Williams had been misled, however. The hacks were not from the Empire News, but from its huge-circulation and scandal-hungry stablemate, the People. Nor was the article about student grants, but about the growing influence of America’s beatnik movement among British youth. In America, beatniks had been considered at worst faintly comic, with their folk music, horn-rimmed glasses, and earnest reading of Camus and Sartre. In Britain—or, at least, to Britain’s gutter press—they had taken over from Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls as symbols of juvenile delinquency. THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR screamed a double-page spread in the People on Sunday, July 24. A purportedly nationwide survey gave harrowing details of the “unsavoury cult” that was said (without any evidence) to have turned young Americans by the thousand into “drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies…and outright thugs and hoodlums.” As an instance of the “unbelievable squalor that surrounds these well-educated youngsters,” the report described a three-room flat in “decaying Gambier Terrace in the heart of Liverpool.” The accompanying photograph showed several of the tenants in what was called the living room, but was actually John’s and Stu’s bedroom. No squalid detail was left unlisted, from its broken armchairs and debris-strewn table to the floor “littered with newspapers, milk bottles, beer and spirits bottles, bits of orange-peel, paint-tubes and lumps of cement and plaster of Paris.”
Of the figures shown in the picture, Allan Williams alone was recognizable, by his black beard—his journalist pals taking pains to make clear he was just a visitor who’d dropped in to Beatnik Hell—to “listen to some jazz.” The only tenants mentioned by name were Rod Murray and Rod Jones. Mid-July being vacation time, John was probably not even in residence, but back enjoying the home comforts and steak pies of Mendips. This very first time that the media searchlight shone into his life, it missed him completely.
Before August 1960, everything that John, Paul, George, and Stu knew about Hamburg between them could have been written comfortably on the back of a one-penny stamp. They knew it vaguely as a northern port in the then Federal Republic of West Germany, whose name often appeared on the sterns of ships tying up in the Mersey. They knew of it even more vaguely as the one city on mainland Europe whose sexual daring surpassed even that of Paris. For years, Liverpool mariners had brought home lurid tales about its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, where female nudity was said to flourish on a scale as yet undreamed of in Britain and the cabarets to feature barely imaginable acts with whips, mud, live snakes, or even donkeys. The tarts of Lime Street seemed like maiden aunts by comparison.
Unlike London’s Soho or New York’s Forty-second Street, the Reeperbahn had no history of fostering music alongside the sex. But by the late fifties, thanks mainly to West Germany’s American military occupiers (who, of course, included Elvis Presley) rock-’n’-roll culture was seeping in even there. To attract the younger customers, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider hit on the idea of presenting live beat groups at his establishment rather than simply relying on a jukebox like his competitors. The requisite live sound being still beyond West German musicians, or Belgian or French ones, Koschmider had no option but to recruit his groups from Britain. Through a convoluted chapter of accidents that would need a chapter of its own to relate, the place from which he ended up recruiting them was Liverpool, and the person who became his main supplier was Allan Williams.
Williams’s first export to Herr Koschmider and the Reeperbahn had been the highly professional and versatile Derry and the Seniors. So powerful a draw did they prove at Koschmider’s club, the Kaiserkeller, that he sent an enthusiastic request for more of the same. Despite protests from the Seniors, that such a “bum group” would spoil the scene for everyone else, Williams decided to offer the gig to the Beatles.
The engagement was for six weeks, beginning on August 16; it could not be slotted in among other commitments like the Johnny Gentle tour, but would require all of them to abandon their various respectable courses in life for the precarious existence of full-time musicians. They would be working for an unknown employer in a foreign city hundreds of miles away, among a people who, not many years previously, had tried to bomb their country into extinction. Nonetheless, the response to Williams’s offer was an instant, resounding affirmative.
To the many admirers of Stu Sutcliffe’s art, the decision seemed little short of insane. He had just been awarded his National Diploma in Art and Design with painting as his specialist subject, and was about to begin a postgraduate teacher-training course. He himself fully realized what was at stake, and had initially refused the Hamburg offer, but then John had said that the Beatles wouldn’t go without him, and he couldn’t let John down.
His tutor, Arthur Ballard, was appalled by this seemingly pointless sacrifice of a brilliant future, and furious with John—and Allan Williams—for encouraging it. Stu had been such an exceptional student, however, that the college showed willingness to bend the rules for him. He was told he could begin his postgraduate course later in the academic year if he wished.
Paul McCartney and George Harrison were also putting excellent career prospects at risk, as their respective families and teachers unavailingly told them. Paul had just taken his GCE A-levels and, like Stu, planned a teaching career, probably specializing in English. George had an apprenticeship as an electrician at Blacklers, the central Liverpool department store, which in those days virtually guaranteed him employment for life.
Alone of the five, John seemed to have nothing to lose. He had no prospect of gaining any meaningful qualification from art college, and no idea what he wanted to do as a career. The sole obstacle to be reckoned with was his Aunt Mimi. As his guardian, albeit never legally recognized as such, Mimi had the power to veto the whole trip. And, to be sure, her mixture of horror and mystification when first told about it were precisely as John expected. Mimi had no more understanding of rock ’n’ roll than when she first sent him out to practice in Mendips’s soundproof front porch four years previously; to her, it was still no more than a hobby that interfered with his studies, involved the most unsavory possible people and places, and could never conceivably earn him anything like a proper living.
Now, at least, John could reply that it would be earning him a living. The Beatles’ collective weekly wage in Hamburg would be close to £100, which admittedly boiled down to only about £2.50 per day each, yet still seemed astronomical compared with the pittances they were paid in Liverpool. Fortunately, Mimi had never even heard of the Reeperbahn, let alone what was reputed to happen there. Her objections to “Humbug,” as she persisted in calling it, were that John would be giving up college and that he’d be associating with the erstwhile bombers of Liverpool. In the end, she decided—probably rightly—that if she didn’t give permission, he’d simply run away, and then might never come back again.
Like most British teenagers in 1960, John had never been abroad and did not even possess a passport. To apply for one, he had to produce his birth certificate, a document that had somehow gone missing after the frantic tug-of-love that had followed his birth. It turned up in the nick of time—but the way to Hamburg wasn’t all smooth sailing yet.
The Beatles’ new employer, Herr Koschmider, would obviously expect them to have a drummer. In the absence of any successor to Norman Chapman, Paul agreed to take on the role permanently, assembling a scratch kit from odds and ends that previous incumbents had left behind. The problem was that Koschmider had requested a group exactly like Derry and the Seniors—i.e., a quintet. That left only two weeks to find a fifth Beatle. At one point, John even considered asking Royston Ellis to join, in the role of “poet-compere,” as if he expected the Reeperbahn to be like some earnestly attentive student union.
On August 6, complaints from surrounding residents about noise, drunkenness, and violence shut down the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, thereby depriving the Beatles of their last regular Merseyside gig. For want of anything better to do that night, they ended up at the
Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green.
In the ten months since John, Paul, and George had played there as the Quarrymen—and walked out in a huff over a 15 shilling payment—the homely basement club had gone from strength to strength under Mona Best’s vigorous management. Even more gallingly, Ken Brown, the former Quarryman and cause of that bitter 15-bob tiff, had formed a new group, the Blackjacks, who now regularly drew bigger weekend crowds than even Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A major factor in their success was Mrs. Best’s moodily handsome son, Peter, playing a sumptuous new drum kit in a pale blue mother-of-pearl finish (with real calfskins), which his adoring mother had bought him.
Pete Best and his blue drums solved both of the Beatles’ predeparture problems at a stroke. “We just grabbed him and auditioned him,” John remembered. “He could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him.”
10
MACH SCHAU
The Germans liked it as long as it was loud.
What Liverpool had endured at the time of John’s birth Hamburg received back with compound interest. On the night of July 24, 1943, an Allied “thousand bomber raid,” code name Operation Gomorrah, dropped 2,300 tons of bombs and incendiaries on this most crucial of Hitler’s ports and industrial centers, unleashing greater destruction in a few hours than Merseyside had known over weeks during the purgatory of 1940. Four nights later, Gomorrah’s cleansers returned, creating a 150 mph firestorm that reduced eight square miles of the city to ashes and claimed 43,000 civilian lives, more than Britain had lost during the entire Blitz.
Now, only fifteen years after the war’s end, with its scars still far from healed, young survivors from that bomb-battered British city were taking music to young survivors of that devastated German one. In its small, unwitting way, it was a notable act of reconciliation that was to bind Liverpool and Hamburg together forever afterward and foreshadow the apolitical youth culture soon to dominate the whole Western world. Though John never thought of it as such, he had embarked on his very first peace campaign.
To deliver Bruno Koschmider’s new employees as cheaply as possible—and being unable to resist any kind of lark—Allan Williams offered to drive them to Hamburg personally. In the end, a party of nine squeezed into Williams’s battered green-and-white Austin van outside the Jacaranda early on August 15, 1960. Besides John, Paul, George, Stu, and new drummer, Pete Best, the Welshman took along his Chinese wife, Beryl, his brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and his West Indian business partner, Lord Woodbine. In London, they picked up an additional passenger, a German waiter named Georg Steiner, who had also been hired by Koschmider. The van was not like a modern minibus with rows of seats, but a bare metal shell: those in its rear had nowhere to sit but on the piled-up stage equipment and baggage.
The two-day journey was fraught with problems that somehow only Liverpudlians could have created and only Liverpudlians had the resilience and humor to endure. At Harwich, whence they were to cross the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, dock workers initially refused to load the grotesquely overloaded vehicle aboard the ferry. According to Williams, it was mainly John who persuaded them to relent, striking up a rapport as easy as if he himself had spent a lifetime on the dockside.
In those days, when foreign package tours were still in their infancy, most Britons setting foot on mainland Europe underwent a profound culture shock. Now every European nation wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, eats the same fast food. But for nineteen-year-old John, this first-ever trip abroad meant entering a totally alien landscape where not a single person or thing looked or sounded or smelled the same as at home, food and toilet arrangements were hideously unpredictable, and drinking water, bizarrely, came in bottles rather than from the tap. There was as much fear as fascination in that introductory whiff of continental coffee, disinfectant, drains, and tobacco as darkly pungent as licorice.
With customary disregard for detail, Williams had not obtained the work permits his charges needed in order to appear for six weeks in a West German club and be paid in West German currency. If challenged en route, he said, they should pretend to be students on vacation. Fortunately, this was an era of mild frontier controls when, with wartime shortages still lingering, the most serious contraband was not drugs but food. The recurring official challenge, Paul McCartney remembers, was whether they had any illicit coffee. As with the Harwich stevedores, it was usually John’s mixture of charm and cheek at checkpoints that got them waved on with friendly smiles.
He was not always such a ray of sunshine. In Holland, Williams insisted on making a patriotic detour to Arnhem, scene of the Allies’ disastrous Operation Market Garden airborne landings in 1944. There Barry Chang took what would become a famous snapshot of Paul, George, Pete, Stu, Williams, Beryl, and Lord Woodbine around the casket-shaped memorial with its partially prophetic inscription THEIR NAMES LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. John, however, refused to leave the van. One can picture the scene in the bleary Dutch dawn—the big side door sliding back; the hunched and sleepy figure disinclined to move; the attempts to rouse him answered by a torrent of swear words.
He also took time for some shoplifting, finding the unsuspicious Netherland store owners absurdly easy victims after Woolton and Liverpool 8. The haul he later showed to Pete Best included jewelry, handkerchiefs, guitar strings, and a harmonica. Years later, when every detail of his early life was pored over by millions, that harmonica thoughtlessly pocketed in a Dutch music shop would cause many of his admirers pangs of vicarious guilt. Finally, a group of them resolved to set the matter right. Traveling to the Arnhem area, they found the same shop still in business and, to its owner’s bewilderment, solemnly repaid the cost of the stolen instrument.
Though the term had still to be coined, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was one of the world’s earliest experiments in sex therapy. The thinking—later to spread like wildfire through Europe, even unto Britain—was that being open about extreme or deviant sexual practices was healthier than being secretive. It was also a way to manage the problems of the harbor area, corralling pleasure-bent sailors all in one place and so saturating them with off-the-radar pornography that they would hopefully be less inclined to rape or other sexual crimes outside its boundaries. The district of St. Pauli, which includes the Reeperbahn, was a perfect location, handily close to the dockside and well away from Hamburg’s swiftly rebuilt center and many respectable suburbs. This supposedly untamed carnal frontier was in effect a department of City Hall, governed by a mass of surprisingly straitlaced rules and regulations and watched over by a large and zealous police force.
Dusk was falling on August 16 when Allan Williams’s van eventually found its way through Hamburg to St. Pauli, and John, Paul, George, Stu, and Pete received their first sight of their new workplace. After the almost seamless nighttime blackout of Liverpool, the Reeperbahn was an eye-mugging spectacle. Continuous neon signs winked and shimmered in gold, silver, and every suggestive color of the rainbow, their voluptuous German script—Mehrer, Bar Monika, Mambo Schankey, Gretel and Alphons, Roxy Bar—making the entertainments on offer seem even more untranslatably wicked. Though it was still early, the whole strip teemed with people—or rather, with men—and had the lurching, anarchic feel of pub-closing time back home. As the arrivals would soon learn, this was a place where times of day meant nothing.
Their new employer, Bruno Koschmider, might have stepped straight from one of John’s more fanciful cartoons. Aged about fifty, he was a tiny man with an outsize head and wooden-puppet face, topped off by an elaborate silver coiffure. Thanks to a war-disabled leg, he walked with a limp, thus instantly qualifying for the copious Lennon gallery of “cripples.”
A guided tour of Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller club, in the Reeperbahn’s busiest and most garish sector, did much to compensate for his strange appearance. A teeming barn of a place, it had no obvious affinity with the Great War’s “Kaiser Bill,” being decorated on a nautical theme with ornamental life belts, brass binnacles,
pipe-clayed cording, and booths shaped like rowboats. Only now did the newcomers learn that they were not to appear here, with Derry and the Seniors, as they’d been led to believe. In the nearby Grosse Freiheit (Great Freedom) Koschmider also operated a run-down strip club named the Indra. The Beatles’ job would be to make the Indra as big a teenage draw as Derry and his colleagues had the Kaiserkeller.
Worse followed when Koschmider led the way to the living quarters he had contracted to provide for them. A couple of blocks away in Paul Roosen Strasse, he owned a small cinema named the Bambi, which showed a mixture of porn flicks and old Hollywood gangster movies and Westerns. The Beatles’ quarters were a filthy, windowless room and two glorified broom closets immediately behind the screen. The only washing facilities were the adjacent cinema toilets. “We were put in this pigsty,” John remembered. “We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We’d go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show [and] old German fraus pissing next door.”
The working hours laid down by Koschmider were the biggest shock of all. Back in Liverpool, they had never been onstage longer than about twenty minutes. At the Indra club they would be expected to play for four and a half hours each weeknight, in sets of an hour or an hour and a half, with only three thirty-minute breaks in between. On Saturdays and Sundays, the playing time increased to six hours.