The Beatles Boxed Set (17 page)

But as with the other previous members of the band, Moore’s
tenure with the Silver Beetles would be short-lived. He got into an accident in
Scotland and had to race from the hospital to a show where John insisted that
he play the gig. Moore quit even before the engagement was through.

The Silver Beetles returned to Liverpool, their experience
in Scotland only making them want more. Fortunately for the boys, Williams
approached them with an offer of residency at a club in Hamburg. By then, John
had dropped the “Silver” from the band’s name and respelled “Beetles” with an
“a” to emphasize the pun on “beat.” Now they were going by the name the
Beatles.

For John, Paul, George and Stu, Hamburg was a much bigger
break than touring Scotland as a backing band. Williams had offered them
fifteen pounds a week, more than some of their parents were making. It would be
a steady work, and it would provide them with what they had been dreaming of:
to perform in front of a nightly audience. But of course, they had no idea what
was really awaiting them in Hamburg.

Now that they were set for Hamburg, one problem remained: a
drummer. Pete Best had already sat in with them at the Casbah and looked promising.
They offered him the slot, to which he agreed.

On
August 16, the group, including Williams and his Chinese wife, Beryl, her
brother Barry Chang and Lord Woodbine, piled on Williams’ battered van. George
was seventeen, underage, but Williams instructed them to simply flash their
driver’s licenses as government IDs and present themselves as tourists.

            John
stole a harmonica from a drugstore in Belgium and the group stopped to pose in
front of the Arnhem War Memorial.

            Eventually,
the group arrived in Hamburg on August 17 at dusk, the time when the red-light
district, the Reeperbahn, sprang up to life. As the van moved past brothels and
gambling dens and all sorts of clubs, the Beatles couldn’t help but wonder. The
Reeperbahn was full of neon signs and prostitutes lining the streets.

            The
group met Bruno Koschmider when they arrived. He installed them in living
quarters behind the Bambie Kino, the B-movie theater he ran next door to his
club the Indra. John recalled, “We were put in this pigsty, like a toilet it
was, in a cinema, a rundown soft of fleapit.”

The Beatles at Indra Club in Hamburg,
1960

            To
make matters worse, their quarters had only two twin beds. No wallpapers to
cover the bare walls, no other luxuries. John added, “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.”

            The
Beatles played at the Indra the night they arrived. They had become friends
with Rosa, the Indra’s basement “custodian” who provided them with clean towels
and “Prellies” (nonprescription Preludin) to keep them awake all night for
their performances. They would play for six to eight hours, after which they
had consumed alcohol to quench their thirst and amphetamines before collapsing
in their bunks.

            It
was in Hamburg when the Beatles adopted a “crazier” manner in performing.
During their very first performance, they played in a subdued manner the way
they did back in Liverpool. But Koschmider adopted “
Mach schau!”
(“Make
a show!”) to get them performing to liven up the crowd. When business was slow,
Koschmider would remind the boys why he had hired them in the first place: to
keep the drinks flowing. That was the basic of bar-band life. John said, “We
all did ‘mach shauing’ all the time from then on.”

            The
Beatles’ nightly schedule was a grueling, unmerciful one. They had to play
every song they could think of, whether it was included on their set list or
not. Koschmider’s “
mach schau!”
meant that they had to stir up the crowd
by turning up the amps, hitting the drums harder, baiting the audience,
speeding up tempos or crashing the cymbals more often. Their efforts paid off,
for within a few weeks, they had built a little audience for themselves.

            Koschmider
was forced to close the Indra due to noise complaints from the neighbors, and
subsequently moved the Beatles to the Kaiserkeller in October. The Beatles alternated
with Derry and the Seniors, another band from Liverpool, at the Kaiserkeller.

            John
spent one of his first paychecks to buy a 1958 Rickenbacker model 325 guitar.
He and George had seen the guitar in a show window and John mentioned that Jean
“Toots” Thielemans, then a member of the George Shearing Quintet, used the same
model. The Rickenbacker’s shortened neck appealed to John, knowing that a
longer neck can make your wrists sore.

            John’s
guitar work seemed trivial to other matters that the boys dealt with in
Hamburg. Everything that he had learned from the streets eventually made its
way into the act. Pete Best remembered how John became fascinated with cripples
and how he would imitate them onstage, thus offending some in the crowd. But
offstage, Pete said that “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 Hambueg 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.”

            Meanwhile,
the Beatles became a local attraction with their own following. They had
already met a Hamburg art student named Klaus Voormann and his lover, Astrid
Kirchherr and another art friend, Jurgen Vollmer. A few days later, Astrid took
the Beatles to the Dom, an empty fairground where she asked them to pose for
her camera. They wore leather jackets with their slicked-back hair, their baby
faces looking as though they had already conquered the world of entertainment.

Astrid Kirchherr, pictured here with Stu
Sutcliffe, took the first professional photos of the Beatles when they were in
Hamburg

            Afterwards,
Astrid invited them over to her family home for tea. They bonded quickly, did
more photo shoots, and Astrid began learning English to make her feelings known
to Stu. Cynthia Lennon would later write that all of them became lifelong
friends. “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, meanwhile, was “hungry-looking, with a
broad, toothy grin… very quiet” but John “emerged as the leader whenever a
leader was wanted. He wasn’t elected, he just was without question.”

            Astrid
became the big sister to most of the Beatles. She even gave Stu a “French”
hairstyle with bangs, a style that she herself wore, making her look
self-possessed. Afterward, they all began experimenting with their hair except
Pete. A rock critic, Simon Frith, wrote, “Lennon moved from wearing a rock
hairstyle to shock the art school world to wearing an art school hairstyle to
shock the pop world.”

            The
hairstyle, loosely called mop tops, would become the signature style of the
Beatles throughout their careers.

            Meanwhile,
the Beatles stuck to their schedule of performances, though no one anticipated
how their first Hamburg stint would end. In November, a new rival of
Koschmider, Peter Eckhorn, emerged with his own club named the Top Ten Club. Soon
other Koschmider employees defected, including the Beatles. They performed
onstage backing Tony Sheridan after the club’s grand opening.

            Upon
hearing this, Koschmider reminded the Beatles that their contract prohibited
them from performing at any competing club. The Beatles ignored him and thought
that he simply got what he deserved for failing to provide the group a better
accommodation.

The Beatles successfully negotiated with Eckhorn for a
higher fee and they played at the Top Ten Club. Koschmider was furious, so he
called the police to check George Harrison’s work permit. When they learned
that George was only 17, they immediately had him deported. Astrid and Stu
accompanied George to the train station.

Even without him, the remaining Beatles played at the Top
Ten. After a few days, Paul and Pete returned to Bambi Kino to get their
things. It was so dark they set fire to a condom for light and taped it to the
wall. The next day, they were arrested and Koschmider threatened to charge them
with arson. They were then deported. John left by train the following day with
his Rickenbacker. Stu remained in Hamburg. He had already made plans to stay
there, continue his studies and marry Astrid.

John arrived early in Liverpool on December 10, 1960. He
threw stones at Auntie Mimi’s window to wake her up. “Where’s the £100 a week,
then?” She asked when John asked money to pay for his cab fare.

For the next two years, the Beatles became the resident band
in Hamburg where they continually used Preludin to maintain their energy
through all-night performances. By then John had been thrown out of the college
after he failed an annual exam. He was still with Cynthia Powell, with whom he
exchanged passionate letters when he was away in Hamburg.

In 1961, the Beatles were back in Hamburg for their second
stint. When Stu decided to leave the band so that he could focus on his
studies, Paul took up the bass. The Beatles, now with four members, were
contacted by producer Bert Kaempfert, who used them as backing band for Tony
Sheridan on a series of recordings. They recorded the single
My Bonnie
in June 1961 which was released four months later. It reached number 32 on the
Musicmarkt
chart.

 Back in Liverpool, the Beatles’ popularity was increasing,
particularly in Merseyside. They scored gigs at the Cavern club during
lunchtime breaks that later on included evening slots. More people showed up,
and their name and music soon began to spread by word of mouth. There would be
longer queues outside the Cavern, with girls waiting to get inside first to
secure the front row seats.

            Soon
the Beatles were ruling the Whitechapel district, playing more than two hundred
Cavern sets between 1961 and 1962 while also performing at regional dance halls
and churches at night.

            At
this point, John and Paul became even more interested in writing their own
original songs. They had already sixteen originals in their set list, including
Hello Little Girl, One After 909, Like Dreamers Do, Love of the Loved
and
Hold Me Tight.
They would also include in their set list a cover of
various artists including Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Larry
Williams and Leiber and Stoller.

            At
times, John and Paul would go to the NEMS music store on Whitechapel to check
the latest singles and monopolize the listening booth where they’d write
lyrics. Surprisingly, it was the manager of this music store that would become
another addition to what made the Beatles successful.