Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The Hurricanes were offered the same atrocious accommodation not enjoyed by Derry and the Seniors: locked into an office in the Kaiserkeller, with Union Jack flags as bedsheets and one chamber pot in which to let out all that Hamburg food and booze. (Thinking this bad enough, they were shocked by the Beatles’ cavemen-like existence at the Bambi.) Pointing to their smart stage suits, the Hurricanes demanded Bruno Koschmider find them something better, and they ended up, all five of them, in one room down at the British Sailors’ Society. They couldn’t have girls back here, so lust would be spent anywhere that lent itself to the moment.

  On Tuesday, October 4, the Beatles joined them at the Kaiserkeller, Koschmider’s underground Tanzpalast der Jugend (“dance palace of the young”). The Hurricanes’ contract was similar (or even identical) to the Beatles’ in playing times, now they were simply meshed, creating an earlier start and even later finish: each group played four and a half hours Tuesdays to Fridays, which meant nine hours between them; and the six-hour weekend sessions became a shared twelve. These were usually divided as one hour or ninety minutes for each group in turn, and because Koschmider was fastidious about them not leaving the bar between sets, the nights, and days, were about to get even longer.

  At the Indra, the Beatles had felt in competition with Derry and the Seniors, but, stuck down the dark end of the street, they’d little chance of mounting a challenge. Here in the Kaiserkeller, on a rickety stage that seemed certain not to last, they strove hard to be the emperors and achieved supremacy right away. It was only five months since George had been at the Stadium and watched Rory and his boys in the Gene Vincent show; they were Liverpool’s top group and the Beatles hadn’t been fit to lick their boots, yet George had felt “We’re better than them!” Here, now, they were proving it.

  Mach Schauing became essential to the Beatles at the Kaiserkeller: they did nonstop stomping, nonstop four-in-the-bar, nonstop flat-out rock and roll, nonstop comedy, nonstop crips and hunchbacks and Sieg Heils and lying on the floor, nonstop piss-takes, nonstop joy, nonstop insane athleticism. They were a complete music-hall show, all in one, led by John who, says Pete, “would be jumping off the piano and doing the splits.”2 As John recalled:

  Paul would be doing “What’d I Say” for an hour-and-a-half [and we’d be] lying on the floor and banging our guitars and kicking things, always drunk. And all these gangsters would come in, like the local Mafia, and send a crate of champagne on stage, or imitation German champagne, and we had to drink it or they’d kill us. They’d say, “Drink it and then do ‘What’d I Say.’ ” [Even if] they came in at five in the morning and we’d been playing seven hours they gave us a crate of champagne and we were supposed to carry on. I used to be so pissed … I’d be lying on the stage floor behind the piano, drunk, while the rest of the group was playing.3

  In seven weeks at the Indra, the Beatles had clocked up 205 stage hours—the equivalent of 136 ninety-minute shows at home. They were transformed. The spark was now a flame. Confidence, charisma, dynamism and fantastic unpredictability exploded from them. There was no one else like them, not in Hamburg, not in Liverpool, not anywhere in the world. The Hurricanes, marginally but decisively older, were instantly exposed as first-generation rock and rollers, blown away in their matching ties and handkerchiefs.

  Three years later, when Paul, George and Ringo filled out the questionnaires that asked for their first impressions of one another, Ringo said he thought the Beatles were “all good musicians,” Paul thought Ringo a “fab drummer” and George said Ringo “looked moody but [I] found he was quite different once I got to know him.” He later elaborated on this: “I didn’t like the look of Rory’s drummer—he looked the nasty one, with his little gray streak of hair. But the nasty one turned out to be Ringo, the nicest of them all.”4

  The Beatles came as a complete shock to the Hurricanes. The only other time Ringo had seen them was in May, when he’d glanced at three guitarists stumbling through a shambolic rehearsal in the Jacaranda basement. Since then, they’d had a revolution. “They were great in Hamburg. Really good—great rock. That’s when the battle started. We played twelve hours on a weekend night between two bands. That’s a hell of a long time, especially when in each set we were trying to top them and they were trying to top us.”5

  Liverpool competed in St. Pauli every night bar Mondays, lads from Allerton, Huyton, West Derby, Speke, Woolton, Broad Green and the Dingle stretching to be seen and heard. Paul rocked and charmed; Stu was the James Dean dude in shades; Pete gave it the bashful boom; George cracked his lopsided smile and shyly spoke German to the audience; John called them “Krauts” and “fucking Nazis” and tore his throat out to give them Chuck Berry; Rory rocked and combed back his blond mane; Johnny, Lu and Ty twanged their guitars; and Ringo Alley Ooped in Starrtime!—and it all happened in the Kaiserkeller, a dirty violent Bierhaus one floor below street level, festooned with ships’ paraphernalia.

  Five hundred could crowd in, and through the thick tobacco fog those white-jacketed waiters laid into steaming-drunk seamen with tear gas, knuckle-dusters and spring-loaded truncheons. The Beatles had a policy: when a fight started, they played and stamped their feet even louder.6 The atmosphere was never more combustible than when big boats were in port. The night the Beatles began at the Kaiserkeller, two huge American vessels docked in Hamburg, the cargo ship USS Antares and the warship destroyer USS Fiske, and the impact on St. Pauli was tremendous. The Fiske alone discharged more than three hundred navy boys, dollar rich, into the strip clubs and bars—and with its nautical theme, the Kaiserkeller was a honeypot. As Japage 3 the previous year, three of the Beatles had come close to playing for an American audience; now they met one for the first time—another foreign tobacco to hammer the back of their throats as they mach Schaued.

  Allan Williams, back in Hamburg mid-October, was staggered at how good they’d become, and told them they were now the best, that there was no one to touch them in Liverpool.7 He saw them mach Schau and loved how they turned it on even more for his sake. “The Beatles were now getting pissed and acting outrageous on stage, effing and blinding, saying ‘We won the war!’ and stuff like that. I didn’t encourage or discourage them, I just thought it was part of the fun of being there. I saw John moon his arse on the stage, which the Germans thought was hilarious.”8

  Deeply unhappy—actually, morally offended—by such antics, Bruno Koschmider started to keep a behavior logbook (long lost, regrettably) that could be used against these Liverpool louts if things got seriously out of hand. Still, the Beatles’ existing contract was extended during Williams’ visit, its termination redrawn as “the end of this year,” which the Beatles took literally. There was also talk within the group of moving on to Berlin in January 1961—both George and Stu mentioned it in letters at this time: they understood they’d stay there a further two months, until the end of February, and earn DM60 a night each.9

  Always with an eye for opportunity, Williams had a bright idea while here in Hamburg. An operatic tenor himself, he appreciated a deep, strong voice—and Lu “Wally” Walters (the Hurricanes’ second vocalist) had one which he felt could bring success as a nightclub crooner. He suggested they get his voice recorded and he would take a disc or two around the London talent agencies. Lu agreed, and Williams located Akustik Studio, on the seventh floor of an office building opposite the Hauptbahnhof (central station)—Hamburg’s equivalent of Percy Phillips’ place in Liverpool, where a small music combo could cut a straightforward performance. Lu said he wanted Ringo as his drummer because they worked well together, but otherwise the Beatles, rather than the other Hurricanes, could play with him.10

  The session took place on Saturday, October 15, but critical observation is impossible because the discs are missing. It’s the Holy Grail of Beatles audio: a 1960 recording of John, Paul, George and Ringo, along with Lu; Pete and Stu weren’t involved. It’s not entirely clear which songs they recorded, though with Williams hoping to promote Lu as a crooner the
y probably weren’t done as rock and roll. A photograph of one side of one disc shows the title “Summertime,” the Porgy and Bess song; Williams says they also did the Peggy Lee hit “Fever,” which was Lu’s big finger-clicking number in the Kaiserkeller, and Lu himself has mentioned a third piece, “September Song.”11 A week later, tearing home from Hamburg to Liverpool, Williams stopped in London and took at least one of the records into the Regent Street HQ of the Grade Organisation, the new name for the long-established Lew & Leslie Grade agency, the giants of British show business. Though the focus was on Lu Walters, not the backing group, here were the Beatles all the same, in the realm of the mighty Lew Grade for maybe five minutes, and no one wanted to know.

  Williams’ relationship with Koschmider seriously deteriorated while he was back in Hamburg. He didn’t appreciate having to rebuff the German’s suggestion of a reduction in his 10 percent commission (even though this amount was being deducted from the Beatles’ wages), nor the way he was slowing the weekly payments and sometimes not paying at all. In Williams’ own words, he was being “shat on.” He felt no compunction about taking his business elsewhere and started discussions with Peter Eckhorn, owner of the Top Ten Club. Williams said the Liverpool groups could be his instead of Koschmider’s, starting with Gerry and the Pacemakers. They’d been hammering on his door, rueing the chance they’d let slip to play at the Indra—the booking the Beatles got; now they were prepared to jack in their jobs and join the ’Pool in Hamburg.

  Beyond this, Williams also had another idea, one typical of his fertile imagination: he would open a Top Ten Club back home, and the two, Hamburg and Liverpool, could share talent. Home again from Germany and his lightning trip to London, he set about looking for premises. Williams intended—within six weeks—to be running the first 100 percent rock venue in the center of Liverpool, a place for the Beatles, Derry, Gerry, Rory, Cass et al. to call home.

  Home for the Beatles was now at least two more months away. Their Hamburg relationship was love–hate defined: it was wonderful and awful, great and crap, satisfying and sickening. One advantage was the range of musical instruments in the shops. All the Beatles were passionate about American guitars, and now here were those objects of beauty. Stu became the first of the Beatles to buy something made in America, a sixteen-watt Gibson Les Paul amplifier that, in a letter to Arthur Kelly, George joked was bigger than Stu himself. The others had hoped Stu would buy an amp for them at the start of the year, and he’d made good within a few months, albeit at a stiff price: £120.12 Somehow, despite being a foreigner, and though Herr Koschmider refused to act as guarantor, Stu was able to buy it on the drip (Ratenzahlung), paying off about £7 a week.

  When word reached the Kaiserkeller’s Liverpool enclave that Steinway & Sons had a blue Fender Stratocaster guitar, there was an eruption. Accounts of what happened next became contradictory with retelling, but Johnny Guitar remembered John Lennon and Rory Storm having an actual fight in the shop over who would get it. Rory had the cash and had agreed to lend it to John, but at the last moment he loaned it to Ty Brian instead and John went mad. Members of both groups ended up in a twist and shout, after which they didn’t speak for a week or two. The confusion comes because Ringo remembers it being George, not John, who lost out to Ty, and George did later tell how close he came to buying the precious Strat here in Hamburg. He had his heart set on it, and when it was sold to someone else he was crushed. “By the time I got there it had gone. I was so disappointed—it scarred me for the rest of my life.”13 Maybe it was for the best, though: George sometimes got to play Tony Sheridan’s Fender, and Ty’s, and instead he held out for the American guitar he really wanted, a Gretsch.

  Whatever the circumstances, John did buy a new American guitar at this time. He liked the look of a Rickenbacker on an LP sleeve photo, and—when he saw one in a Hamburg music store—knew he had to have it. The Rickenbacker 325 was three-quarter size with a scaled-down neck, in natural blonde finish. The cost was £90–100, “a hell of a lot of money to me at the time,” and he always named it among his most treasured possessions, keeping it and having it repaired when necessary. Again, like Stu, he was somehow able to buy it Ratenzahlung, which would cause George to wonder whether the repayments were ever completed. Even better, John also got a new amp to go with it, an eighteen-watt Fender Deluxe costing about £80, so now he had an American guitar and amp. These two precious pieces of Los Angeles would make a great impact on Liverpool when he got home.14

  In greater need of a new guitar than any of them, Paul kept his hand in his pocket. John let his Nerk Twin brother use his Club 40, even allowing him to swap the strings around for a left-hander, but when given the chance to buy it outright, Paul didn’t, just as he hadn’t bought George’s surplus Club 40. John sold it to someone else instead, here in Hamburg, and claimed a profit on it.15

  Progression of these and other kinds continued to be reported back to Liverpool by post. It happens that most of the surviving correspondence is Stuart’s, who made regular raids on the Bruno Koschmider Betriebe (Company) stationery cupboard to update his mother, father, sisters, ex-girlfriends, friends and tutors. To his art school friend Ken Horton, he shed light on his present lifestyle:

  It is now my seventh week here. I came for a reason I do not know. I have no money, no resources, no hopes, I’m not the happiest man alive. Six months ago I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. Everything that was Art has fallen from me, no paintings left, thank God.

  Last Monday night, my night off, I wandered along the streets here, going mad with the beauty, just wandering and wandering by the docks … Beggars sleeping in doorways unconsciously scratch their lice-fested bodies. Drunken prostitutes lying on newspapers in the gutters slippery with garbage and ships excrement …16

  Within days of penning these aching words, Stuart Sutcliffe’s world was turned upside down by an injection of beauty, love and art—and, through him, so too was the Beatles’.

  It was the consequence of an argument. On an October evening, probably the 20th, a 22-year-old Hamburg art institute graduate named Klaus Voormann had a dispute with his girlfriend and took himself off alone. He went to the cinema and for a long quiet walk by the harbor, and his return route cut through Grosse Freiheit. He resisted the insistent invitations of barkers to step inside this venue or that, having no intention of stopping anywhere, but his stride was halted by the sound of raw rock and roll; it grabbed at his ankles from a tiny basement window at pavement level. His compulsion to go down and investigate was diffused by the sight of some tough-looking rockers gathered around the door. He walked away, but didn’t go far, and eventually plucked up the courage to return and venture into this hard, violent place, the Kaiserkeller, to see who was creating such a sound.

  The first band I ever heard playing rock and roll live was the Beatles, through the window, but when I found the guts to go downstairs into that dungeon it was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes on the stage, doing what I later learned was their Butlin’s holiday camp act, like a showband thing with routines they did with their legs and all that. What first struck me about them was that they had a fantastic drummer. He was swinging like shit. Just incredible.17

  Riveted to his seat, Klaus stayed and watched as this first group went off and another came on to replace them. This second lot made a wholly different impression, and though its members were unknown to him, he was later able to apply names to these initial impressions.

  Stuart came out first. His hair was piled really high and he had dark glasses on, and I thought, “What’s he doing wearing sunglasses in a basement?”—but it was a brilliant entrance, by all of them. They did “Sweet Little Sixteen,” with John singing, and that knocked me out even more than Rory had done. George came to the microphone and talked German. Paul was talking German also, saying a few words into the mike, and the others were making jokes about him and his little announcements between songs. Then George started singing an Eddie Cochran number and it was great. He w
as so fresh. They were like little boys just rocking along, smiling, grinning and being so excited and so happy! They had an amazing communication between them. It was really very exciting and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  Klaus went straight back to his girlfriend. “She said, ‘Are you crazy, ringing the bell at this time of night?’ So then we went into the kitchen very quietly and she made tea and I told her all about it. I said, ‘You’ve got to see this, it’s simply fantastic, I’ve never seen anything like it!’ ”

  Klaus Voormann’s girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, also 22, had been at the same Hamburg art institute. She’d spent two years studying fashion design and then suddenly jumped into photography, which she passed with the highest grade. Now she was working as one of two assistants to a respected fashion/portrait photographer, Reinhart Wolf.18 “Klaus is a loner, a moody type of man, and it really takes something special to make him excited,” she says, “but after he saw the Beatles he was telling me how wonderful they were and how great they were, and it was rare to see him like that. He persuaded me to go and see them.”19

  The following day, when Klaus visited Astrid at Wolf’s studio, his enthusiasm for the English rock and roll group sparked the interest of Jürgen Vollmer, another art institute friend and fellow assistant to Wolf.* Jürgen said he would go too.