manager, Brian Epstein.
“[At] that time, I met Roy Young. Roy Young was an English musician. He was the English Little Richard. He could sing like him. He came into the Top Ten. So Roy became a friend of mine. So one day I said to Roy, ‘Would you come with me to England? I have to book some bands and my English is not that good to discuss contracts, so come with me and you can start working at the Star Club.’ He was a piano player.”
“So you started the Star Club?” I ask him.
YES. MOST ROCK BANDS WERE BASS GUITAR, DRUMS, AND RHYTHM GUITAR, AND HE WAS A PIANO PLAYER, AND PIANO ALWAYS FITS WITH A ROCK ’N’ ROLL BAND. SO WE WENT TO ENGLAND. YES . . . AND THERE WE SAW SOME YOUNG GUY WALKING IN THE STREET AND ASKED HIM WHERE IS THE PLACE WHERE ALL THE ROCK ’N’ ROLL BANDS ARE PLAYING. HE SAID THE BEST PLACE IS YOU GO TO THE CAVERN. SO WE WENT THAT NIGHT TO THE CAVERN AND MET THE BEATLES. I MET PAUL, JOHN, AND ALL [OF] THEM. WE HAD SOME DRINKS. THEY SET UP A MEETING AT THE NEMS OFFICE OF BRIAN EPSTEIN. ROY CAME ALONG AS . . . WELL . . . MY INTERPRETER.
Although this meeting was unnoticed in the early history of the Beatles, it turned into a major moment.
WE CAME TO THE NEMS ENTERPRISE OFFICE, UPSTAIRS. DOWNSTAIRS WAS THE RECORD SHOP. HE WAS VERY SMART-DRESSED AND HE SPOKE VERY FUNNY, LIKE, “YES, MR. FASCHER,” AND THINGS LIKE THAT. HE SAID, “YOU ARE INTERESTED IN BOOKING THE BEATLES?” AND I SAID, “YES, WE HAVE A NEW CLUB IN
HAMBURG AND WE’D LIKE TO HAVE THE BEATLES, BECAUSE I KNOW THE BEATLES ALREADY FROM BEFORE AND I THINK THAT THEY WOULD BE THE RIGHT BAND TO OPEN IN APRIL.” THEN HE SAID, “I THINK WE CAN’T DO IT. . . . THE BEATLES ARE BOOKED ALREADY AT THE TOP TEN.” I SAID, “MR. EPSTEIN, THE BEATLES CANNOT GO BACK TO THE TOP TEN. IF THE BEATLES COME BACK TO HAMBURG . . . THEY’LL COME TO THE STAR CLUB, BECAUSE THERE IS NO TOP TEN ANYMORE.” HE SAID, “HOW DO YOU MEAN THAT?” I SAID, “LIKE I SAID, MR. EPSTEIN,” AND HE SAID, “WELL, I HAVE TO TALK TO THE BOYS FIRST. IS THAT OKAY?” “I COME BACK TOMORROW.”
“Tomorrow” would be the date of the pivotal meeting at the old and grand Adelphia Hotel. Fascher was stunned, thrilled at the outcome.
“Epstein says to me, told me, ‘Mr. Fascher, I spoke to the boys, and the boys were saying, “If Horst say so, there will be no club, then it will happen,” and the boys decide to go with you.’ That was his words. Then we signed a contract. The Beatles got more money. At the Top Ten they earned fifty max.”
The money was an afterthought. It was the place and the atmosphere that moved them into a new league. It was in the Star Club that the Beatles emerged as world-class rockers on two visits in 1962 that changed their world, and ours. It was during these visits that they recorded music, tested the waters, cleaned up their act, and began to soar. These two trips, in the spring and fall of 1962, also featured a changing of the drummers: Pete in the spring, Ringo in the fall. The differences in the 1962 visits were noticeable: The boys were more serious on stage, less sloppy. Their shirts were no longer hanging out. They wore jackets, sometimes with ties. The makeover was not complete, but it was beginning.
Fascher briefly performed with the Beatles during their New Year’s Eve show, which was recorded by another Liverpool musician, Ted “Kingsize” Taylor. Years later, in 1977, the tape was released commercially as Live! at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962. One song from the album, “Hallelujah, I Love Her So,” includes Fascher on backing vocals. And on another song, “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” his brother Fred’s vocals can be heard.
Fascher remained friends with the band long after they became famous. Some of his stories about the Beatles’ Hamburg days have been published in other works, and he published his own memoir in 2006.
In 1966, triumphant and rising toward superstardom, the Beatles returned to Hamburg. But Fascher could not attend their shows; he had been sentenced to another year in jail for violating his parole.
“From ’62 to ’65, I had eight fights. . . . The hardest fight was somebody broke his chin.”
The boxing cost him plenty. He had sworn not to fight, in the ring or out, and his parole violation was another painful moment in his life.
Though Fascher could not make it to the Star Club, he was honored in absentia.
“When the Beatles came here [in 1966] and played the same hall where Bill Haley played . . . my brothers went there and they also went backstage. They had a few words and [my brother] Freddie was saying, ‘Horst can’t be here because he’s still in jail. But give him a song tonight,’ and John said, ‘Yes we [will].’ So during the show, John Lennon was saying to the audience through the mic, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, our friend Horst Fascher can’t be here tonight because he’s still, uh, in jail.’”
The Beatles returned to Britain. Fascher finished his prison stint and then, as usual, went where the trouble was. Where was Fascher headed? Vietnam, where he accompanied Tony Sheridan on a visit to entertain the troops. The rest of his life has included stints at resurrecting the Star Club, and remaining an icon in St. Pauli, where people still remember him as a man who helped bring quality shows to a neighborhood known for other forms of entertainment.
And the Beatles remembered. Ringo and George were there when he opened a new version of the Star Club a couple years later in December 1968. Once again, Tony Sheridan was the top bill. At a difficult time in his life, Fascher had lost a child. His baby girl, with a rare heart problem, could not be saved. But when the girl was still fighting for her life, Paul McCartney flew a team of heart specialists to London to seek options for the little girl, including special surgery. Fascher and his girlfriend were flown to London. Paul arranged the trip.
Fascher tells me about the story, fifty years later, tears welling in his eyes.
“I will never forget. Never forget them. The music. What they did for me.”
Nor will they.
In 1965, without having any knowledge of Horst Fascher, I asked George, “Who were the people who helped you the most?”
“Well, our parents, of course. Our families, you know. Honestly, all of them,” George replied. “Then there were people like Tony [Barrow], [Tony] Bramwell, Mal [Evans], Neil [Aspinall], Derek [Taylor], Brian [Epstein], and many people. George Martin. Oh, there is so much to remember. A woman, Astrid Kirchherr. And . . . a really fascinating guy . . . a bouncer . . . promoter and manager. His name was Horst. It was in Hamburg.”
The Beatles encountered many interesting characters in Hamburg. There were the prostitutes, the doctors who fixed their problems from the prostitutes, the sinister nightclub owner, the German alien police, and the beautiful and devoted Astrid Kirchherr, who lit up their look and design and, in the case of Stuart Sutcliffe, a heart. But it is true; none was as multifaceted as the hard-punching Fascher, who protected them, adored them, and watched them grow into emerging stars at the Star Club. He was an unlikely friend in the unusual city that showed off the most exclusive neighborhoods of northern Germany, and in contrast, the worst.
“I will never forget them,” Fascher says as he stares at this author, who finds it hard to believe that this kind, older man has lived so much, and lost so much. But, as he says, “My soul is still beating, my mind clear, of the days when music from the inside drew me into the nightclubs, and my meeting them. Remember, I loved them, the Beatles . . . before they were stars, and when they were boys. And I love them now.”
The Talented Trio—Style and Substance
The Beatles were rousing the Hamburg crowds to a near frenzy almost nightly. And the males, in the beginning, were as fascinated as the females. During their first trip to Hamburg, a young artist, shaking off depression after an argument with his girlfriend, wandered into the Kaiserkeller. Eventually he lost the girl, but he gained something else: a lifetime of high drama, creativity, and lasting friendship within the Beatles universe.
Klaus Voorman was a young student and artist who, at the time, was dating Astrid Kirchherr. That night he walked into the Kaiserkeller, his inner curiosity was sparked. The first band he watched was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The Beatles followed, and Voorman caught the fire—the sound, the gyrations, the entire mood. He convinced his girlfriend, Astrid, to return with him to the seedy neighborhood, along with a friend, Jürgen Vollmer, a student at the Fashion Institute. Kirchherr had never seen a “live” rock concert. Vollmer would later tell friends he was “incredibly loving the music.” By the end of that first night, the trio was ecstatic, even though Kirchherr’s presence would soon cost Voorman his romance with the young beauty. In time, the Fab Four’s life and times would graduate from raw and raucous to refined and respected, thanks in part to the talented trio, and their love and input. And it started way before young and sensitive Brian Epstein arrived on the scene.
Soon after they met at the Kaiserkeller, Astrid Kirchherr and Stu Sutcliffe fell in love. Voorman maintained his friendship with Kirchherr, and together with Vollmer all three developed a close relationship with the band.
Their impact would be monumental.
Kirchherr remains emblematic of a different time, the recovery of her nation from the devastation of World War II, as her generation, born during the 1930s—in her case, 1938—struggled to empower the people of what was once a militaristic dictatorship to the postwar search for modernity and the road to civil and social justice. To that end, Kirchherr, a young student of photography, became quite a liberal activist, a role she has played all of her life.
Colin Fallows,
professor of sound and visual arts at Liverpool’s John Moores University, was coeditor of an extraordinary book of photographs that accompanied the show Astrid Kirchherr, A Retrospective at the Victoria Gallery and Museum in Liverpool in 2010–2011. The book offers a startling photographic collection of the moods of the young boys. The photographs in this book and collection are haunting and revelatory. You look into the eyes of the boys, and you can sense the times, feel their innocence, view their moods.
Recently, in a coffee shop across from the school, the devoted researcher and veteran art historian talked about Kirchherr’s work with tenderness and joy.
“This is so definitive,” Fallows said. “She studied under Reinart Wolf, a master in his time, a man who understood lighting and mood and the power of simple black and white. The photographer uses a machine, but it’s what the great photographer sees that makes it special.”
From Fallows’s perspective, Kirchherr was intuitive, especially when John and George came to the studio where Stuart had lived and worked. It was after his death, and the two boys were in mourning. They had calmly asked Astrid to take a picture in Stuart’s space, in Stuart’s light.
Fallows’s interpretation of that one picture speaks to the extraordinary intuition of the twenty-four-year-old photographer. In his book, Fallows offers his view:
A PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER, KIRCHHERR POSSESSES A RARE FUSION OF ACUITY AND COMPASSION. IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE INDIVIDUAL BEATLES, SHOT IN THE ENTIRELY BOHEMIAN VENUE OF THE KIRCHHERR LOFT [WHERE STU WOULD LIVE AND PAINT], THE YOUNG MUSICIANS APPEAR BOTH WARY AND YOUTHFULLY VULNERABLE. . . . THEIR PERSONALITIES ARE CAPTURED PHOTOGRAPHICALLY AT A REMARKABLE STAGE IN THEIR DEVELOPMENT AS YOUNG MEN AND ARTISTS. KIRCHHERR, AS THOUGH WITH FEMININE PSYCHIC INSIGHTS, SHOOTS THEIR PORTRAITS IN A MATTER THAT IS ONCE UNDERSTANDING OF THE BROODING TOUGH IMAGE EXPECTED OF YOUNG MALE ROCK ’N’ ROLLERS, YET ACKNOWLEDGING A PROFOUND AND ISOLATING INDIVIDUALISM THAT SEEMS TO EMANATE FROM THE GROUP THEMSELVES. THESE EARLY PORTRAITS APPEAR TO BE DOMINATED BY MONOCHROMATIC DARKNESS: BLACK PREVAILS—IN THE CLOTHING, THE JACKETS AND THE SHADOWS IN WHICH THE GROUP MEMBERS ARE SO OFTEN POSED. THEY APPEAR PREMATURELY AGED, AND THERE ARE FEW SMILES—EVEN THOUGH THE TRANSPOSITION TO WORLD CHARMING “MOP TOP” WAS IMMINENT.
