The Beatles (56 page)

The Beatles took one look
at the Star-Club and saw paradise. It seemed tailored to showcase their music, “
the first real theatrical setting
[they’d] ever seen devoted to rock ’n roll.” The stage was huge, with a spangled backdrop of the Manhattan skyline suspended from struts and lit from behind by a rotating light box. There were enough microphones for a symphony orchestra, and a full arsenal of extraordinary American gear (the amplifiers were all Fenders, which the Beatles had only heard of, never seen). Paul’s eyes bugged out at the equipment specially installed for his use: a Fender Bassman head and two 15-inch speakers in an open-backed cabinet. Even the spotlights were clever: the electrician had coupled car headlights to a twelve-volt transformer and strung them along the front of the balcony. No expense had been spared. “
There was a fucking curtain
, brother!” recalls a duly impressed Liverpool musician. “We’d never seen one before and didn’t know what to do with it, so for the first few days everyone kept pushing the button, making it go back and forth.”

To keep the place operating efficiently, Weissleder had hired Horst Fascher as his chief of security. Fascher, a short, fair-haired man known for eerie politeness, had performed similar duties as enforcer at the Kaiserkeller and the Top Ten, which made him something of a fearsome legend on the Grosse Freiheit. “
The beatings he gave to people
were unbelievable!” says a musician with awe nearly forty years later. “He’d absolutely batter someone until they were senseless. In some of the fights I saw, his men hit guys with wooden chairs, barstools—hit them five or six times over the head, with blood pouring out. They could have easily killed someone, but it never seemed to bother Horst. He’d just throw the person outside and leave him.” Rumor had it that
the missing three fingers
on his right hand had been cut off by gangsters.

The musicians, especially the Beatles, loved Fascher.
He doted on them
like a favorite uncle, practicing his precious English, which he spoke in clipped, precise tones, and chauffeuring them around town in his prized gleaming-white 1957 Chevy convertible. But there were other advantages to his stewardship. “
Horst made sure we were protected
,” says the Merseybeats’ Tony Crane. Every musician was provided with an artful Star-Club
badge—gold typescript on a pin featuring a prominent blue star—which “
gave [them] immunity
” anywhere in the district. “Horst warned us never to go out without it,” recalls Ray Ennis. “We knew that no one would bother us as long as we had it on—and no one ever did.” Liverpool groups could abandon the old, naturally honed fears that stalked them back home. It was a relief not to have to fight their way out of a gig after work, or constantly worry that equipment would be nicked. Out of appreciation, they put up a sign backstage, renaming the club “
Manfred’s Home for Itinerant Scousers
.”

The opening of the Star-Club on April 13, 1962, was an unmitigated sensation. The dance floor was packed, according to Don Arden, the London promoter who held a small interest in the place, with “
roughly 850 to 1,000 people
, depending on how we wanted to shift the tables around and lie to the police about capacity.” And the Beatles kicked out the jams. George had arrived on time, chaperoned from Liverpool by Brian Epstein, and he seemed fully recovered, ready to play. Except for the wall-to-wall crowd that made it difficult to see the band and “got too rowdy and aggressive at times,” Weissleder had pulled off something of a coup: overnight, he had knocked the Top Ten off its enviable perch. Thereafter, all Liverpool bands played the Star-Club, “
a step up
” on the German rock ’n roll circuit, while the Top Ten relied on booking Scottish bands, a factor that eventually doomed it to oblivion.

During the next few weeks, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the Big Three, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and the Searchers all joined the Beatles at intervals during their triumphant residency. It was, from beginning to end, a Liverpool phenomenon. There was no mistaking that a distinctive sound was developing: chord patterns that repeated in their repertoires, a penchant for exquisitely modulated phrasing and sudden downshifting into minor chords, deliberate Everly Brothers references in the harmonies, ways of punctuating lyrics with dynamics, all of it creating a unique, idiosyncratic pop style. It would be another year before those features coalesced and became identified the world over as the Liverpool or Mersey sound, but the essential aspects of it were already in place.

In the almost two months the Beatles were in Hamburg, their sets bulged with new songs: the soulful “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” Ritchie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy,” a trio of Shirelles’ songs—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Mama Said,” and “Baby It’s You”—plus crowd-pleasers like “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Nobody But
You,” “Please Mr. Postman,” and “Mr. Moonlight.” To spotlight Pete, they incorporated “Boys” and “The Peppermint Twist” into the repertoire, and for George a pair of Goffin-King songs—“Don’t Ever Change” and “Sharing You”—as well as “Devil in Her Heart,” which was unearthed from a single by a little-known girl group, the Donays.

From the outset, the Beatles had a great ear. They could listen to something that was either raw or somehow never got off the ground and know instantly how to breathe new life into it. Such was the case in early 1962 when they stumbled across records by an American R&B singer named Arthur Alexander, one of the pioneers of the Muscle Shoals soul sound.
Only one of his songs, “You Better Move On
” (covered by the Rolling Stones in 1964) managed to nick the
Billboard
charts, but there was something powerful about his material that captured the Beatles’ imagination: it was direct, heartfelt and earnest, infused with great melodies. “
We wanted to [sound] like Arthur Alexander
,” Paul reflected in 1987. And for a while his songs dominated their nightly sets—lean, soulful versions of “Soldier of Love,” “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” and “Anna (Go to Him),” the latter of which was recorded for their first album.

With the new songs came a new round of drugs, for the Beatles and the other Liverpool bands. Combined with ridiculous quantities of beer, the speed produced harrowing exploits of drunkenness—smashing guitars onstage, driving insanely, fighting, terrorizing women, behaving rudely at boisterous parties. To keep it all from collapsing necessitated more and more speed. Conveniently, there was no shortage of suppliers right on the premises. Mutti, who followed Horst Fascher to the Star-Club, doled out pills from her stall outside the toilets. Otherwise, Tony Sheridan functioned as the Johnny Appleseed of uppers. He had a bottomless supply, which flowed generously from band to band. When a musician voiced a concern about supply, one of the resident gangsters proudly and swaggeringly drove him out to a farm in the Hamburg countryside. As the eyewitness recalls it: “
He opened the barn door
and there was the trailer of a semi, with its doors flung open and a cascade of boxes and bottles stretching from the back of the truck to the barn door. He’d hijacked the entire supply of amphetamines for northern Germany for a year—just so they could furnish them to us for free.” The craziness that a beer-and-Prellie binge brought on was neither accidental nor arbitrary. The Big Three’s Adrian Barber remembers that Manfred Weissleder deliberately promoted both substances to musicians, not for profits from the drug trade, per se, but because “it kept us stoned and dependent.”

Deliberate or not,
John Lennon managed to fuel his rage
in a stupor of uncontrolled intoxication.
He’d begun blowing off steam
in Hamburg from the moment the Beatles arrived, drinking steadily. At an early-morning party following their opening shows, he doused an annoyed Brian Epstein with warm beer. That established a pattern for the next seven weeks. No one complained when John showed up drunk onstage or played in animal skins or “
foamed at the mouth
” following a “Prellie sandwich,” but it had a cumulative effect. Gradually, the antics grew wilder and more destructive. John began to pick fights he couldn’t win, storming friends in a hail of insults. He told Adrian Barber that “
all people [were] basically shit
” and deserved abuse. It seemed that anyone who crossed his path was fair game. Gerry Marsden recalled how one night, without any provocation, John crowned a fellow with a bottle during a friendly card game and got a beating in return. The guy “knocked hell” out of John. “
And all of us just stood there
and let him do it.” He had it coming, they agreed, and got what he deserved.

John’s spring was filled with similar binges and brawls. It became “
a trend [for musicians] to bounce around
and do inexplicable, outrageous things,” but John took on audiences without regard for the consequences. One night he danced up to the microphone and announced: “
Hey, remember the war
? Well, we fuckin’ won!” Then, grabbing his crotch, he screamed, “Sieg heil
this!
” In case that hadn’t gotten their attention, he dropped his pants and pranced across the stage in his underwear.

Friends from Liverpool, who were used to John’s belligerence, thought he’d gone “
a little bit mad
.” John, in a harsher self-evaluation, later insisted he was “
out of my fucking mind
.
” But the anger and self-hatred were the result of something much more rational. Wounded by the real world, he preferred to face it drunk. Drinking was an excuse, a way to bury the pain of Stu’s death. Drunk, he wouldn’t have to deal with the loss or his unresolved feelings.

If the other Beatles were concerned, they did nothing to intercede. As far as anyone could tell, they never acknowledged that John was out of control, never suggested he take it down a notch or two. It may have seemed perfectly normal to three twenty-year-olds that a comrade would blow off steam in a place like the Grosse Freiheit. Liverpool lads were known to “
let loose like maniacs
.” And it wasn’t too far afield from John’s usual hostile behavior—only more pronounced and enduring than before.

Part of it, no doubt, could be traced to frustration. It was a word he grappled with repeatedly in later recollections of Hamburg—frustration
over the Decca rejection, over the Beatles’ image, over their lack of a topflight drummer, over an indefinite future. Now, news from Cynthia added to his frustration. She had moved into a one-room flat,
a “shabby little… bedsit”
with a shared bath, in a terrace house near Penny Lane, where John looked forward to setting up permanent residence with her following the band’s return to Liverpool. (This, despite the fact that John had begun a torrid relationship with Bettina Derlin, one of the Star-Club’s raunchier bartenders.) Until then, however, Cynthia had invited Dot Rhone to keep her company there. Instead of applauding her self-sufficiency, John dashed off a letter to Cynthia, barely disguising his displeasure. He urged her to “find another flat” for Dot so that it wouldn’t infringe on their privacy. He viewed Dot, who was even more fragile and insecure than he was, as a threat to their relationship. “
Imagine having her there all the time
when we were in bed—and imagine Paul coming all the time—and especially when I wasn’t there. I’d hate the idea.”

Aside from music, Cynthia was the one bright spot in John’s life. Now, too, those sands had begun to shift, and everything under their feet started to give way.

By the beginning of May, Brian Epstein was desperate. He had run out of options as far as record-company contacts were concerned and dreaded facing the Beatles empty-handed when they returned home in a few weeks. “
The pressure was really getting to him
,” recalls Alistair Taylor. “He’d grown increasingly distraught.” With his back to the wall, Brian relented and went back to see George Martin about his open-ended offer to audition the Beatles.

It seemed like an exercise in futility, but Brian put on his most charming face for the meeting, determined to win the producer’s friendship as well as his support. Apparently, the approach paid off. During their amiable meeting at EMI Studios on the morning of May 9, Martin not only honored his offer for an audition but proposed issuing a recording contract for the Beatles before even meeting them. It was an extraordinary development and, no doubt, one that Brian hadn’t anticipated. He must have been astonished, not to mention giddy with excitement.

And yet, while the gesture appeared magnanimous, it was little more than an insurance policy for Martin, should the Beatles live up to expectations.
The contract, in effect, guaranteed the band nothing, least of all a recording session. Instead, by signing it, the Beatles gave EMI a lock on their services
if
the audition showed promise, at which time Martin only had to countersign the document for it to be binding. Otherwise, it would be worthless.

Brian, who surely recognized the drawbacks, responded quickly, believing that any contract was better than nothing at this point. So, on May 9, 1962, he arranged an audition date for a few days after the Beatles returned from Hamburg, then rushed off to the nearest post office to telephone his parents and wire two cables. The first was to the Beatles in Hamburg—an incisive announcement that set the tone for everything that eventually happened. It read:

CONGRATULATIONS BOYS
. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.

A second message, delivered to the
Mersey Beat
offices the same day, said:

HAVE SECURED CONTRACT
FOR BEATLES TO RECORDED [SIC] FOR EMI ON PARLAPHONE [SIC] LABEL. 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH.

It was a stunning piece of news.
None of the Beatles had been forewarned
of new developments on that front, and only George had held out hope for such an outcome.
By way of celebration
, they clapped one another on the back and reprised a popular chant: