The Beatles (38 page)

“That’s the club!” Williams shouted, pulling to the curb outside a squat building on the Grosse Freiheit.

The Kaiserkeller, on the corner of Schmuckstrasse, was everything they imagined it would be. The club was bigger, brighter, louder, and groovier than anything they had seen before. Its decor alone left them practically speechless: a long boat-shaped bar, fishing nets stretched tautly on the ceilings, banquettes built to resemble a ship’s galley, with portholes sunk into the walls and shiny brass fixtures salvaged from the port. The sweet smell of beer filled the room like a perfumed boudoir. The Kaiserkeller was posh
compared with the saltcellars in Liverpool, and wired for rock ’n roll. The sound system was first-rate. And four microphones had been placed at intervals across the small stage, where Derry and the Seniors rocked the house.

Bruno Koschmider must have detected their excitement. Even so, he barely paused long enough to hear their praise before rushing them off to another club several hundred yards down the street, where the Beatles were scheduled to play.

The Indra “
was depressing
” by comparison. “We were crestfallen when we saw [it],” said Pete Best. It was a lounge—a girlie lounge—and deader than dead. A few bleary-eyed tourists sat glumly sipping beers. Along one side of the small rectangular room stood five spare banquettes, all empty, as were four of the six tables placed strategically on the floor. The heavy, worn red curtains and carpeting made the place seem even more shabby than it already appeared.

There was hope. It was explained through an interpreter that Kosch-mider planned to turn the Indra into a balls-out rock ’n roll club, optimally another Kaiserkeller. All the place needed was a hot British band to generate a buzz, and the owner had been assured that the Beatles were up to the job.

But the Beatles were as stiff as the punters who trickled into the club. Accustomed to playing a few songs to a houseful of teenagers, they were oblivious to the demands of a difficult crowd. They had no act to speak of, knew almost nothing of stagecraft, and as musicians they weren’t terribly engaging. Stuart still struggled woefully to follow the melody lines, on top of which, they’d had no time to work Pete into the band.
By contract, the Beatles
were required to play a staggering four and a half hours each night, six hours on the weekend. “
You can’t imagine the work
that took,” says Ray Ennis, who showed up in Hamburg sometime later, with the Swinging Blue Jeans. (They had modernized the spelling of their name beginning with this gig.) “All the Liverpool bands were used to playing twenty-minute sets back home. Suddenly we had to go all night. That meant coming up with the material, not to mention the stamina.”

The Beatles had material. John, Paul, and George were a walking encyclopedia of rock ’n roll songs, to say nothing of the skiffle tunes and pub standards still shuffled into their act. If necessary, they could put together an hour of material without repeating a song. But somehow it didn’t click with the crowd. People would poke their heads inside the Indra doorway to check out the scene, then do a quick about-face. Certainly some blame
could be laid to the place itself, which wasn’t exactly inviting. But as far as creating excitement went, the Beatles weren’t cutting it.

Angrily, Koschmider contacted Allan Williams and expressed his dissatisfaction. Hastily, Williams raced to Hamburg to size up the situation and run some interference. Much to his chagrin, he found Koschmider’s objections justified. The Beatles were performing at the Indra in an unexceptional manner. Their sets “
were… far too deadpan
,” he surmised; they just “stood still and strummed.” This was a bigger problem than it had seemed. Williams had a good thing going with Koschmider. He didn’t want a group like the Beatles to louse up the arrangement.

According to Williams, he gave “the boys a really rough lecture” and followed up with another visit to gauge its effect. Exasperated, he found it hadn’t made the slightest impression. They were playing “almost motionless [sic],” scarcely even trying to complement the inescapable beat. It baffled him. How could they churn out manic rockers like “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” without giving it any oomph? In his interpretive study,
Tell Me Why,
Tim Riley nails it when he calls rock ’n roll “
the sexiest music of all
—it makes you want to
move.
” Even Williams, who had no love for the form, felt its physical tug.
“C’mon, boys,” he exhorted them, “make a show.”

Make a show.

It was like something a teacher might say before the start of school speech day or the class play. Make a show: it sounded completely inappropriate for rock ’n roll. John couldn’t stop snickering. He lurched around the stage in mock-theatrics, diving toward the mike and duck-walking like Chuck Berry or dropping into a split. Williams, who didn’t realize John was taking the mickey out of him, cheered on the antics. “That’s it! Make a show! Make a show!”

Koschmider, too, took up the chant, barking at the band in a kind of quasi-militaristic chant:
“Mach Schau! Mach Schau!”

The Beatles thought that was a scream. A German shouting,
“Mach Schau!”
To them it sounded like the Goons doing a hilarious take on the Nazis—the shrill accent, the jerky hand motion, the bugged-out eyes. However frivolous, it did the trick. They had finally found the stimulus that freed their inhibitions.
“Mach Schau!”
The entire band got into the act, imitating John’s happy horseplay. Paul raised his guitar, as though fencing with John, repeating this gesture until his partner responded. He made pass after pass, speeding up, slowing down. In no time, George chimed in, stamping
and scrabbling his feet like a demented Cossack. Stuart, though saddled with the bass, contorted his body as though he were dodging bullets. A cyclone of rhythmic unrest swept across the Indra’s stage, synced to Pete’s ferocious beat.

It was the breakthrough the band had needed, and immediately they began to work these outbursts into the act. Songs were suddenly larded with physical surges and thrusts. An emphatic spin or kick accented every beat. Once agonizingly inert, the Beatles now leaped off the stage in bursts of manic exhilaration. They were in perpetual motion, and in no time they transformed their sorry sets into something primitive and exciting. And that’s all it took to turn the corner. Word spread quickly around St. Pauli that the Beatles were all the rage, and crowds thronged the Indra to check out the newest British import. Imitating Derry and the Seniors’ high-tension act, they’d started playing what Pete Best referred to as “
powerhouse music
,” which was basically a selection of all-out rockers with the volume cranked up for effect (and the bass turned down for cover), underscored by a palpitating bass-drum beat and frisky stage pranks. “
After a few weeks
, you could barely move in the place, it was so jammed” recalls Johnny Byrne. “The heat was terrific, everyone smoked, drank. Everyone was having a blast. There was a real sense that something incredible was going down.”

Watching greedily from the sidelines, Bruno Koschmider could barely contain his delight. Not only had the Beatles succeeded in drawing good crowds, they had established a direct link for audiences between the Indra and the Kaiserkeller. They’d plug Derry down the street, and crowds would gravitate to that show—and vice versa. It was impossible to go to one without being aware of the other. A Hamburg teenager who spent his weekends in St. Pauli found it “
possible to pass the whole night
going from the Kaiserkeller to the Indra without the need for other entertainment…. There was no place else in the district that offered such an exciting selection of live music.”

And it was nonstop. The scene demanded it. When people strolled by, looking from place to place, their decision whether or not to go into a club was based largely on the music blaring from the doorway. There was no food served in either of the clubs. According to one frequent visitor, “
Eating wasn’t part of the equation
. You went in there to get pissed, dance, and pick up chicks.” The music had to be loud and hot; otherwise, a potential customer would continue on. That meant working at a brutal pace and pitch, sort of “a
baptism by fire
,” according to Bill Harry. Even though there were breaks planted at forty-five-minute intervals, there was
really never any letdown until well after two in the morning. And the breaks, as they discovered, were merely breathers. There was hardly enough time to recharge, no civilized place to rest. At best, the boys would sit slumped at the bar, uninterrupted by drunken patrons, sipping a fifty-pfennig beer,
^*
or they’d run around the corner for a
frikadella
—a greasy meat-and-onion patty that they lived on for weeks on end. There was never time for a proper meal—or enough money. The prices in St. Pauli had been jacked up to fleece the tourists. “Besides,” as Howie Casey recalls, “the first week you spent all your money right away and realized you couldn’t afford to eat.” When possible, the bands crowded into a booth at Wienerwald, a cheap deli featuring rotisserie chickens that they shared, or went to Schmu Goos on Schmuckstrasse, which was “a Chinese place that did workingman’s food”; for a few pfennigs, they’d gobble down a big bowl of soup with a roll that would have to hold them for an entire day—or longer.

Adrenaline was an even bigger headache. After a long night’s work jackknifing across a stage to endless wild applause, the boys were so pumped up that it usually took several hours to reach a state where they were calm enough to drift off. (That is, if they weren’t hunting up a party or hanging out in an all-night bar.) Often they didn’t get to sleep until four or five in the morning, and even then it was an unpleasant prospect.

Their accommodations were appalling—even worse than the Seniors’. With utter indifference, Koschmider had stashed the boys, like props, in abject old storage rooms at the back of a run-down cinema he owned at the bottom of the Grosse Freiheit. The Bambi Kino, as it was known, showed dubbed German-language two-reelers practically twenty-four hours a day, old gangster movies and westerns that were streaked and pitted from use. At one time, before the war, the place had functioned as a legitimate theater, but that time was long past, and the once-swank appointments were beat up and decrepit. Their rooms, in a corridor behind the screen, had fared no better—“
filthy, dirty, and disgusting
” cubicles without windows or proper beds. John, Stuart, and George shared a cell fitted with a camp bed and sofa. Farther down the hall, past the urinal and just off the fire exit, Paul and Pete had adjoining rooms—“
the black holes of Calcutta
,” as they called them—without any lights, to say nothing of facilities or heat. “
It was freezing cold
in there,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who visited the
Beatles often during their stay in St. Pauli. “We’d knock for them at the side door of the Bambi Kino, and John would answer, standing there in a pair of grandad long johns and a button-down vest. It was too cold for us to hang around, just too bitter and damp, and impossible to have a conversation with the German dialogue booming from the cinema.”

But the Beatles were rarely in their rooms. They spent virtually all their spare time at Bruno Koschmider’s two clubs, either performing or fine-tuning arrangements to help tighten the act. On the face of things, this might have seemed relatively ordinary, but it was unique to the impetuous nature of a rock ’n roll band and just one of the many distinctions that contributed to the Beatles’ prodigious success. Exceptionally conscientious about expanding their appeal, they worked as painstakingly as engineers, constructing a set of songs needed to engage the fitful crowds. It didn’t take long for them to hit on a surefire formula: volume. It got people off. More than anyone so far, the Beatles realized that the function of a bar band wasn’t to promote artistry, expand the musical genre, or even entertain. Bar bands really weren’t performers in the conventional sense, but rather were agitators, and as such they had far more in common with the touts than with show business. From their opening chords, the Beatles let it rip. All-out rockers soon filled every minute of the set. Thanks to Paul’s high, unyielding voice, a barn burner like “Long Tall Sally” could ignite an edgy house, with each successive number arranged to ratchet up the emotional heat. He and John combined on a steady string of rockers: “Johnny B. Goode,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Bony Maronie,” “C’mon Everybody,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” which set a blazing pace.

Most of their songs lasted two and a half or three minutes at the most, making it possible to exhaust maybe twenty songs in a typical set. In the beginning, they often found themselves short a song at the end of a set, forcing the hasty relaunch of, say, “Johnny B. Goode.” Chances are, the crowd never even noticed or, at the least, didn’t mind—but it disheartened the band. They considered it a mark of amateurism, feared that it dulled their competitive edge. So even though they were already overworked, the Beatles devoted hours on end to rehearsing. Most afternoons they met at the Indra, giving the songs a real workout, packing each measure with rhythmic tension and pulling out all the stops, to ensure that the material was hot. But like the Seniors, they soon grew tired of rehearsing each afternoon, instead expanding what songs they already knew into long drawn-out jams. One night they walked up to the Kaiserkeller and watched
in awe as the Seniors ate up an entire set with a vapid romp called “Rock with the Seniors,” which was nothing more than a twelve-bar blues riff with shifting rhythmic patterns and no lyric to speak of; every so often, one of the musicians would shout, “Rock with the Seniors!” giving it a kind of “hey-ba-ba-re-bop” holler to hold the pudding together. “What’d I Say,” more than anything else, became what Paul called their trusty “show song.” Paul recalled: “
We used to work the hell out of it
… kept it going for hours and hours.” And every night it took on a different shape, by either substituting their own lyrics or vamping on the bridge; it could—and often did—take off in a number of directions, perilously close to falling apart at any moment, which made it so exciting to watch. The same occurred with “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” a rollicking tour de force, which could last a good half hour. By mid-September the Beatles had turned a corner. A dancer could walk out of the Indra, go across the street for a pack of cigarettes—or a screw—and still, whenever he got back, catch the same song running.