When They Were Boys

by Larry Kane

  It was there, also, that they met “the Enforcer,” the “dynamic trio,” and many forgotten lovers. And through long hours and unfathomable conditions, the Beatles, talented and frightened, turned their desperation and their hunger into something that had until then eluded them—an electrifying act. They just didn’t know it at the time. In fact, they didn’t have a clue. They were too busy playing music, eating sparingly, smoking their lungs out, whoring into the morning hours, and popping prelude [Preludin] pills, washed down with beer, to keep themselves awake. There was plenty of violence, an occasional fistfight between Paul and Stu, and some later attacks by goons. In fact, if you look at the Beatles in 1960, you might surmise that with all the sex, drinking, and fighting, they may have been the world’s first punk rock band. They were so involved in human degradation that it was only when they returned to Liverpool in the late fall of 1960, depressed and disoriented, that they discovered the seedy Hamburg nights, with all the muck and madness, had helped them create a real “act.”

  And this discovery came after an intense period of soul-searching, where the very survival of the group was being discussed, and aggressively at that. Think what might not have occurred if the Beatles had not played and grown in Hamburg. Think where the boys might have wound up if not for the experience of their first performances in Germany, and the love/hate dynamic they developed toward the city offering the wildest of opportunity, as they ate, slept, and played in surroundings of mediocrity with such alacrity.

  When Rory Storm and the Hurricanes decided to stay and play in the UK for the summer, Allan Williams took the Beatles to Hamburg instead. This first trip was exciting and scintillating because, while the boys were experiencing more work and stage time than they expected, they also traveled a parallel life of dirt, daring, and risk-taking that most ordinary people would find not just breathtaking, but dangerous. Storm would eventually join them in Hamburg in the fall of 1960, but he got top billing, and in comparison, much better lodgings. The sleeping quarters ranged from primitive and creaky beds to lounge chairs, not to mention a close proximity to bathrooms, odor and all. It was hardly the stuff that dreams are made of.

  As in all stories of adventure, there are heroes and villains. The primary villain in this case is Bruno Koschmider, the smart and somewhat sinister owner of nightclubs and porn theaters. The hero is “the Enforcer,” a man with much experience—sailing the world at the age of fifteen, becoming featherweight boxing champ of the Hamburg region at the age of twenty, and by his twenty-first birthday, spending nine months in jail for the unintentional killing of a sailor on the streets of the St. Pauli quarter. There is also Allan Williams, a most unlikely manager. And three young Germans you will meet, a trio better fit for existentialism and the freewheeling beatnik culture than they were for five boys from Liverpool who took a daring, devilish trip into life’s ugly underground, and a most outlandish neighborhood.

  Today St. Pauli is a thriving neighborhood of homes and condominiums, with an invigorated restaurant district, but it remains synonymous with the sex stores and prostitutes on the Reeperbahn, its most infamous street.

  The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg, the last one a brief stop in 1966, several years after they had taken over the music world. Their second through fourth journeys had the greatest impact on their music, but the first, in the summer and fall of 1960, changed their fortunes. They came and they played music, and they played in other ways, and in retrospect they were lucky to get out in good health—or even alive.

  Allan Williams describes the boys’ first trip to Hamburg as a journey to remember. The king of the Jacaranda had graduated from small-time promoter to hard-drinking darling of the big London talent bookers. After early success in Hamburg with the group Derry and the Seniors, Williams was asked to send over a second group. With Liverpool’s hottest group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, temporarily engaged at Butlin’s, a well-known and friendly family campsite back in the UK, he took a risk. He would instead book his self-proclaimed “coffeehouse layabouts,” the Beatles.

  As the morning sun shines through the windows of Liverpool’s Hard Day’s Night Hotel in present day, Williams sips his red wine and recalls how, in the beginning, he decided to help them out. After all, the coffeehouse regulars who painted the bathrooms and cleaned up after hours deserved a break.

  BUT IN THOSE DAYS, THE BEATLES WERE THAT HARD UP. . . . THEY HADN’T GOT THE TRAIN FARE. . . . SO I THOUGHT WHEN I CAME BACK THAT I’D TAKE THEM THERE MYSELF IN THE MINIBUS—THAT WAS A JOURNEY TO REMEMBER. . . .

  THERE’S ACTUALLY A FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPH, I THINK IT’S IN MY BOOK, BUT IT’S BEEN PRODUCED MANY TIMES. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THE BEATLES HAD EVER BEEN ABROAD. THE VAN BROKE DOWN AFTER WE GOT OFF THE FERRY. IT WAS A HORRIBLE TRIP. AT ONE POINT, THEY ALL BURST OUT LAUGHING AND I SAID, “WHAT’S THE JOKE?” REMEMBER, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT THEY’D EVER BEEN ABROAD. IT SEEMS THEY WERE LAUGHING SO HARD BECAUSE LENNON HAD STOLEN A MOUTH ORGAN FROM A MUSIC SHOP, A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT SHOP. I THOUGHT, CHRIST, THE WAY THEY’RE BEHAVING WE’RE NOT EVER GOING TO MAKE IT TO HAMBURG; WE’RE GOING TO FINISH UP IN JAIL WITH THIS. THESE THIEVES.

  John once told me that he loved playing the harmonica, especially at the Shea Stadium concert in 1965. At the time, I never knew that he loved the “mouth organ,” as he called it, enough to steal one and risk arrest on that first minibus journey to Hamburg. Williams, who would later warn Brian Epstein about the alleged dishonesty of John’s group, seems even today to have a love-hate emotional connection to the boys. But this author sees it more as love, and an affectionate nostalgia for the rough-and-tumble Beatle boys. If he didn’t love them then, Williams certainly loves them now.

  When Allan Williams’s van finally arrived in Hamburg, nightclub owner Bruno Koschmider brought them to the Indra club, not the larger Kaiserkeller, as planned. Williams was furious.

  IT WAS A STRIP CLUB. THE BEATLES HAD ALREADY PLAYED IN A STRIP CLUB OF MINE IN LIVERPOOL AND I THOUGHT, “I DON’T KNOW. WE DIDN’T COME ALL THE WAY TO PLAY FOR STRIPPERS IN HAMBURG.” I EXPLAINED THIS TO THE GUY WHO OWNED IT, [WHO SAID] “OH NO, THIS IS THE LAST NIGHT OF STRIPPERS; TOMORROW IT WILL BE A ROCK ’N’ ROLL CLUB.” SO THEY WERE A BIT PLEASED. SO WE GOT AN ACCOMMODATION, WHICH WAS ATROCIOUS. HE OWNED A CINEMA—KOSCHMIDER—WHICH HE TURNED FROM A CINEMA INTO A NIGHTCLUB. YOU CAN IMAGINE WHEN IT WAS A CINEMA OR A THEATER, THE DRESSING ROOMS WERE AT THE BACK OF THE STAGE AND, OF COURSE, HE HADN’T CLEANED IT IN, OH, TWENTY OR THIRTY YEARS. THE DUST WAS ABOUT AN INCH THICK EVERYWHERE. THEY WERE SO GRATEFUL THAT THEY WOULD HAVE SLEPT ON THE FLOOR. SO THEY WERE SETTLED IN.

  “Settled in” might have been an exaggeration. In the ensuing four months, the boys, including newcomer Pete Best, slept near bathrooms, stages, rodents, and sheer filth. The place was called “Bambi Kino.” It remains to this day the Beatles’ filthiest memory.

  “I never really slept anywhere so horrible,” Pete Best exclaimed to a crowd at the Fest for Beatles fans in New Jersey in 2005.

  “You felt dirty, always,” Pete remembered.

  “George described it as like the ‘black hole of Calcutta,’” recalls his sister, Louise Harrison.

  Promoter Koschmider’s “accommodations” resembled the squalor-filled surroundings of child labor in a Dickens novel.

  Paul has assorted memories of the storeroom that they called home. “It was awful . . . you might say. No heat . . . some basic beds with no sheets. We were . . . frozen . . . and the room was at the toilet. . . . You could always smell them.”

  George was stunned and unhappy. “We did most of our washing in the washbasin in the bathroom. I think that’s why we always felt dirty.”

  John shared this grotesque memory with me in the mid-seventies: “Knowing that we had to go back to that fucking little house was enough to make you stay and work. Sometimes, after all those little pills, I would be wide awake staring around, wondering if the dirt would cake up inside of me. Sleep was an escape. You shoulda been there, Larry.”

 
; Daily life was a combination of little food, lots of drink, and the obsessions of the boys: rocking hard and sexing hard, not necessarily in that order. There were scenes of decadence that stayed around, for hours and for years, in the vivid memory of one’s own flight to danger. In Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor’s amazing memoir, “editor” George Harrison remembers the perils and sheer terror of life in Hamburg with John Lennon.

  “John would go out in Hamburg for nights without sleep. And then we’d be trying to get to sleep and he would come in. One night, he came in and some chick was in bed with Paul and he cut up all her clothes with a pair of scissors and was stabbing the wardrobe. Everybody was lying in bed thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I hope he doesn’t kill me.’ A frothing mad person, he knew [how to] have ‘fun.’”

  Stuart had less of a problem with the vagaries of an unleashed, undisciplined John Lennon, although he would experience his love-hate dynamic later on. Stuart fell in love in Hamburg, real love, which also had some real benefit for the boys. It is no wonder that Stuart’s early romance with Hamburg photographer Astrid Kirchherr helped provide an escape from life in the Bambi Kino.

  As Astrid remembers, “The Beatles smelled awful. . . . They had to wash where the Kino customers were having a wee. When they came to my house they would want to have showers.”

  A visit to the Kirchherr household also offered hot meals, and a family atmosphere that was missing in the booze- and drug-filled lives of the four Beatles. They would routinely visit, clean up, eat home cooking, and return to the club, where they would alternate with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes when that band finally arrived in Hamburg.

  And besides the dirt, drinking, and drugs, there was another problem: sex. Too much, and with the wrong crowd. For Allan Williams, the readily available sex was less a distraction, in his view, than a real medical threat. Williams was no doctor, but by the time the first trip was over, he might have qualified for status as a nurse.

  “They had a lot of fun,” Williams recalls.

  ALL THE GIRLS WHO WENT OUT WITH THEM . . . MOST WERE PROSTITUTES. IT WAS A RED-LIGHT DISTRICT AND THE GIRLS USED TO SIT IN THE WINDOW AND YOU JUST PICK A WOMAN AND YOU KNOW THERE’D BE A BACK ROOM WHERE YOU’D DO YOUR SHAGGING. AND THESE GIRLS, OF COURSE, LOVED THE BEATLES. MOST OF THE GROUPS CAME BACK FROM HAMBURG WITH A DOSE OF GONORRHEA. . . . I WAS CALLED THE POX DOCTOR. THEY USED TO COME AND SAY, “LOOK, I’VE GOT A DOSE; YOU KNOW, THE CLAP.” SO I’D MAKE THEM PISS INTO A GLASS AND LOOK AT IT, AND IF IT WAS LIKE SHREDDED WHEAT, I’D SAY, “YOU BETTER GET DOWN TO THE DOCTOR; YOU’VE GOT A DOSE. . . .” ONE SHOT IN THE ASS AND THEY WERE OKAY.

  Williams, who has the most joyful laughter you will ever hear, laughs out loud when he talks about his so-called medical career.

  “Truthfully, the prostitutes in the windows loved the boys. I mean, it wasn’t a real problem, though it could be troubling.”

  He howls again.

  “The truth, Larry? In the red-light district of Hamburg, [getting an STD] was like catching a cold.”

  While the Beatles got their medical “protection” courtesy of Allan Williams, they found an unusual protector of their bodies in the form of ex-boxer, and ex-con, Horst Fascher, who was also, coincidentally, a lover of rock music. Fascher, “the Enforcer,” was a bouncer for club owner Koschmider at the Indra and the Kaiserkeller. He protected the boys from the violent thugs of St. Pauli, and also from themselves. One dramatic night, the Enforcer noticed that John was missing from the stage. He looked and looked and found young John in a restroom, where he was locked in an embrace with a woman. Never one for displaying a gentle touch, Fascher poured water over both lovers and demanded that John get on the stage, “even if he was stark naked.” John did appear with only his underpants on, along with the covering guitar, and according to Fascher, the “toilet seat hanging around his neck.”

  But despite the sleep deprivation and sanitary disasters, the boys managed to rock their way to a limited sense of self-worth and gratification.

  What Williams and Fascher couldn’t do was protect the boys from Koschmider’s fighting goons, who punished them for abandoning the Kaiserkeller for another club. The Beatles’ sudden arrival at a third club, the Top Ten, set off a rampage against them by the furious club owner, leading to a disgraceful exit from Hamburg. The only bright spot of the attacks against the boys was the courageous defense by Fascher, whose presence was menacing to the gangsters, who enforced their own brand of martial law. Fascher’s protection was a courageous defense, but he couldn’t cover every attack, and the boys were constantly being beaten up.

  “I tried to protect them, Larry, but it didn’t always work,” Fascher says. “I did my best against the bastards. When they left, I was really down. I really liked these boys.”

  Much like the trio of friends who will soon enter this story, Fascher would make a difference later on.

  The Beatles were finished with the filth, sex, violence, and short-lived hope of Hamburg. They were done with Hamburg, after a humiliating exit.

  They would be happy to never go back, but “going back” had a much different meaning when the boys returned to Liverpool, unknown and ready to consider blowing it all up.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BREAKTHROUGH AT LITHERLAND

  “I had never seen anything like it. . . . It was a near fucking riot.”

  —Tony Bramwell

  “I was completely knocked out by them . . .

  pounding, pulsating, overwhelming.”

  —Brian Kelly, music promoter

  “People didn’t go to a dance to scream. This was news.”

  —Pete Best

  “I was flabbergasted.”

  —Bob Wooler

  Direct from Hamburg–The Beatles!

  Isn’t it amazing how one moment in time, like a flash, can change the direction of our lives—a meeting, a chance encounter, a walk into the unknown, a look, even a glance, and perhaps also the timing of such things. Is it fate? Whatever it is, it just kept showing up for the boys.

  There were so many emotions for the boys when they returned from Hamburg in mid-December 1960. George was already at home sulking, embarrassed that he, the underage Beatle, had actually been deported from Germany. The deportation was not received well in the Harrison household. Harry Harrison was livid, but as always, supportive and concerned about his son’s dreams. Pete and Paul were accused by the nightclub owner, Koschmider, of starting a fire at the famous, odorous Bambo Kino, as they were packing their suitcases. Paul and Pete were arrested. After the embarrassing episode, the boys were released and no charges were filed, evidence that the accusations were questionable in the first place. After this unseemly finale in Hamburg, they came home shortly thereafter, arriving without luggage or money. Paul, pressured by father Jim, applied for work and labored briefly as an assistant to a truck driver; he was soon laid off. Pete, with the help of his mother, scheduled a concert for the boys at the Casbah. This was a welcome break in what seemed like endless days and nights for the exalted yet emasculated and ejected Hamburg rockers. John, the man who’d told the nightclub owner to “get stuffed,” left on his own, without incident, wishing a brief farewell to Stu, who stayed with Astrid in Hamburg. John was visibly distressed when he returned to Menlove Avenue. He was moody and down-beat, and rarely left home unless it was to see his girlfriend, Cynthia Powell.

  It is ironic that Pete, the most positive Beatle in terms of the band’s possible fate at that juncture—even more than Paul—eventually would find his loyalty and optimism unrewarded. But before that happened, Pete’s fast effort to put together the Casbah concert, after the humiliating return from Hamburg, was an attempt to revive the boys’ spirits. His mother, Mona, also knew that getting the boys on stage again would be a tonic. At the same time that Mona scheduled the Casbah concert, there was talk among the Beatles of breaking the entire project apart—dissolving the band entirely. These were serious conversations, especially between John and Paul.

  George Harrison, i
n particular, was beginning to doubt his future with and his place in the band. At this point, he was also sensing that his friend, Paul, was trying to push him into the background. His feelings may have been overreaction, but that’s the way he felt at the time.

  “George would tell me stories about that on so many different occasions,” the late press master and writer Derek Taylor shared with me in the sixties. “At first, he thought he was just overreacting, but it was a sore point, a sensitivity about his role, and his feeling that Paul, even at that young age, was trying to diminish it, that would stay with him for a long time.”

  Paul brought George into the band and was generally supportive of his younger friend, especially during the days after Hamburg when everything was falling to pieces. It was, after all, George who suffered the greatest embarrassment when he was ejected from Germany.

  “Paul can be Paul because Paul is Paul,” said longtime friend Tony Bramwell, in a conversation in 2010. “In those days it was all about survival, and maybe by being just upbeat and looking confident. But the truth is, Paulie always loved George and loves him today.”

  One aspect of life inside the Beatles was the fear factor. Age played a role. How stable were all of us as teenagers? George Harrison was seventeen years old in 1960—just seventeen—and none was over twenty-one. Can you imagine the insecurity suffered by all of them, especially after the highs and lows of Hamburg?

  The boys had toned up their act in the sweat- and smoke-filled Kaiserkeller, living hard, drinking harder, and loving the working women in St. Pauli. They stirred the crowds, but in their minds had nothing to show for it, absolutely nothing. Or at least that’s what they thought.

  “The project did not seem to benefit from all their trying,” remembers Stuart’s sister, Pauline. “Our family was a little nervous about Stu staying behind with Astrid, but he seemed happy; the other boys were not. They had taken their shot, and felt down about it. At least Stuart had the gift of love.”