The Beatles Boxed Set (42 page)

            But
it didn’t seem to matter, for girls were more than willing to hold broom
handles, and even iron their clothes.

            And
George didn’t have a shortage of girlfriends. There was Jennifer Brewer when he
was younger. And then Iris Caldwell, the sister of Rory Storm, lead singer of Rory
Storm and The Hurricanes where Ringo Starr was the drummer before joining The
Beatles. And then when he was a bit older, George met a girl who studied with
John Lennon at the Art College. George thought she resembled his favorite
actress, Brigitte Bardot, and managed to “shag” her at a party one night. When
John learned about this, he began to pay George a little more respect.

            George
remembered his father telling him, “Don’t get yourself trapped alone with a
female you don’t know or with a female you can’t trust. You’ll find yourself in
a paternity suit.”

            Bill
Harry, a friend of George, insisted, “We weren’t promiscuous. First of all, it
was hard to get condoms. Plus, there was no place to go. Where would a boy go
with his girlfriend if they wanted to make love? There were alleys – we used to
call them jiggers – but if a fellow took a girl there and tried to do it with
her, she’d usually say, ‘I’d get off at Edge Hill.’ Edge Hill was the station
just before the last train station, which was Lime Street. So when a girl said
that, she was saying, ‘you’d better be satisfied with coitus interruptus,
because that’s as far as I go.’ To be pregnant and unmarried was such a stigma
that families would have the daughter move away for a time and make some excuse
about going on vacation.”

            Allan
Williams was satisfied with the band’s trial run at the Jacaranda and assigned
them to play backup for Janice, a stripper in the club.

            Williams
had been booking a few groups from Liverpool at clubs in Hamburg, Germany and
was still looking for some to send to Indra, a club in Hamburg owned by Bruno
Koschmider. After listening to the Silver Beatles for a week, he decided to
give them a chance to travel if they find a permanent drummer. George happened
to know Pete Best, a friend who played with the Blackjacks. Coincidentally, by
that time, Blackjacks had broken up, and Paul told Best that they would get £15
a week each. Best agreed, thinking that playing in Hamburg would be a better
career move.

            Harold
Harrison was adamant about not letting his son go to Hamburg, and he had
reasons for his reluctance. Germany was a wartime enemy a couple of years back,
and now Hamburg had a reputation throughout Europe as a place of vice and
criminal activity. Harold also believed that a career in music had no
guarantees.

            But
George’s mother understood her son better and convinced her husband to let
their son go. Harold finally relented and bade his son goodbye. George was only
17 then. He would say goodbye to his world of familiar routines and would say
hello to an unfamiliar world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

After
securing their visas and passports, the band, now calling themselves The
Beatles, hopped into Allan Williams’ Austin van and set out for Hamburg on
August 16, 1960. After two days, they arrived in Hamburg’s red-light district,
Reeperbahn. Transvestites, gangsters and gunrunners were everywhere, as did
seedy restaurants and porn shops. Despite these, or perhaps because of these, George
thought it was the most exciting place he had ever seen.

Williams’ van as it was hoisted onto the
ferry

            But
their journey to Hamburg wasn’t smooth sailing, so to speak. There were ten
people in Williams’ van, including all five Beatles, Williams and his wife, her
brother, Lord Woodbine and Georg Sternet, Koshmider’s translator and future
waiter. Williams did not acquire work permits for Germany, thus, they were
detained at Harwich for five hours. They were only able to move on after
Williams convinced the authorities that they were students on holiday.

            The
Beatles arrived in the wee hours of the morning of August 17, 1960 and
immediately found the St. Pauli area of Hamburg. The Indra Club (64 Grosse
Freiheit) was still closed, so a manager from a neighboring club found someone to
open it. The new arrivals slept on the red leather seats in the alcoves. The
Beatles played that night and were told that they could sleep in a small
cinema’s storeroom directly behind the screen of the cinema, the Bambi Kino.

            The
storeroom was cold and noisy. Paul would later say, “We lived backstage in the
Bambi Kino, next to the toilets, and you could always smell them. The room had
been an old storeroom, and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No
heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of paint; and two sets of bunk beds, with not
very much covers – Union Jack lags – we were frozen.”

            John
had similar recollections of their Hamburg experience, saying, “We were put in
this pigsty. 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 [women] pissing next door.”

            They
were always woken in this way; they would then use cold water from the urinals
for washing and shaving. Each of them was paid £2.5 a day and played seven days
a week. They would play from 8:30-9:30, 10 to 11, 11:30-12:30 and finish the
evening playing from 1 to 2 in the morning.

John, George, Pete, Paul and Stu at the
Indra Club the day after their arrival

            Initially,
The Beatles played in a mannerly fashion the way they did in England. But
Koschmider would scream, “Make a show, boys!
Mach Schau!
” And so they
did, even George who was more reserved than the others. They would jump on and
off the tiny stage, dance with the small audience and run around the room. Customers
also yelled “
Mach Schau! Mach Schau!
” and The Beatles responded by
yelling back and joking with the audience in the front row. John, who was
cheeky and rude, would sometimes scream “Heil Hitler!” from the stage.

            The
band’s first week at Indra Club saw thirty people a night. The number of
attendance rose to 40 the second week. A month into their contract, they had
about 100 people every night, jamming and filling the room to capacity. Two
months later, the neighbors complained about noise, forcing Koschmider to
eliminate live music.

            For
young George, the Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit were the best things The
Beatles had ever seen, with so many neon lights and clubs. He said, “The whole
area was full of transvestites and prostitutes and gangsters, but I couldn’t
say that they were the audience … Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship,
learning how to play in front of people.”

            But
drummer Best thought that Indra was a depressing place and a shabby one
compared to the larger Kaiserkeller, a club that Koschmider also owned and
located at 36 Grosse Freheit. Indra Club would eventually close due to
complaints about the noise, after which The Beatles played in the Kiaserkeller,
beginning on October 4, 1960.

            The
Kaiserkeller was home to prostitutes and knife-wielding thugs, but they loved
The Beatles nonetheless.

            George
had his fans among the audience who called him
das liebschen Kind
(the
darling child) and would often request for him to sing. During these times, John
would invite George to take the lead, and George would sing with gusto as he
rendered his own version of a song by Carl Perkins or Elvis Presley.

            The
Beatles had to play all night, and that meant they had to be awake all night.
They would usually take Preludin, a habit-forming stimulant that an old lady
sold to them. Tony Sheridan, the singer/ guitarist credited with making
“English Mersey” music popular and also a performer in Hamburg in those days,
recalled, “We had no respect for our constitutions. We were going on very
little food, often very little sleep … and on those days when you really didn’t
want to play, you’d pop a pill and it was, ‘Hey, let’s get the fuck up on that
stage, man.’”

            It
was thirsty work as the boys performed for hours on end. Satisfied patrons
would send up beer and other alcohol, and it became the easiest way to stay
quenched.

            The
Beatles went to other clubs after finishing their own schedule to listen to
other bands. At times, they would go straight back to their quarters. John
slept on one bunk on top with George on the bottom, and Paul slept on top and
Stu on the bottom in another. They were always with female company. Girls who
were working at the club assigned numbers to each boy and would toss dice to
see which band member they would try to sleep with. With the pretext of
offering to do their laundry, the girls would head back to the boys’ room. It
looked like a youth hostel many times.

George at the Bambi Kino, 1960

            Sometime
in October 1960, Williams arranged a recording session for Lou Walters, a
member of Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, at the Akustik Studio. Williams had
asked for John, Paul and George to play and sing harmonies on the recording.
During that particular day, Best was away buying drumsticks, so Ringo Starr,
who by then was the drummer of The Hurricanes, played drums. It would be the
very first time that John, Paul, George and Ringo recorded together for songs
Fever,
September Song
and
Summertime.

            The
Beatles’ contract was only for six weeks but was extended by popular demand. George
was now earning £15 per week, which was more than what his father earned, but
it didn’t compensate for his being away from home.

            Local
photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who had been to the club a few times and came to
know George better, knew that George missed his family. She would invite the
boys to her studio for a hot meal and a bath. She often referred to George as
Little Georgie.

            Eventually,
the boys began jamming at Top Ten, a club opened in 1960 by Peter Eckhorn and
where The Beatles aspired to play. Eckhorn offered them more money, a better PA
and a better place to sleep. By doing so, they defied their agreement with
Koschmider.