Paul McCartney (16 page)

Early in October, the Seniors’ cover was blown and the West German immigration authorities ordered them out of the country. But, having spent every Deutschmark they’d earned, they were unable to get back to Britain. Deprived of their accommodation at the Kaiserkeller, they became homeless for several days before throwing themselves on the mercy of the British consul. Brian Griffiths spent one night on a park bench, then Paul offered him the use of his bed at the Bambi Kino during the hours when the Beatles were onstage. John made the same offer to the band’s singer, Derry Wilkie, as did Pete Best to their drummer, Jeff Wallington.

‘I’m in Paul’s bed until about 6 a.m., then suddenly here he is, wanting it back,’ Griff remembers. ‘The only place I could find to sleep was in the cinema-stalls, freezing cold, with rats running around everywhere.’

To take over the Kaiserkeller residency, Allan Williams sent Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who’d by now finished their Butlin’s engagement. Rory–real name Alan Caldwell–was a tall blond Adonis afflicted by a severe stammer that fortunately disappeared while he was singing. Both athletic and eccentric, he would enliven his stage act by shinning up the nearest wall like a human fly or if the venue were a swimming-pool, doing a triple somersault from the top board mid-song in a pair of gold lamé briefs.

The Beatles knew Rory well, having shared a bill with him many times at the Casbah. Less well did they know the Hurricanes’ drummer, Ritchie Starkey, whose penchant for wearing three or four chunky rings on each hand–together with the band’s previous Wild West persona as the Ravin’ Texans–had inspired his stage name of Ringo Starr.

Though Ringo was only a few months John’s senior, he seemed much older and more worldly than any of them with his Ford Zephyr car and taste for American Lark cigarettes. George had always thought ‘he looked like a tough guy… with that grey streak in his hair and half a grey eyebrow and that big nose’, and even John later admitted to having been a little in awe of him.

Paul would be hugely flattered when Ringo came to watch them perform, which he usually did late at night when they were on to very slow numbers like Duane Eddy’s ‘Three-30-Blues’. But never did it cross any of their minds that one day he would join them. A letter from George to a friend in Liverpool around this time voices the apparent consensus that ‘Pete Best is drumming good’.

Rory Storm’s golden hair and Ringo’s doleful face seemed to bring the Beatles luck. Bruno Koschmider had been receiving increasingly angry complaints from an elderly war-widow who lived above the Indra Club and was disturbed by their music each night until the small hours. Wanting no trouble with the authorities, Koschmider closed down the Indra and put them on at the Kaiserkeller as support to the Hurricanes. As Paul had predicted in his letter home, their contract was extended to 31 December.

At the Kaiserkeller, their schedule was even more punishing than before: five-and-a-half hours per night with three half-hour breaks. The large basement club could contain up to 500 people, yet had no ventilation whatever. The heat was consequently horrendous, not to mention the body-odours and cigarette-smoke. The clientele were mostly sailors from a dock-area as extensive as Liverpool’s (but rather more prosperous), and the frequent outbreaks of violence made Wallasey’s Grosvenor Ballroom seem sedate by comparison. To contain it, Koschmider employed a team of waiters mainly recruited from local boxing and bodybuilding gyms and renowned for the ruthless speed with which they handled any disturbance. Specially fractious customers were not just thrown into the street but taken to the boss’s office, where Koschmider himself would go to work on them with his rubber cosh or the antique chair-leg he kept secreted down his trousers. Unlike in Liverpool, however, musicians were granted automatic immunity from attack. Like those figures in Western films who continue calmly sipping their beer while saloon brawls rage around them, Paul would press doggedly on with ‘It’s Now or Never’ as the fists flew and flick-knives flashed.

Also unlike Liverpool, the band were bought drinks by appreciative spectators while they played; so many drinks that by the end of their set the stage-front would be crowded with bottles and glasses. Usually it would be beer, though now and again someone in a prime side booth–traditionally reserved for the Reeperbahn’s top gangsters, racketeers and porn-merchants–would send them a tray of schnapps, insisting that each shot be downed in one, with a ritual cry of ‘Prost!’

This feeling of invulnerability prompted John to ‘Mach Schau’ in ways that might have been expected to get him lynched in a city which had suffered wartime bombing even worse than Liverpool’s. He’d goose-step around the stage shouting ‘Fuckin’ Nazis!’ and ‘Sieg Heil!’ with a black comb pressed to his upper lip like a Hitler moustache. But the Germans either didn’t get it or found it hilarious.

Baiting Bruno was a popular sport with all the musicians–and, again, seemed to bring no consequences. The Kaiserkeller’s half-rotten wooden stage had already been stomped to pieces once by Derry and the Seniors; now the Beatles and Rory Storm’s band had a competition to see who’d be first to do it again. Rory took the prize by leaping on top of his piano during a performance of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. Under their combined weight, the stage’s anaemic timbers gave way and the piano sank from view like a foundering ship with Rory on its poop deck.

Paul took part in the onstage clowning while never going as far as John, or anywhere near it. ‘Generally, if one started acting the fool, the other did, too,’ Brian Griffiths says. ‘But with Paul, it never interfered with the song–or the quality of his voice.’

He was later to admit doing ‘a couple of loony things’ in Hamburg. One of the looniest occurred on a night when he, John, George and Pete Best were all temporarily broke and John suggested solving their problem by robbing a drunken sailor. A suitable victim was found in the Kaiserkeller, then befriended and inveigled outside by promises of an even better place around the corner. But at that point, Paul and George lost their nerve and melted away, leaving the dirty deed to John and Pete Best. Unfortunately, the sailor was not as helplessly drunk as he’d first seemed, and proved to be armed with a tear-gas pistol, so they, too, fled.

‘What Hamburg taught the Beatles was that they didn’t have to copy anyone else any more,’ Tony Sheridan said. ‘They could be themselves–and the qualities they found in themselves surprised even them. Plus, they could rehearse for their future night after night, at the public’s expense. Watching them, I used to think that Paul could probably make it without John, but John was never going to make it without Paul.’

The most significant episode in this first trip to Hamburg found Paul again relegated to a back seat. At the Kaiserkeller, in addition to the traditional Reeperbahn roughnecks, the Beatles began to attract middle-class boys and girls known as ‘exis’ (short for existentialists) who read Camus and Sartre, dressed in unisex black leather and wore their hair combed forward in what was then known as the French style.

The centre of the group was Astrid Kirchherr, a strikingly beautiful and stylish young photographer with close-cropped blonde hair. When Astrid first set eyes on the Beatles she fell headlong in love; not with Paul, the most obviously adorable one, but tiny Stuart Sutcliffe.

As an excuse for getting to know Stu better, she photographed all five Beatles on a foggy autumn morning, in Hamburg’s closed and shuttered Dom fairground. Strangely, in what would not only become a timeless image of the baby Beatles but a blueprint for rock bands ever afterwards, Paul was given little prominence in comparison with Stu, John and even George. One shot shows him leaning against some heavy piece of fairground machinery on which the other three are perched; bereft of his usual ease with the camera, he stares off to one side, holding John’s Club 40 guitar rather than his own inferior Solid 7. In the best-known close-up of him from the shoot, he looks strangely blank, perhaps aware that the photographer’s attention is really on Stu, far in the misty background.

The addition of Astrid and male exis like graphic designer Klaus Voormann and photographer Jürgen Vollmer to the Beatles’ social circle in effect recreated the art-studenty atmosphere from which Paul had felt excluded back in Liverpool. ‘They were more interested in Stuart and John,’ he would recall. ‘I was a little bit too baby-faced and didn’t attract them so much.’

Paul and Stu had always gotten along reasonably well, but now there began to be friction between them. ‘Funnily enough, Paul has turned out the real black sheep of the whole trip,’ Stu wrote to his art college friend Rod Murray just after first meeting Astrid. ‘Everyone hates him and I only feel sorry for him.’

The problem for Paul was no longer Stu’s ineptitude on bass guitar and John’s stubborn blindness to it. By now he had become a reasonably competent player and was doing solos, even taking the odd vocal (like Elvis’s ‘Love Me Tender’) and receiving applause. For a time, Koschmider had taken him out of the Beatles to play in an offshoot of Derry and the Seniors alongside the seasoned sax-player Howie Casey, who found no fault whatsoever with his musicianship.

The truth was that Stu had become bored with playing bass and was longing to return to painting, his true, unquestioned talent. At Astrid’s insistence, he left the band’s quarters at the Bambi Kino to move into the comfortable house she shared with her mother, where an attic room was turned into a studio for him. ‘That was what made Paul upset with Stuart,’ Astrid recalls. ‘He wasn’t serious enough about the band and he wouldn’t practise.’

To sharpen Paul’s sense of grievance, John no longer subjected Stu to ruthless mockery and baiting, but nowadays treated him with–for John–extraordinary gentleness and tolerance. ‘John,’ Astrid remembers, ‘was Stuart’s guardian angel.’

In November 1960, Stu asked Astrid to marry him and was accepted. He wrote to a friend in Liverpool that when the Beatles left Hamburg, either to return home or play elsewhere in mainland Europe, he would stay behind and Paul would take over on bass.

By now, they had become weary of Bruno Koschmider and had set their sights on a rival music club, the Top Ten, on the main Reeperbahn, whose atmosphere, Paul had written to his brother, Mike, was ‘fabulous’. After secretly auditioning for the Top Ten’s go-ahead young owner, Peter Eckhorn, they were offered a residency, beginning immediately, at higher pay and with infinitely more civilised accommodation on the top floor of the club building.

Before that could come to fruition, three of the five Beatles were ignominiously kicked out of the country, seemingly queering their Hamburg pitch for good. On 21 November, the St Pauli police belatedly discovered George Harrison was under 18 and therefore banned from frequenting the Reeperbahn after 10 p.m. Since he’d defied this curfew every night for the past three months, he was immediately deported, leaving under his own steam, by train.

The others gave notice to Koschmider at 1.30 one morning after they came offstage at the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider agreed to let them go, on condition that they played nowhere else in West Germany until the end of their contract, 31 December. When they refused, he luckily didn’t call his waiters or produce his antique chair-leg, but merely ordered them out of his office.

After the customary late-night meal, Paul and Pete Best returned to the Bambi Kino to collect their possessions for the transfer to the Top Ten, where John was already installed. Having packed their bags, even the two most well-behaved Beatles couldn’t resist a small demonstration against the slum conditions they’d had to endure for all these weeks.

Paul has since said that he and Pete set light to a condom, though at the time he said it was ‘a piece of cord nailed to the wall’ of the passage. According to Pete, it was ‘a bit of old sacking’ which didn’t even catch light, merely smouldered a bit at the edges. After a few seconds, they tired of the joke, extinguished the minute conflagration and climbed into their ratty beds one last time.

Next day, a squad of police arrived at the Top Ten club, arrested Paul and Pete and hauled them off to the Reeperbahn’s main police station, where they learned Bruno Koschmider had charged them with attempted arson. Though Koschmider subsequently withdrew the charge, the police soon discovered they’d been working in West Germany for three months without the necessary permits. They, too, were sentenced to deportation, held in custody overnight and put on a flight back to Britain, leaving behind most of their clothes and Pete’s drums.

It would be the only time Pete Best ever saw the inside of a prison cell. Sadly, the same can’t be said of Paul.

‘Sing “Searchin’”, Paul!’

His condition when he arrived back at 20 Forthlin Road gave his father and younger brother a severe shock. Three months of flat-out exertion, irregular meals and scanty sleep had left him ‘like an emaciated skeleton’, Mike McCartney tautologically recalled. ‘When he sat down, the ankles showing above the winkle-pickers were as thin and white as Dad’s pipe-cleaners.’

He spent the next week at home, recuperating on a combination of Jim’s cooking and cod-liver oil capsules. John, too, was by now back in Liverpool, having left West Germany of his own volition six days after Paul’s enforced exit, but the pair were too depressed by what had happened even to get in contact. Meanwhile, George, the original deportee, didn’t know the others had returned: he assumed they’d opened at the Top Ten club with some other lead guitarist in his place. Stu Sutcliffe alone remained in Hamburg, hiding out with Astrid and her mother.

After that heady dip into St Pauli’s ‘great freedom’, the Beatles’ prospects at home seemed little brighter than before. Nor could they look to Allan Williams for salvation this time. Back in the autumn, Williams had hatched another grand entrepreneurial scheme, a Liverpool version of the Reeperbahn’s Top Ten club at which he’d promised them the job of house band. But they came home to find that Williams’s new club had burned down–apparently ‘torched’ by some ill-wisher, possibly also in the club business–only six days after opening.