Paul McCartney (15 page)

There remained one major obstacle for the band who, for the sake of simplicity in a non-English-speaking environment, now called themselves simply the Beatles. Somehow or other, they would have to find themselves a drummer. They thought they’d struck lucky with a mysterious youth named Norman Chapman, whom they chanced to hear practising alone–and brilliantly–in an office building near the Jacaranda. Chapman sat in with them a couple of times, but then had to go into the army in Britain’s final batch of National Service conscripts.

With their departure date looming, Paul was ready to take on the drummer’s role, using odds and ends of kit left behind by previous incumbents. However, that would still leave them one body short: Herr Koschmider wanted a band exactly like the one Williams had previously sent him, and Derry and the Seniors were a quintet.

Then late one night, John, Paul and George happened to drop by the Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green, their first visit since playing there as the Quarrymen the previous year and walking out in a Paul-led huff. They found Mona Best’s basement venue still buzzy, now with a resident band named the Blackjacks, featuring her handsome, taciturn son Pete, on his pearly blue drum-kit. Afterwards, Paul contacted Pete Best–who, coincidentally, was also bound for teacher-training college–told him about the Hamburg gig and invited him to audition for the Beatles. This duly took place, at the same run-down club where they themselves had auditioned for Larry Parnes, but was the merest formality: Pete was in as suddenly as, two years later, he would be out. Blackjacked twice over.

At the Inny, the news that Paul was blowing out sixth form to become a rock musician caused a sensation among pupils and staff alike. Head of English ‘Dusty’ Durband was deeply disappointed by this apparently reckless sacrifice of the most worthwhile of careers. ‘Just who do you want to be, Paul?’ Durban inquired, quoting the least impressive pop name he could think of: ‘Tommy Steele?’

Strictly speaking, it was Jim McCartney’s job to give written notice to the headmaster, Mr Edwards, but Paul himself did so. He was, as always, polite and respectful to ‘the Baz’, but couldn’t resist mentioning the affluence awaiting him in Hamburg: ‘I am sure you will understand why I will not be coming back in September… and the pay is £15 per week.’

On the last day of term, his farewell was to climb onto his wooden desk–the one at which the famous funny man Arthur Askey used to sit–and perform ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ in his lustiest Little Richard shriek.

‘Everything’s mad here. People never sleep’

Dear Dad and Mike

Well, it’s not going too badly, but one disadvantage is that we never get up in time to buy things like writing paper etc!! (as you can see) We play pretty long hours but if we ever feel like going out we can do so because the majority of places stay open till about 7 or 8 in the morning.

I bought a cheap watch at a weekly market they have here, it’s quite good, & keeps good time (cost about 22/- [£1.10])

Because we get up so late in the day, we don’t have time to write, that’s why I’m writing now at 10.30 [am] before I go to sleep.

To Mike.

Tony Sheridan, who was on Oh Boy! & the Empire is in Hamburg & we’re quite good friends. He played with us the other night for a guest spot. Our club’s big but the atmosphere at the place where Sheridan used to play (The Top Ten) is fabulous, & ours is pretty useless.

I’m getting pretty homesick, & even more so now because recently we’ve heard that we may be kept on & may be in Germany for ages! We really can’t refuse if they give us the chance because the money is much better than at home.

Everything’s mad here. People never sleep. The food is… just like English food gone wrong. Potatoes with salad, cold tomatoes, lettuce & that grand luxury dish–potatoes frittes or something
ie.
chips. Sausages are extremely long and are made with fish & meat. Ugh! Ah well, we can buy corn flakes, beefsteak, liver, mashed potatoes etc, at the local cafe now so we’re eating well. We can get a glass of milk for about 13 pfennigs [1p] so that’s cheap enough. Anyway, I’d rather be home.

Don’t be frightened to write. I won’t be annoyed if you do.

Love & Auf Wiedersehen

Paul

This innocent account of shopping for watches in open-air markets, buying cornflakes and drinking milk of course represents only a fraction of what Paul has been doing since his arrival in Hamburg. With typical considerateness, he doesn’t want to worry or offend his father–still less risk being summarily ordered home. Here’s just a little of what he left out:

He’s in Hamburg’s St Pauli district, home of the Reeperbahn, Europe’s most notorious red-light area, surrounded by strip clubs, prostitutes, porno bookshops, blue movie shows, pimps, transvestites and gangsters… His new employer, Bruno Koschmider, is a circus clown turned strip-club owner who enjoys beating up customers with a cosh or a wooden chair-leg while thuggish waiters hold the victim helpless… The Beatles aren’t appearing at Koschmider’s large, busy Kaiserkeller club as they’d expected, but at a run-down strip joint nearby where they’re being used virtually as slave labour, playing for four-and-a-half hours with only three 30-minute breaks each week-night, and for six hours at weekends.… The living accommodation provided for the five of them consists of two stone-walled, windowless, airless storerooms at the rear of a porno cinema called the Bambi Kino, with no washing facilities but the cinema’s gents’ toilet: all in all a scene of squalor and degradation that would have made his fastidious mother weep.

When the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, fellow Liverpudlians Derry and the Seniors had already been playing at the Kaiserkeller for some months. With their black singer, Derry Wilkie, they were a polished, highly professional outfit to whom John, Paul and George had always seemed like little boys, skiffling on the margin. Indeed, their sax-player Howie Casey was incredulous that Allan Williams should be sending over such a ‘bum group’ to play alongside them.

Not all Casey’s bandmates were so disparaging–for instance, newcomer guitarist Brian Griffiths who, at 16, was even younger than George. Back in Liverpool, ‘Griff’ had been outside the Jacaranda one day when he heard a noise coming up through a pavement-grating. ‘It was the Beatles, rehearsing in the basement,’ he says. ‘I’ll always remember, Paul was singing “Roll Over Beethoven” in an amazing, pure voice that seemed to hit every note effortlessly–and yet it rocked! It rocked! It rocked!’

The Beatles’ disappointing venue was called the Indra and located in a street off the main Reeperbahn named the Grosse Freiheit (meaning ‘great freedom’). It had long been failing as a strip club and Bruno Koschmider wanted to change its image, though at first its regulars may well have misinterpreted that change: to German ears, ‘Beatles’ was easily confused with ‘peedles’, meaning little boys’ willies.

The band took the stage in matching lavender-coloured jackets, tailored by the McCartneys’ next-door neighbour, and the same black shirts they’d worn on the Johnny Gentle tour. Paul had a new guitar, a Rosetti Solid 7 with a red sunburst body and double cutaway which, unfortunately, looked a lot better than it sounded. Like the Zenith, it was a right-handed model, which he had to play upside-down with the strings in inverted order.

On this night of 17 August 1960, the five were still exhausted by their road trip from England in Allan Williams’s ramshackle van as well as stunned by their first immersion in the Reeperbahn and deflated by the sordid little club, whose scatter of customers were mostly expecting its usual attraction, a stripper named Conchita.

Their opening numbers were so somnambulistic that Bruno Koschmider began clapping his hands and shouting ‘Mach Schau! [Make it a show]’, an exhortation which in these parts usually caused tassels on bare breasts to whirl faster or heralded the climactic shedding of a G-string. John responded with an over-the-top parody of Gene Vincent, fresh from the Eddie Cochran death-crash, hunchbacked and dragging one calipered leg like a caterwauling Quasimodo. Blissfully unaware that they were being mocked, the Germans loved it.

A half-dead club wasn’t instantly brought to life the way Elvis had done it in his best feature film, King Creole. The Beatles had to build an audience: first making enough noise to attract people in off the Grosse Freiheit, then pulling out all the stops to hold their attention, sometimes playing a whole set to a single occupied table. ‘They had to be good,’ says Hamburg musician Frank Dostal, ‘or else the customers just left and went into the strip-joint or porno bookstore next door.’

Derry and the Seniors dropped by to watch during a break from their own equally punishing work schedule at the Kaiserkeller, further along the street. Saxophonist Howie Casey was amazed at the change in that ‘bum group’ he’d last seen at the Larry Parnes audition. ‘Then, they’d seemed almost embarrassed about how bad they were. But they’d turned into a good stomping band.’

‘Paul was really the one keeping them together,’ Brian Griffiths says. ‘John in those days wasn’t such a good singer, George was very shy, Stu was still a learner on the bass and Pete Best had only just come into the band. Paul had the voice–and the musical technique. He knew all about minor and diminished seventh chords, whereas John was still hanging round guitarists in other bands, saying, “Go on, show us a lick.”’

The Tony Sheridan mentioned in Paul’s letter had been the first British musician on the Reeperbahn, with his backing band, the Jets. Born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity, he was a brilliant guitarist with an educated accent and a streak of self-destructive devilment that was to find a ready response in John. ‘When the Beatles walked into the club where I was playing, I recognised them as blood-brothers,’ Sheridan remembered, ‘although at first I wondered about Paul with that girlie face and those thin eyebrows. Was he gay or something?’

Sheridan gave the Liverpool boys a guided tour of the Reeperbahn’s still unique depravities: the strip clubs where everything came off, the interracial sex-shows, the female mud-wrestling displays, the transvestite bars, the tributary street named the Herbertstrasse whose lighted shop windows displayed price-ticketed whores of every age and size.

They also discovered how the Reeperbahn’s denizens, both British and German, managed to keep themselves going all through its neon-crazy night. They took a slimming tablet called Preludin whose amphetamine content stepped up the body’s metabolic rate, creating both manic energy and a raging thirst. Apart from chewing Vick nasal inhalers, it was the first drug the Beatles had ever tried. John devoured it unthinkingly, taking five or six ‘Prellys’ in an evening, washed down with so many steins of beer that he’d sometimes foam at the mouth like a rabid dog.

But Paul exercised caution and restraint. Prellys induced such goggle-eyed wakefulness that the only way of getting any rest was to take a sleeping-pill. He hated that groggy morning-after feeling–for which the quickest cure was to pop another Prelly. So as not to be thought ‘a cissy’, he’d take just one of the tiny white pills then pretend to be as wired as John.

This ability to put a shell around himself, developed after his mother’s death, also helped him endure the band’s horrible sleeping quarters behind the Bambi Kino, where rats scuttled over the bare concrete floor and the smallest rain-shower came dribbling through the ceiling onto the dingy little cots below. He imagined himself a struggling artist, a young Picasso or Matisse, surviving in a Parisian attic. And one day, he thought, all of this would make ‘a chapter for the memoirs’.

Even his self-control and fastidiousness, however, couldn’t withstand what he later called Hamburg’s ‘sex shock’. He and the others had come from a country whose young women still encased themselves in impenetrable brassieres and corsets, believed premarital sex to be sinful and were haunted by a fear of getting pregnant. Now they were in a community of prostitutes, strippers and barmaids with no such inhibitions–or restrictive undergarments–who found these baby-Teddy boy musicians hugely attractive and, in forthright German style, made no bones about it. Here, sex was no longer an occasional stroke of luck but a 24-hour buffet.

Paul was later to admit he found his first sexual experience with one of these professionals thoroughly unnerving. ‘[She was] a shortish, dark-haired girl… I think she was a strip-teaser. I remember feeling very intimidated in bed with her… spent the whole night not doing an awful lot but trying to work up to it.’

Sometimes the girls had flats or rooms of their own, but often they’d have to be brought back to the Bambi Kino which offered no privacy whatever. When 17-year-old George lost his virginity, Paul, John and Pete were all in bed a few feet away: they kept quiet during the transaction, but cheered and clapped at its end. If Paul came in and saw ‘a little bottom bobbling up and down’, meaning John was athwart a lady friend, he’d mumble ‘Sorry’ and duck out again as if he’d blundered into a wrong classroom at the Inny. John wasn’t always so considerate. ‘When [he] found Paul in bed with a chick,’ George later recalled, ‘he went and got a pair of scissors and cut all her clothes in pieces, then wrecked the wardrobe.’

Even with such distractions, Paul’s primary concern was always the band. ‘I remember, John and I had been drinking for most of the night in this place called Carmen’s Bar,’ Brian Griffiths says. ‘About nine o’clock the next morning, we were walking back to the Indra and as we get closer, we hear a noise… it’s Paul, alone in the empty club, practising Elvis’s big ballad of 1960, “It’s Now or Never”. John goes, “Oh, what the frig’s he doing that sort of crap for?” To John, the only Elvis tracks worth anything were things like “That’s All Right, Mama” and “Mystery Train”. But Paul knew they couldn’t get through the night only on rock ‘n’ roll and they had to appeal to the German audience. So he’d also do “Wooden Heart”, from Elvis’s GI Blues, complete with the verse in German.’

Both the Liverpool bands had entered West Germany without the necessary work permits. If challenged, the Beatles were to pose as students on vacation (which two of them really were) and Derry and the Seniors as plumbers who’d brought along musical instruments to entertain themselves between jobs.