by Bob Spitz
Impressed as they were, however, the Beatles’ reaction turned unsettled when they were escorted upstairs to Astrid’s attic studio. It was a sight for which they were totally unprepared. The room, which faced the back of the house, was like Satan’s lair—black curtains and sheets covered the shuttered window, the furniture had been painted black to match the bedspread, a black cloth covered the mirror, with sheets of aluminum foil pasted to the walls to reflect light from the black candles that cast a somber glow. Astrid, completely blasé, attributed it to her “Cocteau phase,” which seemed to satisfy her openmouthed audience and heighten their intrigue.
In fact, the room had been decorated for Klaus Voormann, who had spent much of the previous two years there as Astrid’s steady lover. Now, Klaus lived in an apartment “literally around the corner,” and while he and Astrid still saw each other every day, the relationship had suddenly turned platonic—and for good reason. Moments after meeting Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid had fallen headlong and seriously in love with him. At first, it was purely physical, spurred by his “tight jeans and leather jacket,” but after those first few minutes, Jürgen Vollmer said, she became “fascinated with Stuart… his mysterious image, his artistic ties, [and] it was more chemical than anything else.”
And not at all one-sided. “[Stuart] let it be known how much he was infatuated [with her],” a friend recalls. Others have said he “was besotted” with her. Almost from the start, Stuart began hounding Astrid’s inner circle for any scrap of information about her—how she thought, what she liked, who she fancied. He didn’t want to alienate Klaus, who remained devotedly at her side, but there was no secret to their mutual attraction; it was unrestrained and intense, and grew increasingly more passionate with each passing day. Pete Best, who watched things unfold from atop the drum stand, viewed it “like one of those fairy stories.” And to a certain extent it was, although not one blessed with a happy ending.
[V]
From the beginning, John and Paul relied heavily on early recording heroes—most notably, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly—to give the vocals personality, then factored in their own distinctive tonal qualities for color and shading. While both were essentially tenors, Paul’s voice tended toward being smooth, upbeat, and whimsical, while John, who was more nasal, provided an essential edge, albeit jagged at times, that stirred the blend with ambiguity. One of them would tackle the lead in any given song. As the melody expanded, the other—practically waiting to pounce—chimed in with a line of harmony until their voices overlapped and interweaved. Duets, however, are unstable compounds; tensions are unavoidably created from the moment each voice splinters into harmony. But when John and Paul sang together they pulled toward the middle. They complemented each other but also, to some degree, tried to match each other without losing balance.
There was more to the Beatles’ magic than John’s and Paul’s voices, however. George’s guitar had become the anchor to the arrangements, giving them form as well as movement. The incidental fills that unspooled between melody lines drew songs together and reinforced interest where things normally fell apart. Later, George would mastermind the Beatles’ magnificent leads, playing them almost like a machine, but in Hamburg his riffs were in perpetual motion, sheepdogging, keeping the wandering, sometimes capricious energy of the rhythm guitars in focus, while other times brightening their steady patterns.
As it happened, George could also sing, not quite as stylishly as John and Paul, but with consistency and fervor. He proved more than capable as a lead vocalist, handling the chores on “Young Blood,” “Three Cool Cats,” and occasionally “Roll Over Beethoven,” on which he alternated with John. When John took the spotlight, Paul and George doubled together at another microphone, creating what one Hamburg fan called “a very charming image.”
Only Stuart remained a lingering problem. Nothing had changed: he had absolutely no facility for the bass, no innate feel for music. Even the exis, his most ardent admirers, recognized his inadequacy onstage. None of the Beatles had any illusions about Stu. They knew he was inept, eternally an amateur. But something else counted for more than pure ability: he was a mate. Yet for all the friendship in the world, his welcome as a Beatle was wearing thin. The better the Beatles got, the more dissatisfied Paul became. “I was always practical, thinking our band could be great,” Paul said, “but with [Stu] on bass there was always something holding us back.” He considered Stuart the “weak link,” too glaring an embarrassment; it reflected on all of them, not just on Stuart. It troubled John as well, but he seemed helpless—or unwilling—to do anything about it. At times, the others suggested that Stuart turn away from the audience, looking moodily over his shoulder instead, so that the misplaced fingering wasn’t easily detected. But people had ears, and with the band’s rapid strides, the clams he played sounded ever more pronounced.
Stuart wasn’t oblivious. In a letter to his friend Sue Williams written as early as October 1960, he explained:
I have definitely decided to pack in the band at the beginning of January… particularly after what I forfeited in return for a few months in a foreign country*—but my curiosity is quenched—as far as rock and roll is concerned anyway.
It might have helped had he conveyed this decision to the other Beatles. Given January as a reference, they might have played out these few months in a wisp of lighthearted amiability, with the anticipation of a fresh start in the New Year. But if Stuart contemplated leaving, as he’d implied, he kept the news to himself, which only served to sow resentment among the once-contented Beatles.
There is no doubt his musical shortcomings cost him dearly with John. Signs of souring showed in their usually puncture-proof relationship: veiled glances at first, then eventually the unforeseen snide comment lobbed into the midst of a group conversation. With John, there was always a lot of acid-tipped barbs flying around, but now he aimed them more accurately at Stuart, who internalized them, without a word of self-defense. Wrathful, John snapped without warning. He poked fun at Stuart’s gracefulness, his persona, his size, and, of course, his infatuation with Astrid. “He was always kidding, but kidding in a way that was borderline hurting,” said Jürgen Vollmer. As a small, mannered young man, Stuart had endured his share of taunts, in most cases gamely defending himself against them. “But he just seemed to take it from John,” recalls Bill Harry. “Stuart was no match for him.”
On October 21, a new club opened around the corner on the Reeperbahn, featuring an act unaffected by competition. That illustrious bad boy, Tony Sheridan, was back in business, headlining at the Top Ten, a sensational, glitzy venue in a huge space formerly occupied by a peep show, and fronting a configuration of the Jets, his revolving-door backing band, that knocked audiences dead. The Beatles went to see him every night after their show, sometimes even slipping in during breaks, stationing themselves practically at his feet so they could pick up pointers, songs, licks, riffs, anything that punched up their act.
Not surprisingly, no one proved more influential to the Beatles during this stretch. Tony did all sorts of obscure material, from Little Richard B-sides to urban blues; he did lovely versions of Bobby Darin’s “Mighty Mighty Man” and “I’ll Be There” and hot-wired standards such as “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Fever,” and “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” until they kicked out the jams. The Beatles pinched “Besame Mucho” from him, along with Bill Haley’s gasoline-powered “Skinny Minnie,” the song Sheridan always closed with. Thanks to Tony they got hip to R&B gurus like Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Witherspoon, and John Lee Hooker. He was a walking encyclopedia of important material, to say nothing of the way he handled a guitar. “I’ve never seen anybody equal to him,” musician John Frankland says forty years later, post-Hendrix, post-Allman, post-Thompson, post-Clapton. “He was a musician’s musician”—a contortionist, an elocutionist with six strings. Over the years, he’d learned how to make the guitar talk—albeit in his own oddball language. “He would play solos that
ran completely off-key, but somehow he would stay within the lines,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who often accompanied the Beatles to Tony’s sets at the Top Ten and watched openmouthed as he ran down half a dozen songs. Unlike his sidekicks with their solid-body Fenders and fancy Ricks, Sheridan wielded a big-bellied Martin Dreadnought with an electric pickup wedged under the strings, not a flexible instrument by any stretch of the imagination, and plied it like a knife and fork. Nothing got to him, except inertia. “He’d get guitar diarrhea—he couldn’t stop playing,” says Gibson Kemp, who described how Tony would “play ‘Skinny Minnie’ as the last song on Saturday morning at six [o’clock], and he’d still be playing it at eight, as they cleaned the club.”
And no one worked harder onstage. He worked his husky voice until it cracked like old plaster, worked it to the bone every night. And he put his body through the kind of physical punishment that had no precedent in this idiom. John Frankland recalls how difficult it was to appear on the same bill. “When you followed Tony onstage, the microphone would be full of snot,” he says. “And where he had been standing, you’d think somebody had thrown a bottle of water because that’s how much the guy sweat. He’d come offstage literally soaking wet. That’s how hard he pushed—he was a worker extraordinaire! No one could keep up with him.”
Only a year later, Liverpool bands would complain about how the Beatles set a bad example by talking among themselves and to the audience, even smoking, while they performed onstage. But that, too, can be traced to Tony Sheridan, who played by his own rules. He never shut up, keeping up a running dialogue with the fans. Or, recalls Frankland: “He’d turn around in mid-song and scream at the drummer: ‘You fucking son of a bitch!’ Once, for no apparent reason, I saw him whack [pianist] Roy Young with a tambourine. He didn’t give a damn about the audience. Tony played for himself.”
All nonsense aside, however, he was a sight to behold. There was so much to learn from the way he worked a room, so much to absorb. The Beatles and the Hurricanes sensed that from the get-go. “In the end,” recalls Johnny Byrne, “we started doing sets with him—Rory would get up first, then the Beatles. It was like a crazy jam session. We weren’t getting paid for it, but it didn’t matter. We honestly loved it.”
So did the Top Ten audience. Word spread through Hamburg that the new club had it all, and that wasn’t just limited to the talent. Everything about the Top Ten was bigger, better, bolder, brassier—a fact not lost on the Beatles. “We suddenly realized [it] was a far better club than Koschmider’s,” recalled Pete Best. “Better clientele, plus the sound system had echo mikes, reverb and all that type of stuff.” The Beatles had been slaving away under dreadful circumstances for almost four months. Now they wanted better working conditions, more money, a new stage—and after they were invited to Sheridan’s cozy flat above the Top Ten, a scene of nightly wild parties, well, they wanted that, too.
The last thing Koschmider expected was a power play by this ungrateful British band. He turned the Beatles down flat, reminding them of their existing contract extension, along with a clause that forbade them from playing at another club within a five-kilometer radius without his permission. Clearly, he’d heard about the crowd-pleasing jams with Sheridan and was taking steps to prevent any more of them.
As far as Bruno was concerned, that should have been the end of it. But the Beatles, stung by his curt rebuff, approached Peter Eckhorn, the Top Ten’s slick, cutthroat young owner, and inquired about the possibility of a job. Eckhorn recognized them immediately as the band that had teamed up so successfully with Tony Sheridan. No doubt he also recognized the advantage it would give him in a heated turf war with Bruno Koschmider. As it happened, the current lineup of Jets were returning to London, necessitating a new house band to back his flaky star, and Eckhorn offered them the job on the spot.
This development inflamed Koschmider, who went on the offensive. He terminated the Beatles’ contract at once, invoking a clause that bound them to employment for another, final month. Fortunately, Eckhorn agreed to wait. But the interim climaxed in fiasco. For months George had been flouting a local curfew, the Ausweiskontrolle, that forbade minors from being out after ten o’clock at night. The band was required to make an announcement from the stage, a few minutes before the curfew went into effect, at which time police canvassed the crowd, examining passports. Ironically, the authorities never thought to check the band, and George, who was still seventeen, had skated free all these months. Suddenly, however, on the evening of November 20, he came under scrutiny. No one knew who tipped off the police, but everyone suspected it was Bruno Koschmider. At the same time it was discovered that George had no work permit. “So I had to leave [Germany],” he said. “I had to go home on my own.” No grace period was extended; he was ordered to comply within twenty-four hours.
Through the early-morning hours, George worked frantically to teach John the lead guitar parts to their songs so that the Beatles could function as a quartet. Merely a capable rhythm guitarist, John didn’t have the chops to pull off anything that required more intricate fretwork. Then someone—no one is sure who—came up with a clever solution: they wouldn’t need a lead playing behind Tony Sheridan. It made more sense to leave the Kaiserkeller early and take their chances with Koschmider.
Seizing a competitive advantage, Eckhorn offered the Beatles immediate work along with a modest attic apartment above the Top Ten. It seemed like the perfect antidote to an otherwise deteriorating situation. Without delay, John and Stuart moved their gear in and claimed a set of bunk beds along the wall. Paul and Pete returned to the Bambi Kino to collect their things. According to accounts given by both of them, the theater was dark when they got there. There was no way to see along the hall, much less their belongings, so they stuck condoms to a nail in the concrete wall and set fire to them. “This gave us just enough light to throw our stuff into our suitcases,” Pete recalled.
Sometime in the early morning of December 1, only hours after the boys had gone to bed, two plainclothes German policemen burst into the Top Ten, seeking Paul and Pete for questioning. Allowed nothing more than to dress, the boys were hustled off to the local station house, where they were grilled on their whereabouts for the past twenty-four hours. It took a bit of doing, piecing together the phrases of broken English, before the boys deduced what the problem was. Their breach of contract and sneaky departure had apparently infuriated Bruno Koschmider, who, out of revenge, accused them of “attempting to burn down the Bambi Kino.” It was a ludicrous charge, yet nonetheless effective. Paul and Pete did their best to explain away the incident—to no avail. The police were not amused and decided to scare the British hooligans, transferring them to a dingy jail cell for several hours before finally deporting them.
Leaving behind their clothing and instruments, Paul and Pete arrived back in Liverpool the next day, exhausted, broke, and greatly disillusioned. John and Stuart had remained in Hamburg, but without work permits it was impossible for them to earn a living. Besides, there was no one left to play with. John stayed only long enough to cadge money for a train ticket home. Stuart, recovering from a head cold, borrowed airfare from Astrid and followed him several weeks later.
The incredible adventure was over. The Beatles had not only crept home penniless and in disgrace but had burned several important bridges back in Germany. Each had to do some fancy explaining to his parents, to whom he’d boasted about fame and riches before setting off for Hamburg. In almost every case, they left out key details about the gig’s bitter resolution and avoided any speculation about their future. Perhaps more notably, they couldn’t face one another. John suffered from such a hollow-eyed depression, friends remember, that after Aunt Mimi helped clean him up, he crawled into bed, locked his door, and refused most company. When he finally did appear, two weeks later, no attempt was made to reach Paul. George, too, said he “felt ashamed” and looked for work, as did Paul, who glumly took a menial job, at his father’s insistence. There was little, if any, feelin
g of optimism. Pete and his mother worked the phone in an effort to recover the band’s lost equipment—which they did—but for several weeks afterward no one touched base. It seemed pointless. They weren’t saying as much, but each of the Beatles was convinced that his career in the band was over.
Chapter 13 A Revelation to Behold
[I]
If the Beatles weren’t the same when they returned home, neither was Liverpool. The city had drifted into a gradual but unyielding decline, and yet, the beat scene thrived like never before. Faced with such opportunity, the Beatles could hardly remain dormant for long. A week before Christmas, during another idle afternoon, Pete phoned George and suggested they comb Liverpool for potential gigs. A few days later John and Pete were reunited, meeting over coffee at their regular corner table in the Jacaranda. Still “disgruntled and very angry” over the Hamburg fiasco, armed with theories and eager to rebuild the band’s stalled career, they wanted to touch base with Allan Williams on the off chance of snaring a few stray dates.
But Williams was struggling with his own set of woes. Petulantly, he told the boys that Bruno Koschmider had failed to pay him the 10 percent commission promised for booking the Beatles into the Kaiserkeller. Plus, only two weeks earlier, his latest venture, a flashy Liverpool version of the Top Ten, had met with unexpected catastrophe. Intrigued by the explosion of beat music and the popularity of local bands, he’d rented an old bottle-washing plant on the periphery of town, hired a personality named Bob Wooler to manage it, and set out to cash in on the new phenomenon with lightning speed. In no time, he and Wooler had booked an impressive lineup of top London talent to alternate with native stock, the objective being that the headliners would focus attention on—and help groom—Merseyside bands, who would inevitably sign up with a talent agency Williams was mulling. For five memorable nights the Top Ten hosted packed, enthusiastic houses, and on the sixth night the club mysteriously burned down. (Wooler, to this day, claims it “was torched.”)