by Bob Spitz
Money, however, was never an issue. According to Alistair Taylor, “Brian’s investment in the band had become quite substantial, without much return. In fact, it was growing more uncertain that he would ever recoup money from the Beatles.” But if he was having second thoughts about this undertaking, he never said so, and he certainly never complained. “Brian was too captivated by the whole experience, too into it,” says Peter Brown. He was caught up in what he perceived to be the exciting world of show business. And, as those close to him realized, he was drawn into the fantasy of rock ’n roll, intent on exploring its shadowy, rebellious, slightly amoral demimonde. By February, he was taking amphetamines. Initially, he blamed it on the gigs—it was the only way he could stay up that late—and to some extent that is true. But the crazy nights out with the Beatles, the pressures at NEMS, the anxieties of London, the desires he may have felt—the roller coaster of highs and lows—all required some form of self-abuse. Preludin was the easy answer. They were in plentiful supply, and the Beatles took them. It was a subtle, if reckless, way for him to fit in. “Brian didn’t want to go to gigs dressed as Mr. Epstein from NEMS,” says Peter Brown. “He didn’t want to look like a prick in a suit, so he put on a turtleneck and a leather jacket to seem more like the boys.” Bill Harry even recalls him at the Cavern one night, “with his hair combed forward, looking completely ridiculous.” He was experimenting, looking for ways to square himself with the Beatles, to square himself with himself.
One thing he refused to share, however, was his sexual identity. The subject had never come up and Brian was loath to raise it. The military discharge, the brush with the police—not to mention the stigma attached to such unspeakable behavior—had already shaken his trust in confiding in anyone who wasn’t like-minded. There is no telling how he thought the Beatles would deal with the truth, but he was unsure enough not to try it out on them. In any case, they suspected as much from the start. “We’d heard Brian was queer,” Paul recalled, although this remark is disingenuous, at best. As Peter Brown recalls, the Beatles were never confused about Brian’s homosexuality. “They always knew he was a queen from the other side of the tracks. It was something they would tease him about.”
John could be especially tough on Brian, if not downright cruel. One night during the disc interlude at the Cavern, Brian stopped backstage, as he often did, to visit with the band. Instantly, Bob Wooler knew rough weather was brewing by the tart look on John’s face and the way he was slumped in his seat. It was a comportment the deejay recognized all too well, an ornery prestrike effect, forewarning that someone, unexpectedly, was about to get the royal treatment. The cloud burst, Wooler recalls, when John crooked one side of his mouth to reflect aloud: “I see that new Dirk Bogarde film is at the Odeon.” More than an observation, it was a cue for someone else in the room to respond: “Which one is that?” To which John replied: “Victim. It’s all about those fucking queers.”
But however hypocritical it sounds, while the Beatles entertained themselves regularly at Brian’s expense, they wouldn’t permit it from outsiders—ever. Ian Sharp, one of John’s art school chums, found out the hard way when he made an off-color remark about Brian during an afternoon bull session at the Kardomah Café. “Within forty-eight hours” Sharp had a letter from Brian’s solicitors demanding a formal apology. Frightened by its implications, Sharp shot back a response full of regret and penitence, thinking that was the end of the matter. But there was one final condition. “I was told by Paul, consequently, that I was never to make any contact with [the Beatles] at all.” It was punctuated by “Sorry about that, mate. See you.” Much to Sharp’s surprise, the Beatles were faithful to the letter of Brian’s wish. Except for a wave when they passed in a car, he says, “that was the very last time I saw them.”
Chapter 17 Do the Right Thing
[I]
With recording efforts at a standstill and the Beatles breathing down his neck, Brian Epstein gained something of a reprieve when the band left Liverpool in April for a third extended appearance in Hamburg. The Beatles were just as eager to leave as Brian was to be free of them for a while. “The Beatles were home in Hamburg,” says Adrian Barber. “It was their town.” Plus it would be great to see old friends: the exis, Tony Sheridan, Stu and Astrid, the ceaseless flow of musicians that funneled through neighboring clubs. Hamburg would help take their minds off the sorry state of affairs back home.
Brian had considered sending them overland with Neil Aspinall in the van, but as their departure loomed, he surprised the band with plane tickets, paid for out of his own pocket. The Beatles were clearly excited. Among them, only Paul had flown before. There was a sense of adventure from the get-go, but in more appreciable terms, it was reassuring that Brian had elevated their status, that they were to be treated more respectfully than in the past, in a manner befitting true artistes.
And yet, for all Brian’s attempts at accommodating them, the Beatles could not ward off misfortune. An omen presented itself when George came down with the measles, forcing him to miss the scheduled flight from Manchester. The rest of the band left without him. Clearing Customs in Hamburg, they charged through the airport, spotting Astrid Kirchherr across the hall. It was hard to miss her; she was majestic, a full sail in black linen. John, pulled into her orbit, windmilled his arms comically in greeting.
“Where’s Stu?” everyone wanted to know.
Her face was blank, still. Noting the guarded blur of her gaze, John asked, “Oh, what’s the matter?”
“Stuart died, John. He’s gone.”
The room went silent, out of focus. A vacuum gathered around them, beyond the uproar, the announcements, the multitudes hurrying past. Paul and Pete stumbled backward on their heels; unable to check their emotions, they caved in to the grief. John, seemingly impervious, had been dealt a sideways blow. He didn’t know how to process this news. Death: it took everything he loved—Uncle George, Julia, now Stuart. His grief was numbing. Nothing registered. Later, myth would have it that he “burst into laughter,” but laughter was beyond him. It was enough that he gave voice to a single word: “How?”
Astrid was forthcoming with details. Since their return from Liverpool, Stuart’s headaches had increased in intensity. They struck like electrical storms, sudden and scary, without warning. It was like “a bomb going off in his head.” There were times, she said, that he lapsed into such black swoons that nothing she did could dislodge him from the excruciating pain. It paralyzed him to the point of crippling agony. In a letter to his mother, he expressed the fear that “he was going blind.” There had been spells when he couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Creatively, physically, emotionally, Stuart was falling apart. The fancy clothes and sunglasses couldn’t conceal his haggard face, his sunken eyes, or his ghastly pallor. His nerves were shot. He couldn’t function in school; his work suffered. Once, he keeled over in class, which alarmed the other students, particularly because he was helpless during these attacks. Astrid was limited in her capacity to sit with him, reduced to stroking a hand or shoulder while he suffered wave after wave of pain. She spent many afternoons that way, with Stuart’s head cradled in her lap, scared for his safety. Other times, she struggled to hold him down, often with her mother’s help, to keep him from endangering himself.
Finally, in order to keep a close eye on him, Astrid insisted that he move into her house. She and her mother dressed up the attic so that it functioned as both a bedroom and an art studio, where Stuart could paint, but that, too, had its drawbacks. According to one account, he’d blacked out and fallen down a flight of stairs. What’s more, it was cold upstairs; he was constantly shivering.
On April 10, a day before the Beatles left for Hamburg, Astrid was summoned home from work by her mother. Stuart was convulsed with pain, she said, and needed immediate attention. “He has to go to the hospital right now.” There was an adamant alarm in her voice; Astrid reacted to it as she might to an air-raid signal, with fear condensing into swift, definite actio
n. An ambulance was already waiting, and without a word, Astrid leaped into the back a moment before it sped away from the curb. Stuart was inside, curled up into a ball. Somehow Astrid managed to bundle his frail, dishrag body into her arms, and it was there, pressed against her, that Stuart died—of a brain aneurism or other disorder, it would never be certain—before they ever reached the hospital.
The Beatles were stunned, confused. No one that close in age had died so tragically. It was “a real shock,” especially for John, who “looked up to Stu” on so many levels.
But the Beatles were determined to open in Hamburg on schedule. Even Astrid insisted that they go on the next night, promising to be in the audience, as Stu would have wanted it.*
The Grosse Freiheit had changed remarkably in the six months since the Beatles had left Hamburg as a versatile but struggling rock ’n roll band. It was still sleazy, still an outpost devoted to the kind of wanton, vulgar behavior that demanded a rock ’n roll soundtrack. Nightclubs still provided the biggest take, and the most opulent of these was the Star-Club, set to open its doors with a bill called the “Rock ’n Twist Parade” headed by the Beatles.* Its owner was a former pig farmer from Munich named Manfred Weissleder, who had risen to prominence by building the most efficient—and most fearsome—organization in Hamburg and eliminating the competition, one by one, so that by the spring of 1962 “without [his] approval you did not work on the Grosse Freiheit.” Weissleder, who stood over six foot seven and “spoke English with a typical German World War II accent,” and his partner, a “ruthless” pit bull named Paul Mueller, passed themselves off as impresarios, but their business was prostitution. Under various fronts and guises, they ran sixteen strip bars in the district—the Rote Katz, or Red Cat, among the largest—and a string of three hundred young girls recruited from across Eastern Europe and as far off as Mongolia.
The Star-Club was on the site of an old cinema, “an immense, cavernous rock ’n roll cathedral,” decked out in plush carpeting, an expanse of dark, polished wood, and, around the perimeter, a grouping of taupe-colored upholstered settees where people lounged between numbers, sipping from stubby bottles of local beer and plying the aggressive pickup scene. Sweating, wandering through a cloud of dense cigarette smoke, around-the-clock revelers explored the many levels of a hedonistic universe. The floors were diverse planets, each with its own stellar personality: music and dancing downstairs, a small “twistin’ base” situated in an overhanging U-shaped balcony, a strip joint—the Erotic Film Night Club—above that, featuring movable, transparent panels that beheld a cinematic smorgasbord of sexual perversion, an old projection room with a sliding peephole that served as Manfred Weissleder’s private lair.
The Beatles took one look at the Star-Club and saw paradise. It seemed tailored to showcase their music, “the first real theatrical setting [they’d] ever seen devoted to rock ’n roll.” The stage was huge, with a spangled backdrop of the Manhattan skyline suspended from struts and lit from behind by a rotating light box. There were enough microphones for a symphony orchestra, and a full arsenal of extraordinary American gear (the amplifiers were all Fenders, which the Beatles had only heard of, never seen). Paul’s eyes bugged out at the equipment specially installed for his use: a Fender Bassman head and two 15-inch speakers in an open-backed cabinet. Even the spotlights were clever: the electrician had coupled car headlights to a twelve-volt transformer and strung them along the front of the balcony. No expense had been spared. “There was a fucking curtain, brother!” recalls a duly impressed Liverpool musician. “We’d never seen one before and didn’t know what to do with it, so for the first few days everyone kept pushing the button, making it go back and forth.”
To keep the place operating efficiently, Weissleder had hired Horst Fascher as his chief of security. Fascher, a short, fair-haired man known for eerie politeness, had performed similar duties as enforcer at the Kaiserkeller and the Top Ten, which made him something of a fearsome legend on the Grosse Freiheit. “The beatings he gave to people were unbelievable!” says a musician with awe nearly forty years later. “He’d absolutely batter someone until they were senseless. In some of the fights I saw, his men hit guys with wooden chairs, barstools—hit them five or six times over the head, with blood pouring out. They could have easily killed someone, but it never seemed to bother Horst. He’d just throw the person outside and leave him.” Rumor had it that the missing three fingers on his right hand had been cut off by gangsters.
The musicians, especially the Beatles, loved Fascher. He doted on them like a favorite uncle, practicing his precious English, which he spoke in clipped, precise tones, and chauffeuring them around town in his prized gleaming-white 1957 Chevy convertible. But there were other advantages to his stewardship. “Horst made sure we were protected,” says the Merseybeats’ Tony Crane. Every musician was provided with an artful Star-Club badge—gold typescript on a pin featuring a prominent blue star—which “gave [them] immunity” anywhere in the district. “Horst warned us never to go out without it,” recalls Ray Ennis. “We knew that no one would bother us as long as we had it on—and no one ever did.” Liverpool groups could abandon the old, naturally honed fears that stalked them back home. It was a relief not to have to fight their way out of a gig after work, or constantly worry that equipment would be nicked. Out of appreciation, they put up a sign backstage, renaming the club “Manfred’s Home for Itinerant Scousers.”
The opening of the Star-Club on April 13, 1962, was an unmitigated sensation. The dance floor was packed, according to Don Arden, the London promoter who held a small interest in the place, with “roughly 850 to 1,000 people, depending on how we wanted to shift the tables around and lie to the police about capacity.” And the Beatles kicked out the jams. George had arrived on time, chaperoned from Liverpool by Brian Epstein, and he seemed fully recovered, ready to play. Except for the wall-to-wall crowd that made it difficult to see the band and “got too rowdy and aggressive at times,” Weissleder had pulled off something of a coup: overnight, he had knocked the Top Ten off its enviable perch. Thereafter, all Liverpool bands played the Star-Club, “a step up” on the German rock ’n roll circuit, while the Top Ten relied on booking Scottish bands, a factor that eventually doomed it to oblivion.
During the next few weeks, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the Big Three, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and the Searchers all joined the Beatles at intervals during their triumphant residency. It was, from beginning to end, a Liverpool phenomenon. There was no mistaking that a distinctive sound was developing: chord patterns that repeated in their repertoires, a penchant for exquisitely modulated phrasing and sudden downshifting into minor chords, deliberate Everly Brothers references in the harmonies, ways of punctuating lyrics with dynamics, all of it creating a unique, idiosyncratic pop style. It would be another year before those features coalesced and became identified the world over as the Liverpool or Mersey sound, but the essential aspects of it were already in place.
In the almost two months the Beatles were in Hamburg, their sets bulged with new songs: the soulful “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” Ritchie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy,” a trio of Shirelles’ songs—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Mama Said,” and “Baby It’s You”—plus crowd-pleasers like “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Nobody But You,” “Please Mr. Postman,” and “Mr. Moonlight.” To spotlight Pete, they incorporated “Boys” and “The Peppermint Twist” into the repertoire, and for George a pair of Goffin-King songs—“Don’t Ever Change” and “Sharing You”—as well as “Devil in Her Heart,” which was unearthed from a single by a little-known girl group, the Donays.
From the outset, the Beatles had a great ear. They could listen to something that was either raw or somehow never got off the ground and know instantly how to breathe new life into it. Such was the case in early 1962 when they stumbled across records by an American R&B singer named Arthur Alexander, one of the pionee
rs of the Muscle Shoals soul sound. Only one of his songs, “You Better Move On” (covered by the Rolling Stones in 1964) managed to nick the Billboard charts, but there was something powerful about his material that captured the Beatles’ imagination: it was direct, heartfelt and earnest, infused with great melodies. “We wanted to [sound] like Arthur Alexander,” Paul reflected in 1987. And for a while his songs dominated their nightly sets—lean, soulful versions of “Soldier of Love,” “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” and “Anna (Go to Him),” the latter of which was recorded for their first album.
With the new songs came a new round of drugs, for the Beatles and the other Liverpool bands. Combined with ridiculous quantities of beer, the speed produced harrowing exploits of drunkenness—smashing guitars onstage, driving insanely, fighting, terrorizing women, behaving rudely at boisterous parties. To keep it all from collapsing necessitated more and more speed. Conveniently, there was no shortage of suppliers right on the premises. Mutti, who followed Horst Fascher to the Star-Club, doled out pills from her stall outside the toilets. Otherwise, Tony Sheridan functioned as the Johnny Appleseed of uppers. He had a bottomless supply, which flowed generously from band to band. When a musician voiced a concern about supply, one of the resident gangsters proudly and swaggeringly drove him out to a farm in the Hamburg countryside. As the eyewitness recalls it: “He opened the barn door and there was the trailer of a semi, with its doors flung open and a cascade of boxes and bottles stretching from the back of the truck to the barn door. He’d hijacked the entire supply of amphetamines for northern Germany for a year—just so they could furnish them to us for free.” The craziness that a beer-and-Prellie binge brought on was neither accidental nor arbitrary. The Big Three’s Adrian Barber remembers that Manfred Weissleder deliberately promoted both substances to musicians, not for profits from the drug trade, per se, but because “it kept us stoned and dependent.”