by Peter Brown
In Liverpool Allan Williams opened up a strip club on Upper Parliament Street called the New Cabaret Artists Club with a West Indian bar man called Lord Woodbine because he smoked Woodbine cigarettes. When the Silver Beatles returned to Liverpool, Williams gave them work at the New Cabaret Artists Club backing a stripper named Shirley for a few weeks. On weekends Williams also booked them in town halls all over the city, often in the poorest and roughest sections of town. Some of these jobs turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. The most notoriously violent venues were in the town halls in Bootle, Garston, and Litherland, where the audiences were frequently composed of large gangs of Teddy Boys and their girlfriends, called “Judies.” The boys in these gangs, which had names like “Bath Hall Bloods,” the “Tigers,” and the “Tanks,” were bona fide thugs, not pretenders like the Silver Beatles. These Teds were armed with chains and knives and wore notorious steel-tipped boots with which they could stomp their prey into unconsciousness. Often a good fight was the last event on their dance cards, and the dirtier the brawl the better. At a dance in Neston, a small town across the water in the Wirral, the town hall turned into a battlefield as the Silver Beatles watched a sixteen-year-old boy stomped to death in front of them. The Teds were also an impossible audience to please. If the band was bad, the Teds had it in for them; if the band was good and managed to raise the least bit of admiration from a Judie, they were in for it anyway. The boys were constantly abused and threatened by these audiences, and even John’s shenanigans and Paul’s baby-faced charm did not abate the cries for blood.
Usually, the most petrified member of the entourage was Cynthia Powell, the only girl to tag along. In the rough neighborhoods Cynthia would try to pass herself off as another Judie who had never seen the Silver Beatles before, lest the Teds beat her up with the rest of them. Cynthia’s Hoylake accent was her biggest giveaway, and she practiced perfecting her “scouse.”
Fortunately for Cynthia, she was not with them one night in the summer of 1959 when the band was ambushed by a gang of Teds in the parking lot of Litherland Town Hall. The bigger boys in the band managed to get away, but Stu Sutcliffe, the smallest and most frail, was easily caught. He was thrown to the ground and savagely kicked in the head until he was nearly unconscious. He would have been killed on the spot if it hadn’t been for John, who ran back into the melce to pull his friend off the ground and drag him to safety. When John deposited Stu on the doorstep of his mother’s house that night, he was still bleeding profusely from his head wounds. I lours later, when the bleeding would not seem to stop, Stu’s mother, Millie, insisted on calling the doctor. But Stu wouldn’t hear of it. “Mother, if you touch that phone I go out of this house, and you’ll never see me again.”
3
That same summer it appeared a terrible calamity had befallen the Jacaranda. The Royal Caribbean Band with their forty-gallon sawed-off steel drums that had so electrified the atmosphere every night had disappeared. Allan Williams learned they had skipped town for a higher-paying job in Hamburg, West Germany. It seemed that Hamburg’s bustling St. Pauli district, with its hundreds of bars, dance halls, and nightclubs, had become a hungry market for foreign entertainment. The club owners were paying top salaries, and so great was the demand for acts that they were even pleased to book an attraction as esoteric as a West Indian steel band. Williams, surmising he might combine the overflow of Liverpool rock groups with the great thirst of Hamburg, set out for the famous city of decadence himself, armed with a tape of Liverpool groups made on a tape recorder that John had stolen from the art college and for the theft of which Stu was subsequently blamed.
Williams was not disappointed with what he found in Hamburg. The St. Pauli district was a neon-lined nocturnal world of seedy, carnivallike clubs, doorway hookers, tranvestites, and porn and weapons shops. All this served as a colorful backdrop for raging gang wars among the numerous drug and gun runners. The crowning touch, however, was the brothel district, the Herberstrasse, a fenced-in city-within-a-city that did a bustling business with a surfeit of customers from the nearby prosperous ports and American army bases.
It was in a basement club on the Grosse Freiheit called the Kaiserkeller that Allan Williams made the acquaintance of Bruno Koschmider. Koschmider was a memorable-looking man, a short, dwarflike fellow with a large head, putty nose, and a shank of carefully waved blond hair. Koschmider had once been a magician and a circus clown before opening several prosperous businesses in the Reeperbahn. As Reeperbahn business necessitated, Koschmider was suspicious and tough. Williams excitedly explained to Koschmider through an interpreter that Liverpool was a great, untapped well of entertainment and the perfect source for a club like Koschmider’s. The Liverpool “beat sound” would go over big in Hamburg, Williams said, and to prove it he produced a tape recording that had been made before he left Liverpool. The tape turned out to be only electronic static and hum.
Williams returned to Liverpool without any bookings but full of inspiration. He kept pitching Liverpool groups to tour promoters and made frequent trips to London. It was on one of these trips, several months later, that he ran into Koschmider again. Koschmider was in London scouting for bands to play his clubs, and within a few minutes Williams had convinced him to sign what he promised was Liverpool’s finest musical product—Derry and the Seniors.
Back in Liverpool, amidst much local envy, Derry and the Seniors were shipped to Hamburg for what seemed like the big time. When word returned to Liverpool that their engagement was proving successful, a pleased Koschmider wrote to Williams asking for yet another group to come to Hamburg, and this time it was the Silver Beatles’ turn. In the flush of getting a booking in the romantic city of Hamburg and leaving Great Britain for the first time, the band dropped the Silver and became, simply, the Beatles.
The one small problem about the Beatles going off to Hamburg was that they still had no permanent drummer. In desperation more than desire, they asked Pete Best to join them. The Beatles had known Pete Best for years; George Harrison had once introduced him to Paul and John, but it was only recently that he had become a drummer—and not a very good one at that. Pete was nineteen, a dark, handsome, and mysteriously quiet young man whose mother, Mona, ran the Casbah Club. The Casbah was a popular teen club in the residential section of West Derby that Mona Best had opened as a place for Pete’s friends to congregate. It was a crude basement club with wooden benches and a dragon painted on the ceiling. When the Beatles first heard through the grapevine that the Casbah was opening and might be a good place to play, they turned up there en masse, along with Cynthia, to nose around. They liked what they saw so much they stayed to help clean up the place, and it was Cynthia who painted the distinctive spiderwebs on the walls.
It was at the Casbah that they made a new friend who was to become an integral part of the group, as important as any of the members. His name was Neil Aspinall, and he was a tall, handsome young man who lived with the Best family as a boarder. Neil had a rakish sense of humor and a direct, no-nonsense northern kind of charm. He was eighteen years old and had just graduated from the Liverpool Institute. He was training to be an accountant, but as his interest in the bands that played the Casbah increased, his attention to his studies lagged. By the following spring Neil was helping the Beatles load their equipment and was driving them to all their jobs in his battered red and white van with a leaky radiator. He wasn’t called the “road manager” until many years later, when the word was invented, but he was much more than that. He became a friend, aid, and protector. In his own unique way, by the force of his personality, he affected the course of the Beatles as deeply as any of the primary four.
As they had hoped, the Casbah became one of the band’s regular jobs, until the boys had a falling out with Mona Best. It seemed one of their ever-changing band members hadn’t shown up one night, and Mrs. Best had docked his fifteen shilling salary from their pay. The Beatles stormed out of the club and later heard that Pete had taken up the drums and f
ormed a group with the errant guitarist. But the hard feelings between the Best family and the Beatles were short-lived, especially in light of the fact that Pete had recently purchased a shiny new set of professional-looking drums. He had left school and was running the Casbah full time when Paul McCartney rang him up and asked if he’d like to audition with them at the Jacaranda. Later that night they celebrated his inclusion as the drummer of the Beatles.
4
For Cynthia Powel the trip to Hamburg was anything but a reason to celebrate. Certainly, she believed, the pleasures of the Reeperbahn would make her seem provincial and inadequate. She was already learning to stave off the flirtatious Liverpool girls who were after John; what with Hamburg’s reputation for loose women, she was sure their relationship wouldn’t endure the separation. She wept bitterly as she kissed John good-bye on the morning of his departure, then dolefully returned to her mother’s house in Hoylake, where Lillian Powell was delighted to have her truant daughter home again. Cynthia tried to make the best of it, reassuring herself that they were scheduled to be gone only six weeks. In the end, it turned out they stayed for over five months.
A compulsive doodler and letter writer, John’s missives arrived almost daily. The envelope would be covered with kisses and verses of love like “Postman, postman, don’t be slow/I’m in love with Cynthia so go man go.” Inside there would be twenty- and thirty-page handwritten epic accounts of his adventures, complete with cartoon drawings. The Beatles had set off from the Jacaranda in a dilapidated cream and green minibus along with Allan Williams, his wife Beryl, his brother-in-law Barry Chang, and his West Indian friend, Lord Woodbine. In the band’s suitcases were new costumes of black crewncck sweaters and short houndstooth jackets for which Allan Williams had advanced them £15 each. The trip was long and the van broke down. At a stop in Arnhem, Holland, John shoplifted a harmonica and added it to their act.
The letters describing Hamburg made it sound as if John wouldn’t need any help from his vivid imagination to improve upon the bizarre reality. They were playing not in the Kaiserkeller but in a dreary little dive called the Indra Club, with a neon sign in the shape of an elephant outside the front door. The Indra’s tiny stage usually featured strippers and sex shows, and the regular customers—a cross section of the Reeperbahn’s underbelly, including gun-toting gangsters, drug pushers, and tranvestites—weren’ t very happy to find a group of oddly dressed English boys on the stage instead of nude female mud wrestlers. The Beatles were expected to entertain from seven in the evening until two or three in the morning, sometimes seven nights a week. The club’s owner, Bruno Koschmider, was obligated to give them a place to live and put them up in the basement of a cinema he also owned called the Bambi Kino. The boys were given three dirty little cubby holes at the front of the theater just behind the screen. The cinema alternated porn films with gangster movies, and it wasn’t unusual for the boys to be awakened in the early afternoon by the sounds of fevered panting. The rooms were literally shit holes, and it wasn’t unusual to find human excrement under a newspaper, if one was brave enough to lift one. Only at Allan Williams’ insistence were they given clean blankets and bedding. No towels were provided, however, and the only toilet was the public one at the rear of the theater.
Five months went by with the boys hardly taking more than a sponge bath. Their meals consisted of a bowl of cornflakes and milk when they arose in the afternoon and an occasional dinner at the Seaman’s Mission, where the English manager had taken pity on them and was feeding them at cut-rate seamen’s prices.
At the Indra their dressing room was also the men’s toilets, and the attendant, an old lady in ankle socks named Rosa, was happy to sell them a prodigious supply of the German-made diet pills called Preludin she kept in a candy jar. Except for Pete Best, who seemed to disassociate himself from all their wildness, the Beatles quickly found they needed the “Prellys” to keep them going through the long nights of nonstop playing. The Prellys made them thirsty, which in turn made them drink more beer, which in turn was free and plentiful from the barmaids when Koschmider wasn’t looking. Also, it became quite common for customers to send drinks up to the stage to get them drunk, shouting “Trinken! Trinken!” The audiences came to be entertained, not to watch the Beatles stand around and play, so when Koschmider yelled “mach shau!” at them, “make show” they did. Their nervous systems electrified by the cheap amphetamines, their inhibitions demolished by the beer and booze, they were capable of anything on stage. John, in particular, would bring down the house with his speed-induced imitation of cripples and goblins. He would jump, crawl, and scream, sometimes taunting the audience with, “Bloody fuckin’ Nazis! Sieg Heil!” The audiences, usually at least as drunk or high as John was, only laughed and cheered and egged him on to be still more outrageous. John was so out of control one night that when a customer overenthusiastically approached the stage, John kicked him in the head twice, then grabbed a steak knife from a table and threw it at the man.
The Beatles’ (save for Pete Best who did not indulge in such things) favorite part of the St. Pauli district was the incredible fenced-in red-light district. Considering how young they were—John and Stu were twenty, Paul was eighteen, and George only seventeen—the Herberstrasse was like a sexual Disneyland. Here, all hours of the day and night, waited prostitutes of every size, shape, and description, sitting in the parlor window of house after house facing the narrow street, reading, arguing, gossiping with tradesmen. This is not to say that the boys had to pay for their sex very often; cute, young, and randy, they had any number of women available to them for free, from the barmaids to the customers. More than once they had a “knee trembler” with some sweet young thing in a doorway only to discover her the next day sitting in the window of a house in the Herberstrasse. Screwed, blewed, and tattooed, stoned any time of the day or night, the boys became a walking laboratory of venereal diseases. During his short stay in Hamburg, Allan Williams became the self-appointed “Little Pox Doctor.” The boys would come to him at the Gretle and Alfons, a small bar where they would spend their off-hours, and ask him to step into the back room for a spot examination. “I looked for swellings in the groin, a discharge from the end, and asked about pain on urinating, all the things I’d read about” He also taught them a witch doctor’s method of diagnosis by holding their urine up to the light in a beer glass. The public-health facilities in Hamburg were free and very accommodating, and the boys were cured, stricken, cured, and stricken at an alarming rate. As soon as they got a shot of penicillin, they were drinking and whoring again. It was only when they returned to Liverpool for good that a venereologist managed to clean them up.
Koschmider extended the Beatles’ engagement, and, after dispatching an exhausted and dissipated Derry and the Seniors back to Liverpool, he moved the Beatles to his big club, the Kaiserkeller. The Kaiserkeller was enormous compared to the Indra, with an incongruous nautical decor of portholes and fishnet. The Kaiserkeller was also much rougher than the Indra, and the club had its own highly efficient squad of bouncers. This small army, frequently called into service in the violent club, was headed by an ex-boxer named Horst Fascher who allegedly had spent time in jail for killing a sailor with his fists in a street brawl. Fortunately, Fascher took the Liverpool boys to his heart, particularly the crazy one, John, and as Kaiserkeller employees they were put under his special protection. With Fascher acting as Godfather, they felt invulnerable, and their provocative behavior increased accordingly One night, smashed on Prellys and beer, they tried to roll an English sailor who got drunk at the bar, but they only had the heart to hit him once or twice before giving up. When Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were also booked into the Kaiserkeller, a contest ensued as to who could stomp a hole first in the rotting Kaiserkeller stage. Rory won and was feted with a case of cheap champagne at a local spot called Willy’s cafe. When Koschmider heard about the contest that had pounded a hole in his stage, he dispatched a contingent of thugs to rough up the two bands.
The Liverpool groups joined forces and, armed with chairs and table legs, managed to emerge from Willy’s with no broken bones. By the next day’s performance a truce had been called, and life went on as usual.
Summer quickly turned into autumn, and the boys’ engagement was extended yet again. In Liverpool, Cynthia waited patiently. John’s letters now talked about a beautiful girl named Astrid Kirchner and her room-mate, Klaus Voorman. As the story unfolded, bit by bit, Astrid and Klaus seemed to be having a tremendous effect on the boys. Klaus, a Berlin-born doctor’s son, was an art student in Hamburg. One night after an argument with Astrid, he had stumbled into the Kaiserkeller. He was astonished to find the Beatles with their funny-looking checkered jackets and wavy pompadours. He was particularly taken by Stu Sutcliffe, hiding behind those mysterious clip-on dark glasses, moodily playing his bass guitar. Two nights later, Klaus asked Astrid to come with him to see them and then the next night and the next, and soon Astrid was hooked on them herself.
Astrid was an exotically pretty girl with a blond pixie haircut and large, dark, sad eyes. She had met Klaus while studying art at a private academy called the Meister Schule. When she met the boys she was a photographic assistant, and Klaus was living in a room on the top floor of her mother’s house. Astrid was enchanted with these peculiar English boys, and despite the language barrier, she managed to strike up a friendship with them. The boys, in return, were delighted to meet some local people their own age. Astrid photographed them frequently and brought along other German art students to the club. These students, of a vogue called “exis,” after the existentialists, were a pale, intense, ascetic bunch. Like Astrid, they dressed in thick black leather trench coats and leather trousers and seemed to the boys to be half poets, half spies. It wasn’t long before the Beatles started wearing leather trousers and tunics, some that Astrid designed and made for them herself.