Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  “Direct from Hamburg—the sensational BEATLES!”

  Gonna tell Aunt Mary, ’bout Uncle John! He claim he has the misery but he’s havin’ a lot of fun!

  Paul tore into “Long Tall Sally” and hit the Little Richard notes right off, the others struck up behind him, the curtains swished open and here they were: Hamburg-hardened rockers in uniform black leather jackets, black drainpipe jeans tucked into gold and silver cowboy boots, pink twat ’ats on top of big quiffs. Here was John’s American guitar and amp, not one but three different singers in the front line, unadulterated Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, the first stirrings of Motown and a ballad or two. Here were eye-catching personalities and ear-grabbing harmonies, boom-boom-boom-boom on the big bass drum and stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp from hard wooden heels on a town hall stage. Five of them: John rocking and startling, Paul rocking and charming, George rocking and smiling, Pete rocking and reticent, Chas rocking and wide-eyed.

  It was meant to be a dance, but the floor emptied. Everyone rushed forward and stood crushed at the front. As Bob Wooler remembered:

  They were transfixed. They were looking up, and I was looking down at the sea of faces. They hadn’t seen or heard anything like it before. I’d never seen anything like it. The Beatles were sensational … They had such a magical influence on people. They put everything into their performance.

  People went crazy for their closing number, “What’d I Say.” Paul took the mike off the stand, shed his guitar and did fantastic antics all over the stage. They were all stomping like hell and the audience went mad.58

  Mad for Germans, no less, which was even more amazing—because, as John recalled, “They all thought we were German. We were billed as ‘from Hamburg’ and they’d all say, ‘You speak good English.’ ”59

  Brian Kelly’s only local competition, Dave Forshaw, a young rock fan who promoted beat nights in Bootle, was awed not only by the Beatles’ magnetism and confidence but by their clothes. Men were allowed into few places without a tie and nowhere at all in working men’s jeans, but here, for the first time, was a group on stage in leather jackets, jeans and no ties. It was mind-boggling. Forshaw got into their dressing room afterward and booked them for three dates. “I organized them with Pete Best, but Lennon was answering back.”60

  Sharp to the moment, Kelly told the stewards to allow no one else near them. Only days earlier he’d needed all Wooler’s persuasion to book the Beatles when his instinct was to blackball them; now he was the luckiest promoter in Liverpool. “I was completely knocked out by them. They had a pounding, pulsating beat which I knew would be big box office.”61 So badly did he want them for himself, Kelly barred his own booking manager: Wooler was kept away from them this night because of his association with other promoters.

  When everyone had gone home, Kelly invited the Beatles upstairs for refreshments, got out his 1961 diary and started to talk dates. John, Paul and George, who’d never had any aptitude for organization, happily conceded the chore to Pete. He knew how to do it, familiar with such dealings through Mona’s Casbah enterprise and Johnny Best’s boxing promotions. In that instant, Pete became the Beatle who took care of the bookings. It was another asset in his favor, fixing his position when in other ways it was less secure.

  Kelly booked them solid, for almost every one of his jive dances over the next three months, at £6 to £8 a time. It was money in the bank. As he well knew, you were lucky if something like the Beatles came along once in a lifetime.

  * * *

  * Local pronunciation guide. Voormann: Foourmun, Kirchherr: Kirichhair (the “r” rolled at the back of the throat and the “ch” enunciated softly), Vollmer: Follmer.

  † It is always said Klaus, Astrid and Jürgen were “exis” (short for “existentialists”). Jürgen definitely inclined to existentialism more than the other two, but none of them followed it as a philosophical doctrine. It was more a label of convenience appropriated (mostly by others) to explain why they looked different from rockers and from ordinary Germans. Klaus is adamant too much has been made of them being exis. “It is always completely overstated. We were not existentialists, no way. We had no political engagements whatsoever, no demonstrations. We just looked like them, but that derived from the fact that we’d analyzed the French avant-garde and worked around Reinhart Wolf.”

  ‡ Just before leaving, it would seem, George had a brief period of playing with the Beatles only until 10PM. After that hour, they had to play without him.

  § John has his Rickenbacker, Paul holds John’s former guitar, the Club 40, restrung for his left-handed use.

  ‖ They originate from Sweden. Astrid is a Swedish name; Kirchherr is German, meaning, in English, “Church-lord.”

  a George left the Bambi couch and slept in Stu’s old bed, Paul and Pete stayed in the second room. Leaving the Kaiserkeller in the early hours every morning, Stu headed for warm, middle-class comfort while his bandmates trooped back to the bitterly cold Kino for the definitive “toppermost of the poppermost” experience … a detail they didn’t let him forget.

  b Unless there was a superseding contract about which nothing is known, the Beatles had already agreed not to appear elsewhere in Hamburg (though they were planning to disregard it) and Koschmider wasn’t obliged to pay their return fares. So much about this period is foggy. Though Pete claims the Beatles demanded their early exit from the Kaiserkeller contract a few days before they quit, a surviving document indicates they were already under notice of termination—though the contract makes no mention of this being necessary.

  c The Eckhorns owned the freehold at Reeperbahn 136. The Top Ten was on the ground floor in the rear and its toilets were in the basement, which still had stables from when the Hippodrom was a horse circus. The front of the building was a four-story gabled house; two generations of Eckhorns lived here, and the attic space had a small spare room with bunk beds.

  It has never been explained why an agreement for April 1961 was drawn up, even roughly, on November 30 when it was expected they would be playing there until Christmas—an engagement for which there seems to have been no paperwork at all. (While the document is most likely legitimate, it’s possible it was written “after the fact,” in 1961, in an attempt to deceive authorities.) Nor is it clear why Eckhorn wanted the Beatles in the Top Ten in the last month of 1960: Tony Sheridan was resident, and Gerry and the Pacemakers were already fixed to come out from Liverpool for eight weeks from December 9.

  d In other pages, George gently suggested Stu send him some money because he wanted to buy an echo unit for £34 “or £6 down, the rest when Frank [Hessy] catches me.” Despite being quoted elsewhere saying he had no money, George reported purchases of the Eddie Cochran LP Singin’ to My Baby and several 45s: “Lucille” and “Like Strangers” by the Everly Brothers, “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison, and instrumentals “Man of Mystery” by the Shadows and “Perfidia” by the Ventures, and he was thinking of buying “Chariot” by Rhet Stoller. As he put it, “I am learning everything I can get my hands on now!”

  e Paul, perhaps for the first time, had to miss his family’s annual party.

  YEAR 4, 1961

  THE ROCK AGE

  EIGHTEEN

  JANUARY–MARCH 1961

  THE BIG BEAT BOPPIN’ BEATLES

  Getting to work was a two-bus journey, changing at Penny Lane before jumping off by Edge Hill, at the spaghetti-tangle of railway tracks. After skipping down the dark line-side slipway near the gasholders, Paul McCartney arrived, 8AM every weekday, at the Bridge Road factory of Massey & Coggins Ltd., armature winders and transformer manufacturers, where he imagined himself stepping up to executive status.

  Christmas was past and with it went the parcel deliveries, so Jim Mac made his mightiest effort yet at insisting his son had to knuckle down. Paul said he already had a job, playing in a group, and they were beginning to go places, but Jim was so resolute that Paul went back to Renshaw Hall and did the jobless shuffle again
—a surname and number like twenty thousand others, from the scallies of 15 to the Scousers of 64, many seeking work, plenty hoping to dodge it. “I went down to the Labor Exchange in me donkey jacket and jeans. The fellow sent me to an electrical engineers firm called Massey & Coggins. I told the boss I wanted a job. I wasn’t particular, I said I’d sweep the yard if he wanted. He asked me where I’d been educated and when I said Liverpool Institute he started making big plans.”1

  The job came his way by chance, but if Paul’s aim was to get back at his dad by finding a position diametrically opposed to his talents, he couldn’t have arranged it better. Instead of something suited to his bright mind, artistic flair, neat handwriting, five O-Levels and English Lit A-Level, Paul joined a factory, one among the flat-capped working classes punching the clock.

  Jim Gilvey, Massey & Coggins’ then 39-year-old managing director, would never forget the arrival in his works office of Paul McCartney: “I interviewed him. He was applying for a job as an electrical apprentice. He would have become an electrician after five years—in the spring of 1966. He never said ’owt to me about being a musician. He called me ‘Mr. Gilvey’ and was a very polite young man. I said, ‘We’ll give you an opportunity, lad, and with your outlook on life you’ll go a long way.’ ”2

  Employed against his own wishes maybe, Paul so quickly tapped into a keen, self-motivating attitude that he pictured himself an important man of business not many years from now. “The group had got going again but I didn’t know if I wanted to go back full time … I imagined myself working my way up, being an executive if I tried hard.”3 While John, George and Pete enjoyed long days of leisure, the boss-to-be learned how to wind heavy coils for electric motors, ate jam butties, and played dinnertime football with other fellers “in a sort of prison exercise yard.”4 He made and drank a strong brew of tea in the union-negotiated breaks, smoked Woodbines, read the Daily Mirror, dashed for the gate when the afternoon hooter went and lived for the weekend and Friday’s wage packet (£7 10s, less tax and National Insurance). “He had to wear a blue boiler-suit and provide it himself,” says Jim Gilvey. “We had a sort of canteen and all the workers were members of the ETU—the Electrical Trades Union.”

  Paul also braved endless gibes about his plentiful hair; and then, after letting out that he was a musician, had to suffer the nickname Mantovani. As boss of the transformer department, Ron Felton had to give Mantovani orders—you must do this, you can’t do that—and Paul surely bristled. “I never liked bosses,” he reflected twenty-five years later, and as he only ever really had one, he probably meant Felton.5

  Though John also came under labor pressure, from Mimi, he was having none of it, and was genuinely shocked that Paul was prepared to brummer strive after everything they’d been through together. “Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job and he fuckin’ dropped the group, saying, ‘I need a steady career!’ We couldn’t believe it.”6

  Paul didn’t drop the Beatles, he just accommodated them alongside the job. The Beatles began 1961 with three bookings a week for promoter Brian Kelly—usually at Litherland Town Hall, Aintree Institute, and Lathom Hall in Seaforth—and as these tended to revolve around weekends, working by day and playing by night caused Paul few problems. Such, anyway, was the adrenaline they generated, the Beatles could have lived without sleep.

  They weren’t the first Liverpool group back from Hamburg. Derry and the Seniors were, and they hadn’t exactly set the place alight. By contrast, the Beatles’ return was no less explosive, locally, than the arrival of rock and roll itself in 1956. No one expected it, no one knew who they were or where they came from, they were just suddenly there, good beyond belief, so exceptional that everything started to change because of them, and quickly.

  In seven extraordinary mach Schauing weeks at the Kaiserkeller the Beatles had doubled the vast amount of stage time already accrued at the Indra. In total, inside just fourteen weeks, they’d rocked Hamburg for about 415 hours—like 276 ninety-minute shows or 830 half-hours—and every night tried not to repeat themselves. No one stopped to realize it, and there was no way of knowing anyway, but the Beatles had to be the most experienced rock group in the world, not just Liverpool. And Hamburg didn’t only multiply their repertoire, it toughened their voices, seasoned their characters, enriched their personalities and strengthened their stamina. Four months earlier they would have struggled to play more than a couple of hours, now it was a piece of cake. All the same, witnesses say they played every show with total conviction—St. Pauli in Liverpool. The effect was incredible.

  First sight of the new Beatles would stay lifelong-sharp in the memory. Wallasey rock guitarist Chris Huston was knocked sideways:

  When they came back from Germany it was like they knew something we didn’t. They had this arrogance. There was a definite difference: they had cockiness, confidence, a spring in their step, they knew more songs and they had different instruments. I asked John what it was like in Hamburg and he said, “Fookin’ great! They roll up the pavements in Liverpool at eleven, but in Hamburg they’re just rolling them out at midnight.” But that didn’t answer what I saw, because Hamburg didn’t change anyone else the same way.7

  The Beatles were a foursome for the first time. Stu was in Hamburg with Astrid, though due home soon, and Chas Newby was back in college, his two weeks in the Beatles at an end. Paul was on bass now … in a manner of speaking. He is remembered for playing his upside-down and broken-down Rosetti with the lead tucked into his pocket rather than plugged into an amplifier—miming, in other words—producing (at best) a few clicks picked up by the vocal microphone. When he did run the Rosetti through an amp it generated an unusual sound because Paul had fitted it with piano strings, three or four of them, snipped surreptitiously from someone’s upright with a pair of pliers. The Beatles’ overall noise was so loud that hardly anyone noticed the lack of bass. Instrumentally, the Beatles’ raw power was coming from three players, not four.

  The front-of-house “mixing desk” was a beast yet to be born: groups provided their own instruments and amps, and promoters hired the microphones and PA. Whenever possible, Pete put a mike close to the bass drum, or even inside it, to kick his four-in-the-bar boom to the distant corners of every dance hall. No one else drummed like this and he quickly had imitators.

  Tony Sanders, drummer with Bootle group the Phantoms, was amazed that the Beatles smoked while playing—just one of many visible aspects of an apparent don’t-give-a-damn attitude. He says that when Paul sang Elvis’s “Wooden Heart,” Pete played the bass drum with his foot, hit the hi-hat with his right hand and smoked with his left. “We thought this was tremendous,” Sanders says. “We were all smoking the next time we went on stage, but it didn’t go with our short haircuts and clean boy-next-door image.”8

  All the groups raced to cover Elvis first, and the Beatles won again with “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” It came out in Britain on Friday, January 13, and they did it the next night at Aintree Institute. Paul set down his guitar, clasped the microphone and did his Elvis act, the great solo star crooning his new slow one. It was already going to pot when he went into the long spoken-word middle section about “all the world’s a stage,” which he’d crammed into his brain inside a few hours … and then John just stopped the group dead.

  Refusing to be involved in anything so corny, he completely took the piss out of Paul, ripping his close mate and bandmate to shreds in front of everyone. “They sent me up rotten,” Paul says, “especially John. They all but laughed me off the stage.” This was the way John dealt with things, and he also knew the Beatles must have a solid front line, not back a soloist. As he said, “Every group had a lead singer in a pink jacket singing Cliff Richard–type songs. We were the only group that didn’t … and that was how we broke through, by being different.”9 Another difference was that most groups used an echo unit (all the rage since the Shadows’ breakthrough) and the Beatles didn’t. In his December 1960 letter to Stu, Ge
orge had said he was planning to buy one, but he hadn’t, and now they decided they wouldn’t.

  Bob Wooler was MC on the night and central to the Beatles’ activities in this period. Although Allan Williams was out of the hospital, the Top Ten Club fire effectively marked the end of his involvement with rock and roll. His time was consumed by the Jacaranda and imminent opening of the Blue Angel nightclub. Though Wooler tried to stoke Williams’ interest, to drag him out to see the Beatles and the effect they were having on audiences, Williams didn’t go. He’d moved on. “I have a mind like a grasshopper,” he says. “Once I’ve done a thing, I don’t go back.”10

  Everything experienced by the Beatles in 1960 happened because of Allan Williams; in 1961 it almost all happened without him. His role had been to light the blue touchpaper and withdraw. Though the Beatles’ first printed business cards announced that A. Williams had Sole Direction over them, two phone numbers were given: Jacaranda Enterprises’ new office at the Blue Angel and Pete Best’s house in West Derby, and it was Pete who handled the Beatles’ bookings, liaising mostly with Bob Wooler. Williams’ management of the Beatles, never defined or set down on paper, simply evaporated. In his place, John, Paul and George came to be more reliant on the Bests than they could ever have imagined. If Pete was busy or out, Mona handled the bookings; the Beatles’ amps and drums were kept at the Bests’ house; and any one of three Best family friends provided transport, to ensure they and their equipment got to every date. One was Neil Aspinall. Although busy—he had an accountancy job in town and spent most evenings laboring over a correspondence course, aiming for bookkeeping qualifications—he drove the Beatles to the halls and returned to fetch them later. 11