Shout! (21 page)

The flattery of being photographed by a beautiful blonde German girl was nothing to the flattery bestowed by the photographs themselves. These were not the usual little snapshots knocked off by some bystander, usually at the least flattering possible moment. These were big, grainy prints, conjured by the girl herself from the recesses of her black satin room and showing the five Beatles as they had never imagined themselves before. Astrid’s lens, in fact, captured the very quality that attracted intellectuals like Klaus and her—the paradox of Teddy Boys with child faces; of would-be toughness and all-protecting innocence. The blunt, heavy fairground machines on which they sat seemed to symbolize their own slight but confident perch on grown-up life. John,
with his collar up, hugging his new Rickenbacker; Paul, with the pout he knew suited him; George, uneasy; Pete Best, self-contained, a little apart—each image held its own true prophecy. In one shot, Stu Sutcliffe stood with his back to the others, the long neck of his guitar pointing into the ground.

It was the first of many photographic sessions with Astrid in the weeks that followed. Each time she would pose them, with or without their guitars, against some part of industrial Hamburg—the docks or the railway sidings. She was lavish with the prints she gave them and with invitations to meals at her house. “I’d cook them all the things they missed from England: scrambled eggs, chips.” All the time, with Klaus Voorman’s help, her English was improving.

At the Kaiserkeller, a part of the audience now were
exi
s brought in by Astrid and Klaus. It became a fad among them to dress, like the rockers, in leather and skin-tight jeans. The Beatles’ music belonged to the same intellectual conversion. Soon the
exi
s had their own small preserve of tables next to the stage. And always among them the girl who followed no style but her own sat with Klaus Voorman, or without him, waiting for the moment, late at night, when John and Paul stood aside and Stu Sutcliffe stepped forward with his heavy bass to sing the Elvis ballad, “Love Me Tender.”

Astrid made no secret of the pursuit, and Stu, for his part, was shyly fascinated. Her elfin beauty, combined with big-breasted voluptuousness, her forthright German ways mingled with a yielding softness, were more than sufficient to captivate any young, inexperienced heterosexual male. Across the barrier of language, they found their passionate artistic and literary beliefs to be one. The talks by candlelight on Astrid’s black coverlet quickly led to other delights unenvisaged by a schoolteacher’s son from Sefton Park, Liverpool.

Astrid was the initiator and teacher, and Stu the willing pupil. With the skills of the artist and the practicality of the
hausfrau
she began to model him into an appearance echoing and complementing her own. She did away first with his Teddy-Boy hairstyle, cutting it short like hers, then shaping it to lie across the forehead in what was then called a French cut, although high-class German boys had worn a similar style since the days of Bismarck.

When Stu arrived at the Kaiserkeller that night John and Paul laughed so much that he hastily combed his hair back into its old upswept
style. Next night, he tried the new way again, ignoring the others’ taunts. Strangely enough, it was George, the least adventurous or assertive one, who next allowed Astrid to unpick the high sheaf of black hair that had previously so emphasized his babyish ears. Paul tried it next, but temporarily—he was waiting to see what John would do. John tried it, so Paul tried it again. Only Pete Best’s hair stayed as before, a crisp, unflappable cockade.

Astrid also began to design and make clothes for Stu. She made him first a suit of shiny black leather jerkin and sheath-tight trousers like the ones she wore herself. The other four Beatles so admired it that they at once ordered copies from a tailor in St. Pauli. Theirs, however, were of less fine workmanship, baggy-waisted and with seams that kept coming apart. At that point, for the moment, Astrid’s influence over them stopped. They laughed at Stu for wearing, as she did, a black corduroy jacket without lapels, based on Pierre Cardin’s current Paris collections. “What are you doing in Mum’s suit then, Stu?” became the general taunt.

Astrid’s mother, horrified to learn of Stu’s living conditions, insisted on giving him his own room, as Klaus Voorman had formerly had, at the top of the Kirchherr house. In November 1960, two months after their first meeting, they became engaged. They bought each other rings, in the German fashion, and went in Astrid’s car for a drive beside the river Elbe. “It was a real engagement,” Astrid says. “We knew from the beginning that it was inevitable we should marry. And so it should have been.”

Stu, despite his quietness and gentleness, was not always an easy person. At times he could be moody and jealously suspect Astrid of being in love with someone else. His emotion, when angry or passionate, could reach an intensity that was almost like a mild seizure. He suffered, too, from headaches, sudden and violent, that shut his eyes in agony behind the dark glasses that were not, she discovered, entirely for show. Then, with equal suddenness, the fit of pain would pass.

Even Astrid could not affect Stu’s life as the downtrodden butt of the other Beatles’ humor. On stage, they teased and taunted him continually, for his smallness, for his outrageous new clothes, above all for the bass playing that never seemed equal to their needs. John inflicted the worst treatment of all, even though, as Astrid well knew, a deep friendship still existed between Stu and him. It was in Paul’s more bantering
tone that the true arrows came. For Paul wanted Stu’s job as bass guitarist. “When John and Stu had a row,” Astrid says, “you could still feel the affection that was there. But when Paul and Stu had a row, you could tell Paul hated him.”

A few yards up the Reeperbahn stood a large, semiunderground arena called the Hippodrome. In former days, it had been a circus, featuring horses ridden by naked girls. By 1960, such entertainments having grown unfashionable, the Hippodrome stood, behind its heavy iron portcullis, dark and in decay. Its owner, a certain Herr Eckhorn, decided to hand it on to his son, Peter, who had recently come home from the sea and was anxious to start a music club in competition with Bruno Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller.

Young Peter Eckhorn wasted no time in hitting at his intended rival. First, he suborned Koschmider’s chief bouncer, Horst Fascher. While still employed at the Kaiserkeller, Horst was helping Eckhorn convert the old Hippodrome, putting in a stage and dance floor and makeshift wooden booths painted the cheapest color, black. Fascher, in addition, began to sow discontent at the Kaiserkeller, telling Bruno’s musicians of the better pay and conditions that Eckhorn’s club—the Top Ten—would offer. “I showed Tony Sheridan out of the back door right away,” Horst recalls with pride. “That Koschmider went crazy, but what could he do to me? He had too great a fear.”

The Top Ten club opened in November 1960, with music by Tony Sheridan and his original Soho-levied group, the Jets. Eckhorn also wanted Derry and the Seniors, but they were by now so poverty-stricken that they had applied to the British consul in Hamburg for an assisted passage home to Liverpool.

The Beatles stayed on at the Kaiserkeller, although in a mood of increasing restlessness. The Top Ten, with its circuslike dimensions and higher rates of pay, was infinitely more attractive than Bruno Koschmider’s nautically inspired basement. Their employer, moreover, stung by Horst Fascher’s and Tony Sheridan’s defection, grew rabidly proprietorial. With a stubby forefinger he drew their attention to the clause in their contract that forbade them to play in any other club within a twenty-five-mile radius of the Kaiserkeller. It had reached Bruno’s ears that when visiting the Top Ten they would sometimes get up and jam with Tony Sheridan on stage.

Before long, Peter Eckhorn had persuaded them to forget the residue of their contract with Koschmider and come across to play for him at the Top Ten. Koschmider, according to Pete Best, hinted that if the Beatles joined Eckhorn, they might not be able to walk with complete safety after dark.

Retribution of a different sort overtook them, however, possibly with some help from Bruno Koschmider. They were about to open at the Top Ten when the
Polizei
, conducting a belated examination of George Harrison’s passport, discovered that he was only seventeen, and too young to be in a club after midnight. For plainly flouting this rule George was ordered out of Germany. Stu and Astrid put him on the train home, dismayed and lost-looking, with some biscuits and apples for the journey.

The others played a few nights at the Top Ten, with John taking the lead guitar part, or leaving it out, and Paul doubling on a piano that was there. Astrid, Klaus, and the
exi
s had followed them from the Kaiserkeller; so had Akim Reichel, a dockside waiter who had discovered them first at the Indra. Akim remembers how tired and dispirited the four survivors seemed. They had been on the Reeperbahn, after all, nearly four months. “They would play sometimes a whole hour,” Akim says, “sitting on the edge of their amplifiers.”

Peter Eckhorn, as well as paying ten marks a day more than Koschmider, provided sleeping accommodation above the club, in an attic fitted with bunk beds. Though far from luxurious, and shared with Tony Sheridan’s group, it was still a vast improvement on the Bambi Kino. Rosa, the WC lady—who had also forsaken the Kaiserkeller for the Top Ten—was prevailed upon by John Lennon to bring coffee and shaving water up to them when they woke in the early afternoon.

In their haste to desert Koschmider Paul and Pete Best had left most of their belongings in the rooms behind the Bambi. They nerved themselves to go back a few days later, walking in through the cinema foyer without opposition, and finding their property all intact behind the screen. Coming out again, down the dark corridor from their respective cubbyholes, Paul struck a match in order to see. “There were some filthy old drapes on the wall, like sacking,” Pete Best says. “Paul caught a bit of that stuff with the match. It wasn’t anything like a fire. It just smouldered a little bit.” Paul’s version is that, in a spirit of half-hearted vandalism, they set fire to a condom.

Early the next morning, policemen entered the Top Ten club,
pounded upstairs to the attic, hauled Pete Best and Paul out of bed, hustled them off to the Reeperbahn’s Station 15, and placed them under lock and key. Between them, using their O-level German, they elicited the fact that they were being held on suspicion of trying to burn down the Bambi Kino. “They only kept us there a few hours,” Pete Best says. “Afterward they admitted it never should have happened.”

No charges were pressed—according to Bruno Koschmider, a magnanimous gesture on his part. Even so, Paul and Pete were both immediately deported. The next day found them on a flight to England, minus most of their clothes and luggage and Pete Best’s drum set.

For John and Stu there was no alternative but to follow the others home. Stu made the journey by air, with a ticket paid for by the Kirchherrs. John went on the train alone, carrying his guitar and the amplifier he had not yet paid for, and terrified he wouldn’t find England where he had left it.

SIX

“HI, ALL YOU CAVERN-DWELLERS. WELCOME TO THE
BEST
OF CELLARS”

H
e reached home in the early hours of a December morning and threw stones at his aunt Mimi’s bedroom window to wake her. Mimi opened the front door and, as John lurched past, enquired sarcastically what had happened to his hundred pounds a week. And if he thought he was going around Woolton in those cowboy boots, Mimi added, he had better think again. John collapsed into bed, not stirring out of doors for a week afterward. In a little while there came a timorous knock at the door of the outer porch. It was his ever faithful, long-suffering girlfriend, Cynthia Powell.

At Forthlin Road Paul found waiting for him a single GCE A-level certificate—in art—and a father who, luckily, was not the type to crow. Even so, Jim McCartney pointed out, it was time to think about getting a proper job. Paul gave in and registered at the local Labor Exchange. The two weeks before Christmas he spent helping to deliver parcels around the docks on the back of a truck belonging to the Speedy Prompt Delivery Company.

He didn’t contact John again until just before Christmas, by which time, to add to the gloom, snow was falling. Snow is never pretty in Liverpool. The two ex-Hamburg desperados, with watering eyes and fingers huddled in their pockets, met down in the city for a drink. They could feel through their boot soles, too, the chill damp of dead-end failure.

Together, they sought out their erstwhile manager, Allan Williams, and found him in equally deflated spirits. Returning from Hamburg the last time he had decided to open the first Liverpool version of a Reeperbahn beat music club. He had taken over an old bottle-washing shop in Soho Street, and employed Lord Woodbine to effect a brief renovation. The new club was to be called the Top Ten and run by Bob Wooler, the railway clerk and spare-time disk jockey who had helped Williams
recruit attractions for his Boxing Stadium concert. Wooler, on the strength of Williams’s offer, had even resigned his steady job with the docks office.

Liverpool’s Top Ten club opened on December 1, 1960. Six days later, it burned to the ground. Local opinion suspected a “torch job.”

Only the cellar club in West Derby run by Pete Best’s mother remained as a potential gig for Williams’s unlucky protégés. Derry and the Seniors had played the Casbah following their own Hamburg disaster, and had good-naturedly plugged the Beatles’ name. When Mona Best gave them their first return booking a poster was put on the cellar door loyally proclaiming the “Fabulous Beatles” had returned. George was then contacted—lying low in Speke, he had not realized that John and Paul were home. Stu Sutcliffe, however, remained out of touch with the others until well into the following January.

That first night back at the Casbah showed what a transformation Hamburg had wrought. The months of sweated nights at the Kaiserkeller had given their music a prizefighter’s muscle and power; each number was stamped through as if against a Reeperbahn brawl, or in one last attempt to break through Bruno Koschmider’s stage. They literally rocked the little club under the Victorian house, where nothing more wicked than Pepsi Cola was drunk, nothing popped more potent than peanuts, and where no fracas arose that could not be quelled by Mrs. Best’s vigorous, dark-eyed stare.