John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  His Aunt Mimi still had no idea how he spent his days, believing him to have reenrolled at college after his return from Hamburg. Eventually Mimi’s suspicions were aroused by the knots of girls who had taken to hanging around Mendips’s front gate. “Then I heard that John was being seen playing with the Beatles at this cave place.”

  Furious at having been hoodwinked for so long, she decided to catch him red-handed at the Cavern, and mobilized her sisters Nanny and Harrie to lend moral support. “I was shocked. I’d never seen such a place,” she recalled. “It was just like a cellar. The man on the door told me, ‘You can’t go in there.’ I told him, ‘Oh yes I can, I’m John’s Aunt Mimi.’ I had to watch I didn’t fall on the steps, they were so steep, and it was dark. I couldn’t see at first, and then I could see him up on the stage. I’d never heard such a din. It wasn’t music to me—just a din. I watched him cavorting around. I wasn’t amused. I was hopping mad. I wanted to pull him offstage by his ear.”

  John in his turn was stunned to look out into the Cavern’s sweltering gloom and behold not one but three aunts with their usual immaculate coats, hats, patent leather handbags, and umbrellas, seated in the front row among the Bulldog Gang and the Woodentops. “He started singing like he did that day at the church fete,” Mimi remembered. “‘Oh-oh, Mimi’s here….’ I gave him a piece of my mind after the show. I was mad at him because he ought to have been at the art college studying, not playing at a place like that. I thought he was making a laughingstock of himself.”

  Before winter was out, the Beatles began to feel stirrings of nostalgia for Hamburg. They remained in friendly contact with the Top Ten Club’s young owner, Peter Eckhorn, and had an open invitation to work for him if their problems with the immigration and youth-welfare authorities could be sorted out. Talking to Gerry and the Pacemakers, who had inaugurated the Top Ten in their place, made John in particular yearn to be back among strippers, transvestites, and rainbow neon, drinking chilled lager from liter mugs rather than half pints of inky “mild.” Hamburg, moreover, held no possibility of looking into one’s audience and finding a trio of censorious aunts. So, at the nod from John, Pete telephoned Eckhorn and found the offer still open.

  Considering the dramatic quasi-criminal exit that three of them had made from St. Pauli the previous November, their return was arranged without undue difficulty. George Harrison, having turned eighteen in February, was now perfectly legal on the Reeperbahn after 10:00 p.m. Placatory letters from Mona and Pete Best, Paul McCartney, and Allan Williams convinced the West German Foreign Office that Paul and Pete had not tried to burn down the Bambi Kino, and the deportation order against them was conditionally lifted for one year. John, of course, atypically had nothing to apologize for, so he could reenter the country whenever he chose. A month’s engagement with Peter Eckhorn was agreed on, beginning April 1.

  The moment should have been a perfect one for Stu Sutcliffe to leave the Beatles without loss of face to himself or to John. Stu was to remain in Liverpool and begin the teacher-training course he had been virtually guaranteed by the art college. Anticipating a lengthy separation from his German fiancée, Astrid Kirchherr, he had brought her over from Hamburg to meet his parents and two sisters, but still had made no definite plans for their marriage. While naturally regretting that he and John now had to pursue separate paths, he was bursting with eagerness to return to his proper métier.

  Stu’s interview for the course, which he had understood to be a mere formality, took place on February 23. To his astonishment, he was turned down. All his previous exemplary record at college could not persuade any senior staff member to plead his case. Not until some time later did his mother find out the reason for the college’s sudden animosity. Questions were finally being asked about the amplifier that the student entertainment committee had bought for John and the Quarrymen to use at their dances, which had disappeared permanently from college circa July 1959. As both a committee member and a sometime Quarryman, Stu was held responsible for its theft.

  When appeals to the college authorities proved hopeless, he decided his only option was to return to Hamburg and Astrid, which implicitly meant playing on with the Beatles at the Top Ten Club. He made the journey alone on March 15, moving back into his attic room at Astrid’s mother’s house and tying up final details of the group’s amnesty before their arrival by train two weeks later.

  At the Top Ten, the Beatles divided star billing with that other errant art student, Tony Sheridan. Though technically Sheridan’s backing group, they were far more than mere sidemen. Sheridan’s main interest was playing lead guitar, and he willingly ceded most of the vocals to John or Paul, or John and Paul together. The work schedule was as punishing as at the Kaiserkeller: seven p.m. to two a.m. from Monday to Friday and seven to three on weekends, with a fifteen-minute break every hour. Eckhorn did not pay much more than Bruno Koschmider, about £21 each per week, but he offered infinitely better living conditions. Above the club’s streamlined portico was a Hansel-and-Gretel facade of dormer windows with crisscross beams. John, Paul, George, Pete, and Sheridan shared a fourth-floor room equipped with bunk beds and adjacent washing and toilet facilities. After dossing in the dark behind a cinema screen, it seemed like the Waldorf-Astoria.

  The once alien nightscape was now full of welcoming supporters. Led by Astrid, Klaus Voormann, and Jurgen Vollmer, the exis had deserted the Kaiserkeller and brought their black leather and pale, androgynous faces over to the Top Ten en masse. As its club manager and security chief, Eckhorn had employed Horst Fascher, the former boxing champion who regarded watching John’s back almost as a vocation.

  Despite the Reeperbahn’s sexual banquet, John still hated being apart from Cynthia and continued writing conscientiously to her, as Paul did also to his own steady, the petite Dorothy Rhone. With conditions so much more civilized this time around, it was decided to bring both girlfriends over for a visit during Cyn’s Easter college vacation. Having convinced their respective mothers that one would effectively chaperone the other, they set off together by boat and rail on what was Dot’s first-ever trip abroad.

  German friends rallied round to make the girls’ two-week stay as comfortable as possible. Paul and Dot borrowed a houseboat belonging to Rosa, the elderly washroom attendant from the Bambi Kino, while Cynthia was put up at Astrid’s mother’s home in Altona. She had dreaded having to spend time with Astrid, whom she found intimidatingly beautiful and stylish—and still half suspected of ensnaring John. But Astrid could not have been friendlier or more hospitable, attending to Cyn’s every comfort, lending her clothes and shoes to spice up her limited wardrobe, each evening driving her down to the Reeperbahn to watch John play. Still as possessive as ever, he detailed Horst Fascher to make sure no other men tried to chat her up while he was onstage. “I had quite two or three fights just from taking care of Cynthia,” Fascher says.

  John took almost voyeuristic pleasure in showing the sheltered Hoylake girl every sleazy nook and cranny of his working environment, not forgetting the whores in the Herbertstrasse’s shop windows. To keep awake with their beaux into the small hours every night, both Cynthia and Dot also had to take uppers, Preludin and a new variety named Purple Hearts, supplied by the ever-obliging Rosa. “We thought they were great,” Dot remembers. “They didn’t just keep you awake, they made you feel wonderful as well. Usually, the pair of us hardly dared say a word, but when we took those things, we couldn’t stop talking.”

  Stu meanwhile seemed to find consolation for the blow he had suffered by putting not only Liverpool but his very nationality far behind him. Living with Astrid and her mother, he had picked up German with such remarkable speed that he often seemed more comfortable with it than with English. Thanks to his superstylish fiancée, the one-time sloppy-jerseyed art student now dressed at the height of exi chic, in pin-fastened shirt collars, sleeveless leather waistcoats, and high elastic-sided boots, or in jackets from Astrid’s own wardrobe with the cloth-covered buttons and roun
d collars that to John and the other Beatles still hilariously connoted something borrowed from Mum.

  Many exi boys wore their hair wedged over their foreheads in what was known on the Continent as the French style (France’s concept of masculinity then being unlike any other). Astrid herself had cut Klaus Voormann’s hair that way when they were girl-and boyfriend, mainly to hide Klaus’s rather prominent ears. Now Stu demanded that she do the same for him. So one night she unpicked his Teddy-boy cockade and reshaped it into a shallow busby with bangs that barely cleared his eyes. The new style brought out all the feminine delicacy of Stu’s features—indeed, made the artless Liverpool boy and the ethereal German girl look uncannily alike.

  To any red-blooded British male in 1961, combed-forward hair like that of some Roman senator or medieval troubadour—or Frenchman—was an idea beyond repugnance. In contemporary English-speaking culture, the one and only fringed man was Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, a knockabout comic whose spidery black bangs seemed designed only to encourage additional slaps and blows from his two colleagues. Sure enough, when Stu first took the new haircut to the Top Ten Club, he was mercilessly ribbed by the other Beatles, John especially. Yet, as even John realized, Stu was at the cutting edge while they, with their Elvis forelocks, were not. A couple of days later, George Harrison went to Astrid and asked her to do his hair like Stu’s. On seeing the results, he panicked and hastily combed it up into its old stack again. John and Paul kept up unremitting mockery of the style but were both secretly intrigued by it; at one point, John and George even borrowed scissors and set about one another’s heads in an abortive attempt to re-create it. Only Pete Best remained perfectly happy (and so a little further alienated) with his crisp, vertical Jeff Chandler.

  In fact, neither Stu’s disappointment nor his new life as a fashion plate could extinguish his creative drive for long. He still planned to find a teacher-training course somewhere back in Britain and meanwhile began half illicitly to attend drawing classes at Hamburg’s large and well-appointed state art college. By a happy chance, the college teaching staff included Edouardo Paolozzi, a thirty-six-year-old Scots-Italian who resembled an orangutan but whose radically surrealist sculpture had won admirers, including Giacometti and Braque. Expatriate professor and student clicked immediately, not least because Paolozzi, too, had fled abroad to escape what he felt to be Britain’s stifling provincialism. So impressed was he by Stu’s work that he took him into his own hand-picked class, even arranged for him to receive a maintenance grant from the Hamburg city council.

  This unexpected boost to his self-esteem reignited the almost demented energy that used to dazzle Liverpool teachers like Arthur Ballard. In his attic room at the Kirchherr house, Stu began to paint again on his old heroic scale, using canvases so large that he could barely reach their tops. This time, however, the work was not inspired pastiche but wholly original—closely detailed abstracts in which the colors of the red-light district he now knew so well, its chaos, vitality, even its noise, seemed to be distilled. And, as always, his passion kicked off a reciprocal motor inside John. “Whenever John came to our house to see Stuart, he would sit down and start to draw,” Astrid remembers. “But always cartoons of crippled people…or Jesus hanging on the Cross with a pair of slippers underneath. I didn’t realise then but I found out later all about the way his own mummy had died. He was very angry with God for taking his mummy away from him.”

  Inevitably, the greater Stu’s absorption in painting, the less interest and energy he had left over for the Beatles. “People started getting mad at him because he wouldn’t practise,” Astrid says. “As it was, he didn’t have enough hours in the day for all the work he wanted to do.” According to Astrid, John remained unconcerned by Stu’s deficiencies. “He always used to say the same thing if ever anyone criticized Stuart’s playing: ‘Never mind—he looks good.’” But George and Paul, especially Paul, were becoming openly resentful of Stu’s attitude and John’s seeming readiness to put friendship above the good of the group as a whole. Paul had always felt himself in competition with Stu for John’s attention, even though their respective friendships with John were on entirely different levels. With his omnivorous musical talent, he was already a far better bass player than Stu could ever hope to be—and also at least as good a drummer as Pete Best. Onstage at the Cavern, he had once been heard to shout at Stu and Pete, “You may look like James Dean and you may look like Jeff Chandler, but you’re both crap!”

  The end result was the only onstage fight the Beatles ever had, ironically between their two least aggressive members. One night at the Top Ten, in the middle of a number with Tony Sheridan, Paul and Stu suddenly both stopped playing and began throwing punches at each other. According to Sheridan, Paul had made a snide remark about Astrid, knowing full well that it would provoke even the passionately nonviolent Stu beyond endurance. But neither was much of a bruiser, and Paul now says it was not a real fight, “more a standoff…We gripped each other fiercely until we were prised apart.” On the night in question, Cynthia and Dot were still in town but away from the club, visiting Astrid. Stu took the incident seriously enough to telephone and angrily order Paul’s girl out of his girl’s house.

  A far nastier dustup—offstage this time—took place between Pete Best and the Beatles’ ad hoc vocalist, Tony Sheridan, with John in his favorite role of agent provocateur. “John orchestrated the whole thing,” Sheridan remembers. “He made Pete his mouthpiece for some niggles against me; my Irish blood was roused, and Pete and I ended up having a slugging match, out in the back corridor of the club, that must have gone on for a couple of hours. John didn’t even wait around to see the end of it. I think he felt a bit guilty the next day, though, because both Pete and I were so battered that we could hardly get up on the stage.”

  Generally speaking, the Beatles’ stint at the Top Ten Club was an upbeat time, with their name firmly established back on Merseyside and inklings that their West German stardom might extend beyond the Reeperbahn, possibly even outside Hamburg. Early in April—foreshadowing what was soon to happen in Liverpool—the Top Ten received a visit from a celebrated local entrepreneur who had heard about the wild young English group in residence there, and decided to check them out for himself. Thirty-seven year-old Bert Kaempfert was at that time West Germany’s most famous popular musician, both as leader of an orchestra in the easy-listening mode and as composer of international hits like Elvis Presley’s “Wooden Heart.” He also scouted talent and produced records for the Polydor label, pop music arm of the venerable Deutsche Grammophon company, but a brand as yet barely known outside mainland Europe.

  Kaempfert, it transpired, was mainly interested in Tony Sheridan as a potential solo star for the domestic pop market. After several exhaustive live auditions, Sheridan was offered a recording session for Polydor, with the Beatles as his sidemen, all under the supervision of Kaempfert himself. John, at least, had no doubt of their superiority over anything else in the Polydor stable. “When the offer came through, we thought it would be easy,” he recalled. “The Germans had such shitty records. Ours were bound to be better.”

  The session took place, disappointingly, not at Polydor’s headquarters but in the assembly hall of a local kindergarten, where Kaempfert set up his equipment on the stage, then created a flimsy form of sound insulation by closing the curtains. The Beatles backed Sheridan through five numbers, of which the best known would be two ancient chestnuts, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” both set to the same Reeperbahn-rousing rock beat. The other three were slightly more original: Hank Snow’s “Nobody’s Child,” Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out Some Insurance,” and a composition of Sheridan’s, “Why (Can’t You Love Me Again)?” The occasion marked the transference of bass playing from Stu Sutcliffe to Paul, though Stu still turned up to lend moral support. Despite Kaempfert’s eminence, he had little idea of how to produce rock ’n’ roll, still less how to highlight the Beatles’ instrumental an
d vocal idiosyncrasies. “It’s just Tony…singing with us banging in the background,” John would later complain of the Sheridan tracks. “It’s terrible. It could be anyone.”

  Kaempfert, though, was sufficiently impressed by the Beatles’ playing to let them record two numbers on their own. As possible choices, John and Paul put up four or five of the original songs they were still turning out, largely into a vacuum. A skilled composer himself, Kaempfert recognized the quality of their work, but as a pragmatic producer he knew it to be way off beam for the oompah West German market. More commercially promising was an instrumental John and George had built around an echoey treble guitar riff, much like those that were giving the Shadows almost nonstop hits back in the UK. This was recorded with the ironic title “Cry for a Shadow.”

  The one Beatles-only vocal track would be John singing “Ain’t She Sweet,” a twenties jazz song that was always one of Julia’s favorite banjo-plunking party pieces. He himself had been doing it onstage for years, initially like Gene Vincent’s 1956 version, “very mellow and high-pitched, but the Germans shouted ‘Harder, Harder!’…They wanted it a bit more like a march.” Kaempfert therefore got “hard” John, with the same snarl bunched at the back of his throat that he used for singing Chuck Berry to drunken sailors or besotted Cavernites. Yet his fondness for the hoary old favorite couldn’t help showing, as when he remolded a line of the chorus (“…well, I ask you-oo ver-ee-ee a-confidentially…”), suddenly more scat singer than rocker. “Oh me oh my!” also got an extra lift, as if another John Lennon, his blackface minstrel grandfather, were fleetingly resurrected.

  Kaempfert had prescience enough to sign the Beatles to a one-year recording agreement, but then made no further effort to develop them. Polydor did not release “Cry for a Shadow” or “Ain’t She Sweet,” preferring the Tony Sheridan versions of “My Bonnie” and “When the Saints,” and denying the Beatles even a secondhand share in the glory. To avoid any risk of confusion with peedles, they were billed on the record as the Beat Brothers. Meanwhile, the first commercial recording of John’s voice was cast into the vaults and forgotten.