John Lennon: The Life (24 page)

Unlike London’s Soho or New York’s Forty-second Street, the Reeperbahn had no history of fostering music alongside the sex. But by the late fifties, thanks mainly to West Germany’s American military occupiers (who, of course, included Elvis Presley) rock-’n’-roll culture was seeping in even there. To attract the younger customers, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider hit on the idea of presenting live beat groups at his establishment rather than simply relying on a jukebox like his competitors. The requisite live sound being still beyond West German musicians, or Belgian or French ones, Koschmider had no option but to recruit his groups from Britain. Through a convoluted chapter of accidents that would need a chapter of its own to relate, the place from which he ended up recruiting them was Liverpool, and the person who became his main supplier was Allan Williams.

Williams’s first export to Herr Koschmider and the Reeperbahn had been the highly professional and versatile Derry and the Seniors. So powerful a draw did they prove at Koschmider’s club, the Kaiserkeller, that he sent an enthusiastic request for more of the same. Despite protests from the Seniors, that such a “bum group” would spoil the scene for everyone else, Williams decided to offer the gig to the Beatles.

The engagement was for six weeks, beginning on August 16; it could not be slotted in among other commitments like the Johnny
Gentle tour, but would require all of them to abandon their various respectable courses in life for the precarious existence of full-time musicians. They would be working for an unknown employer in a foreign city hundreds of miles away, among a people who, not many years previously, had tried to bomb their country into extinction. Nonetheless, the response to Williams’s offer was an instant, resounding affirmative.

To the many admirers of Stu Sutcliffe’s art, the decision seemed little short of insane. He had just been awarded his National Diploma in Art and Design with painting as his specialist subject, and was about to begin a postgraduate teacher-training course. He himself fully realized what was at stake, and had initially refused the Hamburg offer, but then John had said that the Beatles wouldn’t go without him, and he couldn’t let John down.

His tutor, Arthur Ballard, was appalled by this seemingly pointless sacrifice of a brilliant future, and furious with John—and Allan Williams—for encouraging it. Stu had been such an exceptional student, however, that the college showed willingness to bend the rules for him. He was told he could begin his postgraduate course later in the academic year if he wished.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison were also putting excellent career prospects at risk, as their respective families and teachers unavailingly told them. Paul had just taken his GCE A-levels and, like Stu, planned a teaching career, probably specializing in English. George had an apprenticeship as an electrician at Blacklers, the central Liverpool department store, which in those days virtually guaranteed him employment for life.

Alone of the five, John seemed to have nothing to lose. He had no prospect of gaining any meaningful qualification from art college, and no idea what he wanted to do as a career. The sole obstacle to be reckoned with was his Aunt Mimi. As his guardian, albeit never legally recognized as such, Mimi had the power to veto the whole trip. And, to be sure, her mixture of horror and mystification when first told about it were precisely as John expected. Mimi had no more understanding of rock ’n’ roll than when she first sent him out to practice in Mendips’s soundproof front porch four years previously;
to her, it was still no more than a hobby that interfered with his studies, involved the most unsavory possible people and places, and could never conceivably earn him anything like a proper living.

Now, at least, John could reply that it
would
be earning him a living. The Beatles’ collective weekly wage in Hamburg would be close to £100, which admittedly boiled down to only about £2.50 per day each, yet still seemed astronomical compared with the pittances they were paid in Liverpool. Fortunately, Mimi had never even heard of the Reeperbahn, let alone what was reputed to happen there. Her objections to “Humbug,” as she persisted in calling it, were that John would be giving up college and that he’d be associating with the erstwhile bombers of Liverpool. In the end, she decided—probably rightly—that if she didn’t give permission, he’d simply run away, and then might never come back again.

Like most British teenagers in 1960, John had never been abroad and did not even possess a passport. To apply for one, he had to produce his birth certificate, a document that had somehow gone missing after the frantic tug-of-love that had followed his birth. It turned up in the nick of time—but the way to Hamburg wasn’t all smooth sailing yet.

The Beatles’ new employer, Herr Koschmider, would obviously expect them to have a drummer. In the absence of any successor to Norman Chapman, Paul agreed to take on the role permanently, assembling a scratch kit from odds and ends that previous incumbents had left behind. The problem was that Koschmider had requested a group exactly like Derry and the Seniors—i.e., a quintet. That left only two weeks to find a fifth Beatle. At one point, John even considered asking Royston Ellis to join, in the role of “poet-compere,” as if he expected the Reeperbahn to be like some earnestly attentive student union.

On August 6, complaints from surrounding residents about noise, drunkenness, and violence shut down the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, thereby depriving the Beatles of their last regular Merseyside gig. For want of anything better to do that night, they ended up at the Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green.

In the ten months since John, Paul, and George had played there
as the Quarrymen—and walked out in a huff over a 15 shilling payment—the homely basement club had gone from strength to strength under Mona Best’s vigorous management. Even more gallingly, Ken Brown, the former Quarryman and cause of that bitter 15-bob tiff, had formed a new group, the Blackjacks, who now regularly drew bigger weekend crowds than even Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A major factor in their success was Mrs. Best’s moodily handsome son, Peter, playing a sumptuous new drum kit in a pale blue mother-of-pearl finish (with real calfskins), which his adoring mother had bought him.

Pete Best and his blue drums solved both of the Beatles’ predeparture problems at a stroke. “We just grabbed him and auditioned him,” John remembered. “He could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him.”

W
hat Liverpool had endured at the time of John’s birth Hamburg received back with compound interest. On the night of July 24, 1943, an Allied “thousand bomber raid,” code name Operation Gomorrah, dropped 2,300 tons of bombs and incendiaries on this most crucial of Hitler’s ports and industrial centers, unleashing greater destruction in a few hours than Merseyside had known over weeks during the purgatory of 1940. Four nights later, Gomorrah’s cleansers returned, creating a 150 mph firestorm that reduced eight square miles of the city to ashes and claimed 43,000 civilian lives, more than Britain had lost during the entire Blitz.

Now, only fifteen years after the war’s end, with its scars still far from healed, young survivors from that bomb-battered British city were taking music to young survivors of that devastated German one. In its small, unwitting way, it was a notable act of reconciliation that was to bind Liverpool and Hamburg together forever afterward
and foreshadow the apolitical youth culture soon to dominate the whole Western world. Though John never thought of it as such, he had embarked on his very first peace campaign.

To deliver Bruno Koschmider’s new employees as cheaply as possible—and being unable to resist any kind of lark—Allan Williams offered to drive them to Hamburg personally. In the end, a party of nine squeezed into Williams’s battered green-and-white Austin van outside the Jacaranda early on August 15, 1960. Besides John, Paul, George, Stu, and new drummer, Pete Best, the Welshman took along his Chinese wife, Beryl, his brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and his West Indian business partner, Lord Woodbine. In London, they picked up an additional passenger, a German waiter named Georg Steiner, who had also been hired by Koschmider. The van was not like a modern minibus with rows of seats, but a bare metal shell: those in its rear had nowhere to sit but on the piled-up stage equipment and baggage.

The two-day journey was fraught with problems that somehow only Liverpudlians could have created and only Liverpudlians had the resilience and humor to endure. At Harwich, whence they were to cross the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, dock workers initially refused to load the grotesquely overloaded vehicle aboard the ferry. According to Williams, it was mainly John who persuaded them to relent, striking up a rapport as easy as if he himself had spent a lifetime on the dockside.

In those days, when foreign package tours were still in their infancy, most Britons setting foot on mainland Europe underwent a profound culture shock. Now every European nation wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, eats the same fast food. But for nineteen-year-old John, this first-ever trip abroad meant entering a totally alien landscape where not a single person or thing looked or sounded or smelled the same as at home, food and toilet arrangements were hideously unpredictable, and drinking water, bizarrely, came in bottles rather than from the tap. There was as much fear as fascination in that introductory whiff of continental coffee, disinfectant, drains, and tobacco as darkly pungent as licorice.

With customary disregard for detail, Williams had not obtained the work permits his charges needed in order to appear for six weeks in a West German club and be paid in West German currency. If challenged en route, he said, they should pretend to be students on vacation. Fortunately, this was an era of mild frontier controls when, with wartime shortages still lingering, the most serious contraband was not drugs but food. The recurring official challenge, Paul McCartney remembers, was whether they had any illicit coffee. As with the Harwich stevedores, it was usually John’s mixture of charm and cheek at checkpoints that got them waved on with friendly smiles.

He was not always such a ray of sunshine. In Holland, Williams insisted on making a patriotic detour to Arnhem, scene of the Allies’ disastrous Operation Market Garden airborne landings in 1944. There Barry Chang took what would become a famous snapshot of Paul, George, Pete, Stu, Williams, Beryl, and Lord Woodbine around the casket-shaped memorial with its partially prophetic inscription
THEIR NAMES LIVETH FOR EVERMORE
. John, however, refused to leave the van. One can picture the scene in the bleary Dutch dawn—the big side door sliding back; the hunched and sleepy figure disinclined to move; the attempts to rouse him answered by a torrent of swear words.

He also took time for some shoplifting, finding the unsuspicious Netherland store owners absurdly easy victims after Woolton and Liverpool 8. The haul he later showed to Pete Best included jewelry, handkerchiefs, guitar strings, and a harmonica. Years later, when every detail of his early life was pored over by millions, that harmonica thoughtlessly pocketed in a Dutch music shop would cause many of his admirers pangs of vicarious guilt. Finally, a group of them resolved to set the matter right. Traveling to the Arnhem area, they found the same shop still in business and, to its owner’s bewilderment, solemnly repaid the cost of the stolen instrument.

T
hough the term had still to be coined, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was one of the world’s earliest experiments in sex therapy. The thinking—later to spread like wildfire through Europe, even unto Britain—was that being open about extreme or deviant sexual prac
tices was healthier than being secretive. It was also a way to manage the problems of the harbor area, corralling pleasure-bent sailors all in one place and so saturating them with off-the-radar pornography that they would hopefully be less inclined to rape or other sexual crimes outside its boundaries. The district of St. Pauli, which includes the Reeperbahn, was a perfect location, handily close to the dockside and well away from Hamburg’s swiftly rebuilt center and many respectable suburbs. This supposedly untamed carnal frontier was in effect a department of City Hall, governed by a mass of surprisingly straitlaced rules and regulations and watched over by a large and zealous police force.

Dusk was falling on August 16 when Allan Williams’s van eventually found its way through Hamburg to St. Pauli, and John, Paul, George, Stu, and Pete received their first sight of their new workplace. After the almost seamless nighttime blackout of Liverpool, the Reeperbahn was an eye-mugging spectacle. Continuous neon signs winked and shimmered in gold, silver, and every suggestive color of the rainbow, their voluptuous German script—
Mehrer, Bar Monika, Mambo Schankey, Gretel and Alphons, Roxy Bar
—making the entertainments on offer seem even more untranslatably wicked. Though it was still early, the whole strip teemed with people—or rather, with men—and had the lurching, anarchic feel of pub-closing time back home. As the arrivals would soon learn, this was a place where times of day meant nothing.

Their new employer, Bruno Koschmider, might have stepped straight from one of John’s more fanciful cartoons. Aged about fifty, he was a tiny man with an outsize head and wooden-puppet face, topped off by an elaborate silver coiffure. Thanks to a war-disabled leg, he walked with a limp, thus instantly qualifying for the copious Lennon gallery of “cripples.”

A guided tour of Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller club, in the Reeperbahn’s busiest and most garish sector, did much to compensate for his strange appearance. A teeming barn of a place, it had no obvious affinity with the Great War’s “Kaiser Bill,” being decorated on a nautical theme with ornamental life belts, brass binnacles, pipe-clayed cording, and booths shaped like rowboats. Only now did the new
comers learn that they were not to appear here, with Derry and the Seniors, as they’d been led to believe. In the nearby Grosse Freiheit (Great Freedom) Koschmider also operated a run-down strip club named the Indra. The Beatles’ job would be to make the Indra as big a teenage draw as Derry and his colleagues had the Kaiserkeller.

Worse followed when Koschmider led the way to the living quarters he had contracted to provide for them. A couple of blocks away in Paul Roosen Strasse, he owned a small cinema named the Bambi, which showed a mixture of porn flicks and old Hollywood gangster movies and Westerns. The Beatles’ quarters were a filthy, windowless room and two glorified broom closets immediately behind the screen. The only washing facilities were the adjacent cinema toilets. “We were put in this pigsty,” John remembered. “We were living in a toilet, like right next to the ladies’ toilet. We’d go to bed late and be woken up next day by the sound of the cinema show [and] old German fraus pissing next door.”

The working hours laid down by Koschmider were the biggest shock of all. Back in Liverpool, they had never been onstage longer than about twenty minutes. At the Indra club they would be expected to play for four and a half hours each weeknight, in sets of an hour or an hour and a half, with only three thirty-minute breaks in between. On Saturdays and Sundays, the playing time increased to six hours.

The quintet made their debut the following night, August 17, clad in matching lilac jackets that had been tailored for them by Paul McCartney’s next-door neighbor. It was far from a rip-roaring success. The thinnest sprinkle of customers watched from red-shaded tables, surprised not to see the club’s usual entertainment, a stripper named Conchita. Koschmider’s advance publicity, such as it was, had created some uncertainty as to the exact nature and purpose of the new attraction, “Beatle” being easily confused with the German word
peedle
, or little boy’s willy. The room reeked of stale beer and wine and was lined in dusty velvet drapes that muffled already feeble amps and made Pete Best feel as if he was “drumming under the bedclothes.”

All five “Peedles” were still wiped out by their journey, awed by
their new surroundings, and doubtful of their ability to connect with their new public. For the opening numbers, they stood as still and stiff-faced as lilac-tinted zombies. Dismayed by their lack of animation but unable to communicate in English, Koschmider shouted at them,
“Mach schau!”
—“Make a show”—a command usually given to dilatory striptease artistes. “And of course whenever there was any pressure point, I had to get us out of it,” John would remember. “The guys said, ‘Well okay John, you’re the leader.’ When nothing was going on, they’d say, ‘Uh-oh, no leader, fuck it,’ but if anything happened it was like ‘You’re the leader, you get up and do a show.’

“We were scared by it all at first, being in the middle of the tough clubland. But we felt cocky, being from Liverpool, at least believing the myth about Liverpool producing cocky people. So I put my guitar down and did Gene Vincent all night, banging and lying on the floor and throwing the mike around and pretending I had a bad leg…. We did mach schau-ing all the time from then on.”

According to myth, it was Hamburg that produced the first serious growth spurt in Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership. Actually, the Beatles spent almost their whole time in West Germany as a “covers band,” although that underrates the ingenuity they were forced to employ. The repertoire of mainstream rock-’n’-roll hits they first brought with them from Liverpool were exhausted as quickly as their last few English cigarettes. To get through sets an hour and a half long, they had to delve deep into the creative hinterland of all their musical idols—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers—seeking out little-known B-sides and unregarded album tracks. They had to find other rock-’n’-roll songs by American artists, black and white, singular and plural, that had never crossed the Atlantic, let alone made the British Top 20, and also ransack the milky post–rock-’n’-roll charts for ballads they could play without nausea, like Bobby Vee’s “More Than I Can Say.” With the continuing popularity of Duane “Twangy Guitar” Eddy, they had to be as much an instrumental as a vocal group, churning out bass-string psychodramas like Eddy’s “Rebel-Rouser” or “Shazam.” When rock, pop, country, and even skiffle could not fill out the time, they had to reach into the realm of stan
dards and show tunes that Paul overtly loved—and John covertly did—with old wind-up gramophone favorites like “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Besame Mucho,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

Performing nightly in their out-of-the-way, unalluring venue, they were somewhat like old-fashioned fairground barkers, first drawing in the patrons, then working like blazes to keep them there. The best come-on, they found, was a heavy, stomping beat, laid down by Pete Best’s blue bass drum, and perhaps not a million miles from the militaristic march tempo that had recently echoed across Europe. “We really had to hammer,” John recalled. “We had to try anything that came into our heads. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best, and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.”

The most famous Reeperbahn story, told and retold in Liverpool dockside pubs, was that you could see a woman being mounted by a donkey with a washer around its penis to restrict penetration. Though this new concept of donkey work proved a myth, St. Pauli had much else to shock and amaze. First, it had all the nudity it had been credited with and more—not coyly concealed by turned backs and crossed arms, as at home, but full-frontal, full-rear-al nudity, pulsing with youth and warmth and invitation. For all five teenage Beatles, sooner than they could ever have imagined, bouncing breasts and grinding, weaving G-strung bottoms became merely so much incidental furniture.

In some clubs, they could see men and women have full, unprotected sex in twos, threes, or even fours, in every possible and improbable configuration, often in the taboo combination of white and black. In others, they could see nude women wrestling in a pit of mud, cheered on by plump businessmen tied into communal pinafores to guard against the splashes. In the numerous
Schwülen laden
(queer dives) like Bar Monika or the Roxy Bar, they could watch men give each other blow jobs or meet male transvestites as beautiful and elegant as Parisian models who only in the final stages of intimacy would unveil their gristly secret.