Authors: Philip Norman
The halt is commemorated by a snapshot that Barry Chang, Williams’s Chinese brother-in-law, took at the Arnhem Memorial to the dead of World War II. Paul, in a turned-up lumberjack collar, sits with Pete Best and George in front of a marble plinth inscribed with the epitaph “Their Names Liveth For Ever More.” John is missing from the group; he had refused to get out of the van.
• • •
They expected a city like Liverpool, and this, in a sense, they found. There was the same river, broad like the Mersey but, unlike the Mersey, crowded with ships and with shipyards beyond that seemed to grow out of lush forests. There was the same overhead railway that Liverpool had recently lost, although nothing resembling the same tired cityscape beneath. Not the bomb sites and garbage, but tree-lined boulevards, seamless with prosperity; chic shops and ships’ chandlers and cafés filled with well-dressed, unscarred, confident people. There was a glimpse of the dark-spired City Hall, and of the Alster lake, set about by glass-walled banks and press buildings, and traversed by elegant swans. What was said inside Allan Williams’s minibus that August evening would be echoed many times afterward in varying tones of disbelief: Wasn’t this the country that had
lost
the war?
The journey from the West German frontier had been rich in incident. At one point, they were almost run down by a tram, in whose rails Lord Woodbine had accidentally jammed the minibus’s front wheels. Allan Williams, taking over as driver on the outskirts of Hamburg, had immediately rammed a small sedan.
They arrived on the Reeperbahn just as neon lights were beginning to eclipse the fairground palings of the nightclubs and their painted, acrobatic nudes. Spotting the narrow road junction, where an
imbiss
belched out fumes of
frikadellen
and
currywurst
, Allan Williams remembered where he was. They turned left into Grosse Freiheit, welcomed by overarching illuminations and the stare of predatory eyes.
Even John Lennon, with his fondness for human curiosities, had not expected an employer quite like Bruno Koschmider. The figure that hopped out of the Kaiserkeller to greet them had begun life in a circus, working as a clown, fire-eater, acrobat, and illusionist with fifty small cage-birds hidden in his coat. His dwarfish stature; his large, elaborately coiffured head; his turned-up nose and quick, stumping gait, all made even John not quite like to laugh. Bruno, for his part, was unimpressed by the look of his new employees: “They were dressed in bad clothes—cheap shirts, trousers that were not clean. Their fingernails were dirty.”
If Bruno was somewhat disconcerting, his Kaiserkeller club brought much reassurance. The exterior portico bore, in large letters, the name D
ERRY AND THE
S
ENIORS VON
L
IVERPOOL
. A glimpse inside, on the way to Koschmider’s office, showed what seemed a vast meadow of tables and
side booths, shaped like lifeboats, around the stage and miniature dance floor. The Beatles, their spirits reviving, began to laugh and cuff one another, saying this was all right, wasn’t it? Allan Williams reminded them that they were not booked to play here but in one of Herr Koschmider’s other clubs, the Indra.
Further along the Grosse Freiheit, beyond St. Joseph’s Catholic church, the illuminations dwindled into a region of plain-fronted bordellos interspersed with private houses where elderly
hausfraus
still set potted plants on the upper window ledges. Here, under a neon sign shaped like an elephant, was to be found the Indra Club. Bruno Koschmider led the way downstairs into a small cellar cabaret, gloomy, shabby, and at that moment occupied by only two customers. Down here, for the next eight weeks, the Beatles would be expected to play for four and a half hours each weeknight and six hours on Saturdays and Sundays.
Koschmider next conducted them to the living quarters provided under the terms of his contract with Allan Williams. Across the road from the Indra he operated a small cinema, the Bambi Kino, that varied the general diet of flesh by showing corny old gangster movies and Westerns. The Beatles’ lodgings were one filthy room and two windowless cubbyholes immediately behind—and in booming earshot of the cinema screen. The only washing facilities were the cinema toilets, from the communal vestibule of which an old woman attendant stared at them grimly over her saucer of tips.
It was some consolation to meet up with Derry and the Seniors and to learn that, despite munificent billing outside the Kaiserkeller, Liverpool’s famous R&B group were also having to sleep rough. “Bruno gave us one little bed between five of us,” Howie Casey, the sax player, says. “I’d been sleeping on that, covered by a flag, and the other lads slept on chairs set two together. The waiters used to lock us inside the club each night.”
The Bambi Kino was not a great deal worse than the cellar of Lord Woodbine’s New Colony Club or the Gambier Terrace flat back home in Liverpool. Paul and Pete Best took a cubbyhole each while John, Stu, and George flopped down in the larger room. All five were soon asleep, untroubled by the sounds of gunfire and police sirens that wafted through the grimy wall from the cinema screen.
Their first night’s playing at the Indra was a severe letdown. Half a
dozen people sat and watched them indifferently from tables with red-shaded lamps. The clientele, mainly prostitutes and their customers, showed little enthusiasm for Carl Perkins’s “Honey Don’t” or Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” The club also bore a curse in the form of an old woman living upstairs who continually phoned police headquarters on the Reeperbahn to complain about the noise. Bruno Koschmider, not wishing for that kind of trouble, hissed at them to turn even their feeble amplifiers down.
Allan and Beryl Williams, Barry Chang, and Lord Woodbine remained in Hamburg throughout that inaugural week. Williams, himself comfortably ensconced in a small hotel, did what he could to improve the Beatles’ living quarters—it was at his urgent insistence that Bruno provided blankets for their beds. Beryl shopped in the city center with her brother, and Lord Woodbine, as usual, remained worried by nothing. He sang calypsos at the Kaiserkeller and, one night, grew so affected by its libations that he attempted to dive into the South Sea Islands mural.
Williams, in his conscientious moments, worried about the club he had committed his charges to, and about their plainly evinced hatred of it. On their opening night they had played the entire four-and-a-half-hour stretch mutinously still and huddled-up. “Come on, boys!” Williams exhorted them from the bar. “Make it a show, boys!” Bruno Koschmider took up the phrase, clapping his large, flat hands. “Mak show, boys,” he would cry. “Mak show, Beatles! Mak show!”
John’s answer was to launch himself into writhings and shimmyings that were a grotesque parody of Gene Vincent at the Boxing Stadium show. Down the street at the Kaiserkeller word began to spread of this other group
von
Liverpool who leapt around the stage like monkeys and stamped their feet deafeningly on the stage. They were stamping out the rhythm to help their new drummer, Pete Best, and also to goad the old woman upstairs.
Before long, the rival groups from the Kaiserkeller had come up to the Indra to see them. Howie Casey was astonished at the improvement since their audition as the Silver Beatles in front of Larry Parnes. “That day, they’d seemed embarrassed about how bad they were,” Howie says. “You could tell something had happened to them in the meantime. They’d turned into a good stomping band.”
Derry and the Seniors brought with them a wide-eyed, curly-haired
youth whom all the Beatles—George especially—regarded with awe. Born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity, he was better known as Tony Sheridan, a singer and inspired solo guitarist with many appearances to his credit on the
Oh Boy!
television show. His talent, however, was accompanied by habits too blithely erratic to suit the rock ’n’ roll star-makers. When Bruno Koschmider hired him he had been sacked from
Oh Boy!
and most other engagements, and was playing at the 2i’s coffee bar for one pound a night. Even now, the British police were hard on his trail due to various installment plan irregularities.
Anthony Esmond steered the Beatles, past beckoning doorway touts, for an insider’s tour of the Reeperbahn’s peculiar delights. They saw the women who grappled in mud, cheered on by an audience tied into a protective communal bib. They visited the Roxy Bar and met ravishing hostesses with tinkling laughs and undisguisably male biceps and breastbones. Two streets away, where a wooden fence forbade entry to all under eighteen, their companions steered them through the Herbert-strasse, past red-lit shop windows containing whores in every type of fancy dress, all ages from nymphet to scolding granny, smiling or scowling forth, gossiping with one another, reading, knitting, listlessly examining their own frilly garters or spooning up bowls of soup.
The other initiation was into beer. For beer, damp gold, foam piling under thin metal bar taps, had never been more plentiful. Derry and the Seniors, when they first opened at the Kaiserkeller, had been allowed beer ad lib in breaks between performing. Though Koschmider had hastily withdrawn this privilege, the nightly allowance still seemed vast to five boys who, at home in Liverpool, had often been hard put to scrape up the price of a half-pint each. Then there were the drinks pressed on them by customers at the Indra, the drinks that would be sent up to them onstage while they played. It became nothing unusual for a whole crate of beer to be shoved at their feet by well-wishers whose size and potential truculence underlined the necessity of finishing every bottle.
Sex was easily available. Here you did not chase it, as in Liverpool, and clutch at it furtively in cold shop doors. Here it came after you, putting strong arms round you, mincing no words; it was unabashed, expert—indeed, professional. For even the most cynical whores found it piquant to have an innocent boy from Liverpool—to lure and buy as a change from being, eternally, bait and merchandise.
The Freiheit provided an abundance of everything but sleep. Sheridan and the other musicians already knew a way to get by without it, just as the barmaids and whores and bouncers and pickpockets did. Someone in the early days had discovered Preludin, a brand of German slimming tablet that, while removing appetite, also roused the metabolism to goggle-eyed hyperactivity. Soon the Beatles—all but Pete Best—were gobbling “Prellys” by the tubeful each night. As the pills took effect they dried up the saliva, increasing the desire for beer.
Now the Beatles needed no exhortation to “mak show.” John, in particular, began to go berserk onstage, prancing and groveling in imitation of any rock ’n’ roller or movie monster his dazzled mind could summon up. The fact that their audience could not understand a word they said provoked John into cries of
“Sieg Heil!”
and “Fucking Nazis!” to which the audience invariably responded by laughing and clapping. Bruno Koschmider, who had spent the war in a panzer division, was not so amused.
At 5:00 or 6:00
A.M
.—according to subsequent adventures—they would stagger back along the sunny Freiheit, past doorway touts unsleepingly active. Behind the Bambi Kino they would collapse into their squalid beds for the two or three hours’ sleep that were possible before the day’s first picture show. Sometimes it would be gunfire on the screen that jolted them awake, or the voice of George Raft or Edward G. Robinson.
Hounded into consciousness, they would dash to the cinema toilets while the basins were still clean. Rosa, the female custodian, for all her outward grimness, kept clean towels for them, and odds and ends of soap. “She thought we were all mad,” Pete Best says. “She’d shout things at us—
verrucht
[wicked] and
beknaakt
—but she’d be laughing. We called her ‘Mutti.’”
There were now five or six hours to be disposed of before they began playing and drinking again. At the Gretel and Alphons or Willi’s Bar, the Freiheit’s two most tolerant cafés, they would breakfast on cornflakes or chicken soup, the only food that their dehydrated frames could endure. They would then drift round the corner, through the stench of
frikadelli
and last night’s vomit, to the shop on the main Reeperbahn that fascinated John Lennon especially with its display of switchblades, bayonets, coshes, swords, brass knuckle-dusters, and tear-gas pistols.
If not too devastatingly hung over they might catch a tram into central Hamburg and stroll on the elegant boulevards, looking at the clothes and the perfumes, the elaborate bakers and confectioners, the radios and tape recorders and occasional displays of imported American guitars, saxophones, and drums. Since their wages, paid out by Bruno on a Thursday, seldom lasted more than twenty-four hours, such expeditions were usually limited to gazing and wishing. John, however, blew every pfennig he had on a new guitar, an American Rickenbacker “short arm.”
The daylight hours improved considerably after someone, walking on the dockside, discovered Hamburg’s long-established branch of the British Sailors’ Society, a refuge for mariners ashore in foreign ports. Jim Hawke, the resident manager, was a hefty Londoner who had entered Hamburg with the first invading Allied troops and had subsequently done duty as a guard at the Nuremberg trials. In 1960, he and his German wife, Lilo, had been in charge of the Hamburg branch only a few months. Already, as it happened, they had met Stu Sutcliffe’s father, still then a second engineer with the Booth shipping line.
Hawke, a tenderhearted man under his stern exterior, granted the same privileges to Liverpool musicians as to sailors far from home. Most attractive from the Beatles’ point of view were the English breakfasts, cooked by an elderly German woman, Frau Prill, who knew the secret of frying real English chips. “They never seemed to have any money,” Hawke said. “You could see them carefully counting out the coins. They always had what was the cheapest—steak, egg, and chips, which I put on for two marks 80 (about twenty-five pence). And big half-liter tankards of milk. Some days they’d have an Oxo cube beaten up in milk.