The Beatles in Hamburg

Ian Inglis

• Editorial: Reaktion Books
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781861899521
• Categoría: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoría: Musique

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are four of the most famous names in the history of music. In the 1960s, the Beatles became the bestselling pop band in the world, inspiring legions of fans and developing into popular music icons. Fifty years later, their recordings are still in demand. But none of this happened overnight. As Ian Inglis reveals in this tale of the band's early years, before they took the world by storm, the Beatles were little more than an inexperienced, semi-professional group of talented musicians in dire need of practice.

Inglis tells the story of the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany, where their agent, Allan Williams, first sent them in August of 1960. In addition to showing how Hamburg itself played a role in the Beatles' remarkable story, Inglis details the difficulties they faced— unusualperformance venues, age restrictions, and deportations—and the experiences and personalities that shaped them as performers and composers. Ultimately, Inglis explains, the Beatles not only became proficient musicians in Hamburg, but while there they began to build the reputation that would eventually make them the most popular band in the world. An illuminating look at the group's formative years, The Beatles in Hamburg is the perfect book for any one in thrall of Beatlemania or fan of popular music history.

1 HAMBURG BEFORE THE BEATLES,
THE BEATLES BEFORE HAMBURG

There had been a settlement between the rivers Elbe and Alster since around ad 800; in the ninth century, a small harbour containing a 120-metre-long wooden jetty was used by the town’s 200 inhabitants for long-distance trade, and the fortress of Hammaburg was built nearby to provide protection. In 937 Archbishop Adaldag granted the town the right to hold markets, thus recognizing its status as a maritime trading centre. Despite repeated attacks from Viking, Polish and Danish forces, its mercantile activities continued, and in 1189 Emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted the town an imperial charter, which guaranteed the right to customs-free travel along the lower Elbe to the North Sea. In 1321 it joined with a number of northern European towns (including Lübeck, Visby and Riga) situated around the Baltic coast to form the economic federation known as the Hanseatic League. Although much of the League’s trading activities were to the east or with Scandinavia, Hamburg’s position allowed it to develop as its gateway to the west and the North Sea: over the next hundred years, it established trading posts in London, Bruges, Amsterdam and northern Scandinavia, and its population doubled from 8,000 to 16,000.

The European discovery of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century gave a further impetus to Hamburg’s foreign trade, especially with those countries on Europe’s Atlantic coast. Throughout the sixteenth century large numbers of Jewish and Protestant refugees came to the city from across Europe to escape religious persecution, bringing with them new financial and trading connections. Direct trade with North America commenced in 1782 and by 1800, the port of Hamburg was home to nearly 300 ships. The imposition by Napoleon of the Continental System (an embargo on trade with England) from 1806 to 1814 provided a serious, if temporary, obstacle to the city’s continued growth. However, in the mid-nineteenth century a programme of vigorous expansion began, bringing increased docks, storage and shipyard facilities. By 1913 the city had more than a million residents, and i ts port was the most important on the continent, the third largest in the world after London and New York, and the principal point of departure for German families embarking to North America. Despite the loss of trade that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Hamburg was able to retain many of its cultural and business advantages in the interwar years. In the Second World War, more than half the city and 80 per cent of its port were destroyed during the bombing raids and resultant firestorm of July 1943, and for much of the next two decades the city was engaged in a huge rebuilding programme. By the mid-1950s £100 million had been invested in the reconstruction of the port alone, and trading had recovered to its pre-war levels. By 1960 Hamburg had recovered much of its prosperity and, with a surrounding population of two million residents, was Germany’s second city.

One aspect of Hamburg’s postwar resurrection was particularly significant. Among the myriad functions provided by the contemporary city there are four principal concerns: housing, employment, transport and leisure. In the early 1960s Hamburg was widely renowned for its focus on leisure – a singular form of leisure, centred around the sex industry. Like other European cities with an identifiable ‘red-light’ district (Soho in London, the Walletjes area of Amsterdam, Pigalle in Paris, the old Le Panier district of Marseille, Las Ramblas in Barcelona), it possessed a compact, thriving and exotic quarter of strip clubs, brothels, nightclubs, sex shops, bars and cinemas that promised the transient population amusements that were unavailable elsewhere.¹ The area of St Pauli had been frequented by visiting sailors since the eighteenth century and the postwar reconstruction retained its original character. Many of its activities were located along the Reeperbahn – the main thoroughfare that runs for some 500 metres from east to west, parallel with the Elbe – and its surrounding streets: Grosse Freiheit, with its dense concentration of clubs, and Herbertstrasse, which was gated at both ends to discourage women and children from seeing the public display of prostitutes in its shop windows, were particularly notorious.

Music was also central to the area’s attractions. However, because the city lay within the British zone, the demand for rock’n’roll that US troops had brought with them to cities in the American zone was relatively low. Instead Hamburg was a centre for traditional jazz, which was eagerly consumed by the city’s considerable student communities at the Universität Hamburg (University of Hamburg), the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Hamburg College of Art) and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater (State University of Music and Theatre). Unlike students at British universities, for whom the experience of leaving home for the first time was an important part of their educational experience, the majority of German students remained at home and attended university locally. In addition, the city’s already cosmopolitan population was further stratified by the influx of a series of unrelated groups with quite separate cultural histories:

Many residents had found their way to the city as refugees from the German Eastern territories. Hamburg was considered to be a stronghold of the expellees. The city’s inhabitants also included former prisoners of war and forced labourers who were unable to return to their countries of origin . . . Former Allied soldiers stayed in the city for a variety of reasons, many because they had started a family here . . . There were many single-parent families with mothers whose husbands had been killed or were missing in action.²

The quest to provide entertainment that would appeal to all of these groups – those who lived in the city permanently, those who were there temporarily and those who were merely passing through – was therefore a pressing concern to those promoters who were well aware of the impact of the us-led ‘teenage revolution’ and the growth of the youth market in the 1950s, and for whom the well-publicized presence in Germany, as an enlisted member of the US Army, of Elvis Presley from October 1958 to March 1960, added another level of interest.

One such entrepreneur was Bruno Koschmider, a former circus performer who had been born in 1926 in the disputed Polish-German city of Danzig (Gdansk). He had opened The Indra (64 Grosse Freiheit) in 1950, and in April 1960 travelled to the UK in search of British performers to perform rock’n’roll in his strip club. His objective was to reproduce in Hamburg the achievements of London’s 2 I’s coffee bar, widely known as ‘the birthplace of British rock’n’roll’. Its Australian owners, Paul Lincoln and Ray Hunter, had opened the 2 I’s in 1956, and soon began to promote skiffle and rock’n’roll acts in its basement room. Situated on Soho’s Old Compton Street, the club had launched the careers of several of the country’s leading singers, including Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Terry Dene. During that first visit Koschmider booked The Jets, an impromptu group whose lead singer was Tony Sheridan, to appear at The Kaiserkeller (36 Grosse Freiheit), which he had opened in October 1959, and their success in attracting young audiences led him to repeat the experiment with Liverpool’s Derry and the Seniors. His principal rival was a young ex-seaman, Peter Eckhorn. With financial backing from his father, St Pauli restaurateur Herbert Eckhorn, he had converted the decaying premises of The Hippodrom into The Top Ten Club (136 Reeperbahn), which opened in November 1960 as a rock’n’roll venue. And in 1962 Koschmider and Eckhorn faced new competition from businessman Manfred Weissleder. Born in Dortmund in 1928, he had come to Hamburg to find work as an electrician but, since the late 1950s, had owned and managed the Erotic Night Club (on the top floor of the Tabu Club in St Pauli), where he screened his own nudist films. At the start of the year, he rented the former Stern cinema which had, at various times, contained bars, restaurants and a canteen kitchen, with the specific intention of turning it into the Reeperbahn’s premier dance hall. It opened as The Star-Club (39 Grosse Freiheit) in April 1962.

Significantly, neither Koschmider, Eckhorn or Weissleder were interested in music. They were entrepreneurs for whom it was either a product to be bought and sold in the hope that it might be profitable, or an initial device to entice customers into their premises where they might consume other commodities, chiefly alcohol. Furthermore, they were competitors whose goals and ambitions would frequently collide, creating antagonism and distrust. Eckhorn was generally regarded by most who knew him as ‘a fair-minded employer, from whom bonuses could be expected on a good night’.³ Pete Best remembers him as ‘an affable chap’.⁴ However, contemporary descriptions of his business rivals stress their combative, pugnacious (and often unattractive) personalities:

Weissleder let no-one steal the butter from his bread. He stood no nonsense from his staff and went straight for his objectives without making any great detours . . . this tall, powerful and at times hot-tempered man seemed to be the epitome of the Ugly German.⁵

Koschmider himself went about armed with the leg of an old German chair in knotty hardwood . . . Sometimes, rather than merely ejecting a troublemaker, the Kaiserkeller waiters would carry him into their employer’s office for a prolonged workover. When the victim was pinned down and helpless, Koschmider would weigh in with his antique chair leg.⁶

Living in a German city that had made little or no contribution to popular music, working in the heart of one of the world’s most infamous red-light districts, these three men were an unlikely trio to oversee the imminent revolution in rock’n’roll that would begin with The Beatles.

The story of The Beatles is deceptively easy to relate, not least because it has been told and retold on so many occasions. But it is intertwined with the story of Liverpool itself. As ‘war babies’ growing up in one of the uk’s principal ports, they were subject to the kind of familial upheavals and social dislocations that might seem shocking today, but which were routine circumstances for many children of that generation. As teenagers they lived through the enormous physical and demographic changes imposed on many of Britain’s towns and cities in the 1950s, and from which few communities – especially in industrial conurbations such as Merseyside – were exempt.

The city was granted a royal charter by King John in 1207 and had long been used as the principal sea connection with Ireland. However, in the eighteenth century its location on the northwest coast made it increasingly useful for transatlantic trade with America, and it began to play a central, and lucrative, role in the slave trade, which provided the historical basis for the first phase of the city’s wealth. A triangular route was established: from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa, from where many tens of thousands of Africans were transported across the Atlantic to be sold as slaves in the West Indies; from there the ships returned to Liverpool laden with sugar, tobacco and cotton. When the slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1807, the city’s attention concentrated on cotton. It became the port at which ships arrived from the US carrying raw cotton, which was then woven into cloth in the factories of Lancashire. This was the second phase of Liverpool’s wealth, and continued through the nineteenth century. However, as the cotton trade started to decline in the mid-twentieth century, the city, which had suffered massive bomb damage during the Second World War, became less a symbol of affluence and prosperity, and more a symbol of inner-city decay, poorly designed housing estates, deprivation and social problems. New industries, notably car manufacture, were introduced to the city, but by the early 1960s it had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and its population of around 700,000 had barely increased since 1900.⁷

Liverpool also possessed three additional characteristics which, while they might appear irrelevant, are actually indicative of its culture in the postwar period. First, it was widely reputed to contain more public houses and bars per head of population than any other city in Britain. Second, it had supplied, over several decades, many of the country’s leading entertainers. Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, Ted Ray, Ken Dodd and Norman Vaughan may not have achieved fame outside Britain, but all were among the most popular comedians in the UK through their appearances in music hall, and on radio and television; several successful pop stars of the late 1950s and early 1960s were also from Liverpool, including Michael Holliday, Frankie Vaughan and Billy Fury. Third, the city was, and still is, home to two of Britain’s best-supported football clubs – Liverpool and Everton. These factors combined to give Liverpool a reputation as a vigorous, exciting and independent centre of popular entertainment:

Liverpool’s role as a seaport endowed it with an ‘outward looking’ character, a sense of detachment from the rest of Britain, and thus a sense of being somehow different. It is a characteristic shared by New Orleans . . . which has a similar economic, social and cultural history and strong musical identity. It is a city divided by social differences and rivalries yet at the same time it projects a strong sense of loyalty and solidarity, and a spirit of co-operation . . . This was particularly suited to the world of rock music which thrives upon challenge and attention.⁸

Furthermore, its distance from London – in pre-motorway Britain, the train journey to the capital took several hours – allowed the city to develop and maintain a distinctive regional identity, typified for many by the heavy, nasal drawl of the ‘Scouse’ accent. This was the environment in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best and Ringo Starr moved from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood.

John Lennon was born in October 1940, during a German air raid on the city, at Liverpool’s Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. His parents, Julia Stanley and Alfred Lennon, had married in 1938 but, as a merchant seaman, Alfred had spent little time with his wife. This pattern was only exacerbated by the outbreak of war in 1939. In reality the two lived separate lives and in June 1945, after an affair with a Welsh soldier named Taffy Williams, Julia gave birth to a daughter, Victoria; she was adopted by a Norwegian couple who re-named her Ingrid. In 1946 Julia set up home on a council estate at Allerton with another man, Bobby Dykins. Julia and Alfred recognized that their relationship was at an end but were unable to agree on John’s future. At this point, Julia’s eldest sister Mimi and her husband George Smith offered to have John live with them at their home in Menlove Avenue in the middle-class suburb of Woolton. Alfred disappeared from John’s life, only to reappear in 1963 when Beatlemania took hold of the country. Julia remained in Liverpool, although her contact with John was intermittent. She and Dykins had two daughters: Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline, born in 1949. In June 1955 George Smith collapsed and died while John was on holiday with relatives in Scotland. In July 1958 Julia was knocked down and killed in Menlove Avenue by a car driven by an off-duty policeman.

At Dovedale Road Primary School and Quarry Bank High School, Lennon was regarded as a bright but increasingly trouble-some student. He left Quarry Bank in July 1957 without a single O-level pass, but managed to secure a place at Liverpool College of Art. A principal reason for his lack of academic effort had been his discovery in 1956 of rock’n’roll (initially through the music of Elvis Presley) and skiffle (a peculiarly British amalgam of folk, jazz and blues, whose principal exponent was Lonnie Donegan). ‘After that, nothing was the same for me’, he later explained.⁹ Like many thousands of youngsters to whom these new musical forms represented a potentially exciting alternative to the drab austerity of 1950s Britain, Lennon was inspired to form his first group. Named The Quarrymen after the school, its six original members were Lennon (guitar), Eric Griffiths (guitar), Rod Davis (banjo), Pete Shotton (washboard), Colin Hanton (drums) and Len Garry (tea-chest bass). For several months, they rehearsed in each other’s houses and played at a variety of local venues – youth clubs, amateur talent shows, community functions and social club dances.¹⁰ On 6 July 1957, when The Quarrymen appeared at an annual garden fete held by St Peter’s church in Woolton, Lennon’s fellow pupil Ivan Vaughan brought a friend from nearby Allerton to meet the group. His name was Paul McCartney.

Paul McCartney was the elder son of Jim McCartney and Mary Mohin. They married in April 1941: Paul was born in June 1942 and his brother Michael in January 1944. The family lived in a variety of areas around Merseyside (including Anfield, Wallasey, Knowsley and Speke) before moving in 1955 to a home in Forthlin Road on the newly built Mather Avenue council estate in Allerton. Like Lennon, he passed the 11-plus examination, and entered the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, the city’s most prestigious grammar school, in 1953. Mary died in October 1956, shortly after she had been diagnosed as having cancer. Although Jim introduced the teenaged Paul to the show tunes and brass band music of his own youth (in the 1920s and ’30s he had led Jim Mac’s Jazz Band), it was rock’n’roll and skifffle that captured Paul’s attention, and he soon taught himself to play the guitar. His five O-level passes enabled him to pass into the sixth form at the Liverpool Institute where, to satisfy his father’s hopes that he would train as a teacher, he took A-levels in English and Art. However, within a few days of meeting Lennon, he had been invited to join The Quarrymen, and his academic aspirations...