John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The quintet made their debut the following night, August 17, clad in matching lilac jackets that had been tailored for them by Paul McCartney’s next-door neighbor. It was far from a rip-roaring success. The thinnest sprinkle of customers watched from red-shaded tables, surprised not to see the club’s usual entertainment, a stripper named Conchita. Koschmider’s advance publicity, such as it was, had created some uncertainty as to the exact nature and purpose of the new attraction, “Beatle” being easily confused with the German word peedle, or little boy’s willy. The room reeked of stale beer and wine and was lined in dusty velvet drapes that muffled already feeble amps and made Pete Best feel as if he was “drumming under the bedclothes.”

  All five “Peedles” were still wiped out by their journey, awed by their new surroundings, and doubtful of their ability to connect with their new public. For the opening numbers, they stood as still and stiff-faced as lilac-tinted zombies. Dismayed by their lack of animation but unable to communicate in English, Koschmider shouted at them, “Mach schau!”—“Make a show”—a command usually given to dilatory striptease artistes. “And of course whenever there was any pressure point, I had to get us out of it,” John would remember. “The guys said, ‘Well okay John, you’re the leader.’ When nothing was going on, they’d say, ‘Uh-oh, no leader, fuck it,’ but if anything happened it was like ‘You’re the leader, you get up and do a show.’

  “We were scared by it all at first, being in the middle of the tough clubland. But we felt cocky, being from Liverpool, at least believing the myth about Liverpool producing cocky people. So I put my guitar down and did Gene Vincent all night, banging and lying on the floor and throwing the mike around and pretending I had a bad leg…. We did mach schau-ing all the time from then on.”

  According to myth, it was Hamburg that produced the first serious growth spurt in Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership. Actually, the Beatles spent almost their whole time in West Germany as a “covers band,” although that underrates the ingenuity they were forced to employ. The repertoire of mainstream rock-’n’-roll hits they first brought with them from Liverpool were exhausted as quickly as their last few English cigarettes. To get through sets an hour and a half long, they had to delve deep into the creative hinterland of all their musical idols—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers—seeking out little-known B-sides and unregarded album tracks. They had to find other rock-’n’-roll songs by American artists, black and white, singular and plural, that had never crossed the Atlantic, let alone made the British Top 20, and also ransack the milky post–rock-’n’-roll charts for ballads they could play without nausea, like Bobby Vee’s “More Than I Can Say.” With the continuing popularity of Duane “Twangy Guitar” Eddy, they had to be as much an instrumental as a vocal group, churning out bass-string psychodramas like Eddy’s “Rebel-Rouser” or “Shazam.” When rock, pop, country, and even skiffle could not fill out the time, they had to reach into the realm of standards and show tunes that Paul overtly loved—and John covertly did—with old wind-up gramophone favorites like “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Besame Mucho,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

  Performing nightly in their out-of-the-way, unalluring venue, they were somewhat like old-fashioned fairground barkers, first drawing in the patrons, then working like blazes to keep them there. The best come-on, they found, was a heavy, stomping beat, laid down by Pete Best’s blue bass drum, and perhaps not a million miles from the militaristic march tempo that had recently echoed across Europe. “We really had to hammer,” John recalled. “We had to try anything that came into our heads. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best, and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.”

  The most famous Reeperbahn story, told and retold in Liverpool dockside pubs, was that you could see a woman being mounted by a donkey with a washer around its penis to restrict penetration. Though this new concept of donkey work proved a myth, St. Pauli had much else to shock and amaze. First, it had all the nudity it had been credited with and more—not coyly concealed by turned backs and crossed arms, as at home, but full-frontal, full-rear-al nudity, pulsing with youth and warmth and invitation. For all five teenage Beatles, sooner than they could ever have imagined, bouncing breasts and grinding, weaving G-strung bottoms became merely so much incidental furniture.

  In some clubs, they could see men and women have full, unprotected sex in twos, threes, or even fours, in every possible and improbable configuration, often in the taboo combination of white and black. In others, they could see nude women wrestling in a pit of mud, cheered on by plump businessmen tied into communal pinafores to guard against the splashes. In the numerous Schwülen laden (queer dives) like Bar Monika or the Roxy Bar, they could watch men give each other blow jobs or meet male transvestites as beautiful and elegant as Parisian models who only in the final stages of intimacy would unveil their gristly secret.

  At the same time, Germanic bureaucracy, health regulation, and anomalous concern for the moral welfare of the young were as omnipresent as neon tubing. To discourage organized crime, pimps were allowed to run only two prostitutes each, making their trade largely a spare-time one carried on by waiters and barmen. In some streets, club patrons were allowed to see female pubic hair, in others not. St. Pauli’s pièce de résistance, the Herbertstrasse, where whores sat on display in shop windows, was screened from general view by a high wooden fence. Most relevant to the Beatles, a curfew came into force at 10:00 p.m., obliging all under-eighteens to leave the area. Each note that seventeen-year-old George Harrison played at the Indra after that time was a breach of the law.

  Many places, like Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller, were straightforward bars, vastly bigger than any Liverpool pub, where seafaring men of all nations and personnel from American and British NATO bases congregated by the riotous thousand before and after hitting the nudie joints. Reeperbahn waiters were renowned for toughness and ruthlessness, Koschmider’s most of all. When fights broke out, which they did almost continuously, a squad of waiters would swoop on the culprits like a highly-trained SWAT team, pulling lead-weighted saps from under their white jackets. Koschmider himself went about armed with the leg of an old German chair in knotty hardwood, which he kept concealed down one trouser leg. Sometimes, rather than merely ejecting a troublemaker, the Kaiserkeller waiters would carry him into their employer’s office for a prolonged work-over. When the victim was pinned down and helpless, Koschmider would weigh in with his antique chair leg. “I’ve never seen such killers,” John remembered.

  Even by northern British standards, the German intake of beer was prodigious, and the Liverpool lads were soon competing with the best of them. This was not the tepid, woody ale they were used to, but chilled draft lager served in fluted, gold-rimmed glasses that, back home, still featured only in upmarket cocktail bars. After ninety minutes of mach schau on the Indra’s stage, their thirst for this frosted gold nectar was almost unlimited. Any customer for whom they played a request would show appreciation by sending them ein bier each; by the end of an average night, the stage front would be littered with empty and half-empty glasses.

  Playing and drinking at these levels brought on fatigue such as none of them had ever known before. On the round-the-clock Reeperbahn, it was a common complaint, with its own well-tried remedy. Friendly Indra staff introduced them to Preludin (phenmetrazine), a weight-loss tablet available over the counter at any pharmacy, which made the metabolism work at roughly twice normal speed. A secondary effect was to make the eyes bulge like ping-pong balls, dry up the saliva, and so redouble the craving for cold beer.

  None of the five except George was a virgin when they arrived in Hamburg. But, as soon became clear, even their best results with Liverpool girls had taught them next to nothing. Sex was the Reeperbahn’s main recreation as well as its currency. And five relatively innocent Liverpool lads were the freshest and tenderest of meat. As they built a fol
lowing at the Indra, they found themselves besieged by invitations from female customers, barmaids and waitresses, or dancers and strippers who would drop by the club after a night’s work. It was done in a casual, no-nonsense style that antedated so-called sexual liberation in the rest of the world by a full decade. A woman who fancied a bit of boy-Scouser would indicate her choice by pointing, or sometimes reaching up in midsong to fondle his leg. Many dispensed with even these slight formalities, going directly to the Beatles’ squalid quarters at the Bambi Kino, finding their way behind the screen, and waiting in one or other of the ratty beds until their quarry arrived. As Pete Best later recalled, such encounters would often happen in pitch darkness, the girl not knowing which Beatle it was and he never seeing her face—hence the almost dehumanized term “muff-diving” that the Liverpudlians coined for them.

  Living at such close quarters meant fucking at close quarters also. When George did finally lose his virginity, John, Paul, and Pete were all in the same room and, as he would recall, “clapped and cheered at the end.” Paul remembered that “I’d walk in on John and see a little bottom going up and down and a girl underneath. It was perfectly normal, you’d go ‘Oh shit, sorry…’ and back out of the room.” Pete Best, himself no mean sexual athlete, was amazed at John’s capacity, and that he still had enough libido left over to be a connoisseur of the Reeperbahn’s spectacular “wank mags.”

  Freed at last from the long leash of Woolton and Mendips and the choke chain of his Aunt Mimi, John went wild. While the other four all recognized the need for some caution and self-control, he knocked back the cold yellow beer and gulped the tiny white Preludin tablets, never bothering to keep count. The lethal, eye-popping, thirst-inflaming mixture of pills and alcohol spurred him to ever wilder onstage antics in the name of mach schau. Limping and lurching around in his demented parody of Gene Vincent at the Liverpool boxing stadium was only the beginning. He would jump up onto Paul’s shoulders, and cannon sideways into George or Stu, and leap off the stage to land among the dancers on his knees or in a split. At unpredictable moments he would stop singing and taunt his audience as “fuckin’ Nazis” and “Hitlerites” or, with appropriate idiot grimaces and claw hands, as “German Spassies” (spastics). Punk rock, twenty-five years into the future, would have nothing on this.

  Though not the vicious and racially torn gangland it would later become, St. Pauli in 1960 was still a highly dangerous place. The Polizei might be scrupulous about checking papers and issuing medical certificates, but they paid little attention to the grievous bodily harm inflicted nightly throughout its neon wonderland by blackjacks, knives, brass knuckles, and tear-gas pistols. Yet by an unwritten law, so long as they observed a few basic rules, Liverpool’s boy rock-’n’-rollers were immune from all harm. Friendly waiters advised them where to go and not go, to whom to be polite, and whose girlfriend never to muff-dive. Horrific fights would break out around them, leaving them unscathed like a scene from some Marx Brothers film. Most extraordinarily, in all the drunken melees through which they passed, not one person ever called them to account for the ruin and death their countrymen had so recently inflicted here. John’s “Nazi” taunts were either not understood or taken in a spirit of badinage.

  The few hours between playing and sleep they spent mostly out on the street, drifting from bar to café and doorway to doorway with the tide of sex tourists, and touts peddling anything from dirty books to diamonds. A short walk from the Reeperbahn was a music store named Steinway, which stocked an impressive range of imported American guitars and amps, and proved just as accommodating about paying in installment as Hessy’s back in Liverpool. Here John found the guitar of his dreams, a double-cutaway Rickenbacker Capri 325 whose shorter-than-usual neck gave it the look of a skirmish weapon as much as a songbox. Although still theoretically paying off Hessy’s for his Hofner Club 40, he put himself in hock a second time for a Rickenbacker with a “natural” ivory white finish that was to be his faithful companion throughout all the tempests ahead.

  Despite his countless new bedfellows, he suffered bouts of missing Cynthia and sent her regular, edited accounts of his Hamburg life, marking the envelopes S.W.A.L.K. (Sealed With a Loving Kiss) or “Postman, postman, don’t be slow / I’m in love with Cyn’ so go man go” like any ardent young swain. Back in Liverpool, Cyn and Paul’s girlfriend, Dot Rhone, kept rigorously to the code their lords and masters had laid down for them, refusing even the friendliest, no-strings offers of dates from other young men; regularly photographing one another as proof that their regulation Brigitte Bardot look was being kept up to scratch. If Dot was not around to take Cyn’s picture, she would squeeze into a Woolworths photo booth, wearing her sexiest outfit, with her hair newly done, and give sultry come-hither looks to an invisible John as the impatient light flashed. John responded with similar passport-size snaps of his most deformed hunchback poses and leering “spassie” grimaces.

  Like others before him, Pete Best saw how John’s fondness for mimicking deformity turned to horror and revulsion at any sight of the real thing. Once as the two sat in a restaurant, a badly maimed war veteran was helped to a nearby table. Though John had already ordered his meal, he jumped up and bolted.

  Given their different personalities and very different levels of musical prowess, the five Hamburg Beatles shook down together remarkably well. At this point, it was hardly an issue that the lineup included John’s two closest friends, who had always pulled him in diametrically opposite directions.

  Paul McCartney and Stu Sutcliffe were never going to be close, but both were civilized for their young years and thus got along tolerably enough. What chiefly concerned Paul was Stu’s commitment to the group: that he should apply himself fully to his bass playing and not distract John with impractical questions of art and aesthetics. And for a time, both those requirements seemed to be being met.

  Stu saw the trip to Hamburg as a clean break from his life at art college, his home city’s predictable subject matter, and the “tricks” he believed he had come to rely on in his work there. Despite the garish colors and teeming subject matter around him, he resisted all temptation to paint or draw, let alone to encourage John to do so. With the disillusionment that in youth can be actively pleasurable, he described himself as “a romantic gone sour…I have shrivelled like a sucked grape. I must dig deep and plant myself and grow.”

  As even Paul conceded, Stu was a strong visual asset to the group, a James Dean movie in miniature, with his upswept hair and brooding shades, while the others played Groucho and Harpo. To relieve their Preludin-parched throats, he had to take a share of the vocals, doing not at all badly with slow Presley ballads like “Love Me Tender.” And his employer, at least, had no complaints about his playing. A few weeks after the Beatles opened at the Indra, Koschmider removed Stu from their ranks and put him into an ad hoc quartet that was to play in alternation with Derry and the Seniors at the Kaiserkeller. This hybrid group included Howie Casey, the Seniors’ much-respected sax player, who found no serious fault with Stu’s musicianship either. He thus became the first Beatle to get the gig that they all coveted.

  Liverpool had not, in fact, provided the very first young Britons to rock the Reeperbahn. That distinction belonged to Tony Sheridan, who, with his backing band, the Jets, had come over via London’s Soho the previous June. Born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity, Sheridan, like John, was not yet twenty but already boasted an impressive pedigree: he was the first rock-’n’-roller ever to play an electric guitar on British television (in days when they were still considered a fire hazard), and had made regular appearances on Oh Boy! and in Larry Parnes’s touring revues, backing big American names like Eddie Cochran and Conway Twitty.

  Sheridan both sang and played lead guitar—in those days still a highly unusual accomplishment—and had developed a technique that would influence John more than any, perhaps, since Elvis’s. While performing, he planted his legs wide apart and leaned forward, with shoulders slightly hunched and h
ead down, as if facing directly into a hurricane. Like other Reeperbahn ravers, he could not find enough pure rock ’n’ roll to last through the long nights, so had to draw heavily on the ostensibly square world of ballads and standards. But when Sheridan played an oldie, it was always in a brand-new, often startling interpretation, with shades of mockery or innuendo its original composer never intended and chord changes no one else would have dared. Musically, as in life, he was a born subversive.

  Sheridan had started out as resident act at the Kaiserkeller, watching Koschmider rough up customers and sleeping under threadbare Union Flags in the basement. When the Beatles finally met up with him, he was playing at a strip club named Studio X. “We were all acting tough, shut into our leather jackets and putting on a hard face that said ‘Don’t mess with me’ even though we were all as soft as syrup inside,” he recalls. “But John in those days seemed scary. Here was this guy in glasses who’d take his glasses off and stare at you in that blank, vacant way, as if he was willing trouble to happen. I sometimes used to think, ‘Is he like this back in Liverpool? And if so, why is he still alive?’

  “But as soon as you got to know him, you saw that underneath he was a mass of insecurities. He didn’t think he was a good singer—because, remember, his voice wasn’t like any of the other guys’ who were around at that time. And he didn’t rate himself as a guitarist, chugging along on three fingers the way he did. He saw himself as just the motor of the group, the mouth that said ‘We’re from Liverpool, and none of you bastards is gonna stop us.’”

  Sheridan widened John’s musical horizon in every direction, encouraging him to stray outside the three-finger chord style Julia had taught him and venture down the new Rickenbacker’s stubby fretboard into riskier high-register minors and sevenths. The inveterate jazz-hater was even persuaded that not everything from that genre could be written off as pretentious and “soft.” Sheridan’s current idol was Ray Charles, a jazz-reared singer-pianist whose genius embraced rock, soul, and even country, and whose instant classic “What’d I Say” was a godsend to any group in need of time-consuming material. “Almost all of my conversations with John were about music. He wanted to learn everything he possibly could. But even if he was asking for help, it came out in a typical sort of sarcastic Lennon quip, like ‘Come on, Sheridan. You’re supposed to know all about this stuff.’”