The Beatles (41 page)

Intuitive, ambitious, aroused, Astrid was not about to let a treasure like the Beatles slip through her fingers. Following the session in der Dom, she drove the band (minus Pete Best, who chose not to accompany them) straight to her mother’s house in the rather posh suburb of Altona, where she entertained them with afternoon tea. To a man, the Beatles were properly impressed and taken by surprise. The sight of Astrid’s handsome, solid-looking house and fashionable neighborhood was totally alien to the four boys, who had seen nothing of Hamburg outside of its grungy red-light district. Flowers and shrubs hugged the front steps, with a welcoming sweep of lawn. Children raced bicycles along the freshly paved street. Cars gleamed at the curb. It was tasteful, without being what local people referred to as
spiessbürger,
or grossly bourgeois, with a curl of the lip. It reminded the band of Childwall, in Liverpool, a suburb of impeccably manicured homes and estates, housing the city’s upper crust.

Impressed as they were, however, the Beatles’ reaction turned unsettled when they were escorted upstairs to Astrid’s attic studio. It was a sight for which they were totally unprepared. The room, which faced the back of the house, was like Satan’s lair—black curtains and sheets covered the shuttered window, the furniture had been painted black to match the bedspread, a black cloth covered the mirror, with sheets of aluminum foil pasted to the walls to reflect light from the black candles that cast a somber glow. Astrid, completely blasé, attributed it to her “
Cocteau phase
,” which seemed to satisfy her openmouthed audience and heighten their intrigue.

In fact, the room had been decorated for Klaus Voormann, who had spent much of the previous two years there as Astrid’s steady lover. Now, Klaus lived in an apartment “literally around the corner,” and while he and Astrid still saw each other every day, the relationship had suddenly turned
platonic—and for good reason. Moments after meeting Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid had fallen headlong and seriously in love with him. At first, it was purely physical, spurred by his “tight jeans and leather jacket,” but after those first few minutes, Jürgen Vollmer said, she became “fascinated with Stuart… his mysterious image, his artistic ties, [and] it was more chemical than anything else.”

And not at all one-sided. “[Stuart] let it be known how much he was infatuated [with her],” a friend recalls. Others have said he “was besotted” with her. Almost from the start, Stuart began hounding Astrid’s inner circle for any scrap of information about her—how she thought, what she liked, who she fancied. He didn’t want to alienate Klaus, who remained devotedly at her side, but there was no secret to their mutual attraction; it was unrestrained and intense, and grew increasingly more passionate with each passing day. Pete Best, who watched things unfold from atop the drum stand, viewed it “like one of those fairy stories.” And to a certain extent it was, although not one blessed with a happy ending.

From the beginning, John and Paul relied heavily on early recording heroes—most notably, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly—to give the vocals personality, then factored in their own distinctive tonal qualities for color and shading. While both were essentially tenors, Paul’s voice tended toward being smooth, upbeat, and whimsical, while John, who was more nasal, provided an essential edge, albeit jagged at times, that stirred the blend with ambiguity. One of them would tackle the lead in any given song. As the melody expanded, the other—practically waiting to pounce—chimed in with a line of harmony until their voices overlapped and interweaved. Duets, however, are unstable compounds; tensions are unavoidably created from the moment each voice splinters into harmony. But when John and Paul sang together they pulled toward the middle. They complemented each other but also, to some degree, tried to match each other without losing balance.

There was more to the Beatles’ magic than John’s and Paul’s voices, however. George’s guitar had become the anchor to the arrangements, giving them form as well as movement. The incidental fills that unspooled between melody lines drew songs together and reinforced interest where things normally fell apart. Later, George would mastermind the Beatles’
magnificent leads, playing them almost like a machine, but in Hamburg his riffs were in perpetual motion, sheepdogging, keeping the wandering, sometimes capricious energy of the rhythm guitars in focus, while other times brightening their steady patterns.

As it happened, George could also sing, not quite as stylishly as John and Paul, but with consistency and fervor.
He proved more than capable
as a lead vocalist, handling the chores on “Young Blood,” “Three Cool Cats,” and occasionally “Roll Over Beethoven,” on which he alternated with John. When John took the spotlight, Paul and George doubled together at another microphone, creating what one Hamburg fan called “
a very charming image
.”

Only Stuart remained a lingering problem. Nothing had changed: he had absolutely no facility for the bass, no innate feel for music. Even the exis, his most ardent admirers, recognized his inadequacy onstage. None of the Beatles had any illusions about Stu. They knew he was inept, eternally an amateur. But something else counted for more than pure ability: he was a mate. Yet for all the friendship in the world, his welcome as a Beatle was wearing thin. The better the Beatles got, the more dissatisfied Paul became. “
I was always practical
, thinking our band could be great,” Paul said, “but with [Stu] on bass there was always something holding us back.” He considered Stuart the “
weak link
,” too glaring an embarrassment; it reflected on all of them, not just on Stuart. It troubled John as well, but he seemed helpless—or unwilling—to do anything about it. At times, the others suggested that Stuart turn away from the audience, looking moodily over his shoulder instead, so that the misplaced fingering wasn’t easily detected. But people had ears, and with the band’s rapid strides, the clams he played sounded ever more pronounced.

Stuart wasn’t oblivious. In a letter to his friend Sue Williams written as early as October 1960, he explained:

I have definitely decided to pack in
the band at the beginning of January… particularly after what I forfeited in return for a few months in a foreign country
^*
—but my curiosity is quenched—as far as rock and roll is concerned anyway.

It might have helped had he conveyed this decision to the other Beatles. Given January as a reference, they might have played out these few months
in a wisp of lighthearted amiability, with the anticipation of a fresh start in the New Year. But if Stuart contemplated leaving, as he’d implied, he kept the news to himself, which only served to sow resentment among the once-contented Beatles.

There is no doubt his musical shortcomings cost him dearly with John. Signs of souring showed in their usually puncture-proof relationship: veiled glances at first, then eventually the unforeseen snide comment lobbed into the midst of a group conversation. With John, there was always a lot of acid-tipped barbs flying around, but now he aimed them more accurately at Stuart, who internalized them, without a word of self-defense. Wrathful, John snapped without warning. He poked fun at Stuart’s gracefulness, his persona, his size, and, of course, his infatuation with Astrid. “
He was always kidding
, but kidding in a way that was borderline hurting,” said Jürgen Vollmer. As a small, mannered young man, Stuart had endured his share of taunts, in most cases gamely defending himself against them. “
But he just seemed to take it
from John,” recalls Bill Harry. “Stuart was no match for him.”

On October 21, a new club opened around the corner on the Reeperbahn, featuring an act unaffected by competition. That illustrious bad boy, Tony Sheridan, was back in business, headlining at the Top Ten, a sensational, glitzy venue in a huge space formerly
occupied by a peep show
, and fronting a configuration of the Jets, his revolving-door backing band, that knocked audiences dead. The Beatles went to see him every night after their show, sometimes even slipping in during breaks, stationing themselves practically at his feet so they could pick up pointers, songs, licks, riffs, anything that punched up their act.

Not surprisingly, no one proved more influential to the Beatles during this stretch. Tony did all sorts of obscure material, from Little Richard B-sides to urban blues; he did lovely versions of Bobby Darin’s “Mighty Mighty Man” and “I’ll Be There” and hot-wired standards such as “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Fever,” and “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” until they kicked out the jams. The Beatles pinched “Besame Mucho” from him, along with Bill Haley’s gasoline-powered “Skinny Minnie,” the song Sheridan always closed with. Thanks to Tony they got hip to R&B gurus like Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Witherspoon, and John Lee Hooker. He was a walking encyclopedia of important material, to say nothing of the way he handled a guitar. “I’ve never seen anybody equal to him,” musician John Frankland says forty years later, post-Hendrix,
post-Allman, post-Thompson, post-Clapton. “He was a musician’s musician”—a contortionist, an elocutionist with six strings. Over the years, he’d learned how to make the guitar talk—albeit in his own oddball language. “
He would play solos
that ran completely off-key, but somehow he would stay within the lines,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who often accompanied the Beatles to Tony’s sets at the Top Ten and watched openmouthed as he ran down half a dozen songs. Unlike his sidekicks with their solid-body Fenders and fancy Ricks, Sheridan wielded a big-bellied Martin Dreadnought with an electric pickup wedged under the strings, not a flexible instrument by any stretch of the imagination, and plied it like a knife and fork. Nothing got to him, except inertia. “
He’d get guitar diarrhea
—he couldn’t stop playing,” says Gibson Kemp, who described how Tony would “play ‘Skinny Minnie’ as the last song on Saturday morning at six [o’clock], and he’d still be playing it at eight, as they cleaned the club.”

And no one worked harder onstage. He worked his husky voice until it cracked like old plaster, worked it to the bone every night. And he put his body through the kind of physical punishment that had no precedent in this idiom. John Frankland recalls how difficult it was to appear on the same bill. “When you followed Tony onstage, the microphone would be full of snot,” he says. “And where he had been standing, you’d think somebody had thrown a bottle of water because that’s how much the guy sweat. He’d come offstage literally soaking wet. That’s how hard he pushed—he was a
worker
extraordinaire! No one could keep up with him.”

Only a year later, Liverpool bands would complain about how the Beatles set a bad example by talking among themselves and to the audience, even smoking, while they performed onstage. But that, too, can be traced to Tony Sheridan, who played by his own rules. He never shut up, keeping up a running dialogue with the fans. Or, recalls Frankland: “He’d turn around in mid-song and scream at the drummer: ‘You fucking son of a bitch!’ Once, for no apparent reason, I saw him whack [pianist] Roy Young with a tambourine. He didn’t give a damn about the audience. Tony played for himself.”

All nonsense aside, however, he was a sight to behold. There was so much to learn from the way he worked a room, so much to absorb. The Beatles and the Hurricanes sensed that from the get-go. “
In the end
,” recalls Johnny Byrne, “we started doing sets with him—Rory would get up first, then the Beatles. It was like a crazy jam session. We weren’t getting paid for it, but it didn’t matter. We honestly loved it.”

So did the Top Ten audience. Word spread through Hamburg that the new club had it all, and that wasn’t just limited to the talent. Everything about the Top Ten was bigger, better, bolder, brassier—a fact not lost on the Beatles. “
We suddenly realized
[it] was a far better club than Koschmider’s,” recalled Pete Best. “Better clientele, plus the sound system had echo mikes, reverb and all that type of stuff.” The Beatles had been slaving away under dreadful circumstances for almost four months. Now they wanted better working conditions, more money, a new stage—and after they were invited to Sheridan’s cozy flat above the Top Ten, a scene of nightly wild parties, well, they wanted that, too.

The last thing Koschmider expected was a power play by this ungrateful British band. He turned the Beatles down flat, reminding them of their existing contract extension,
along with a clause that forbade
them from playing at another club within a five-kilometer radius without his permission. Clearly, he’d heard about the crowd-pleasing jams with Sheridan and was taking steps to prevent any more of them.

As far as Bruno was concerned, that should have been the end of it. But the Beatles, stung by his curt rebuff, approached Peter Eckhorn, the Top Ten’s slick, cutthroat young owner, and inquired about the possibility of a job.
Eckhorn recognized
them immediately as the band that had teamed up so successfully with Tony Sheridan. No doubt he also recognized the advantage it would give him in a heated turf war with Bruno Koschmider. As it happened, the current lineup of Jets were returning to London, necessitating a new house band to back his flaky star, and Eckhorn offered them the job on the spot.

This development inflamed Koschmider, who went on the offensive.
He terminated the Beatles’ contract
at once, invoking a clause that bound them to employment for another, final month. Fortunately, Eckhorn agreed to wait. But the interim climaxed in fiasco. For months George had been flouting a local curfew, the
Ausweiskontrolle,
that forbade minors from being out after ten o’clock at night.
The band was required to make an announcement
from the stage, a few minutes before the curfew went into effect, at which time police canvassed the crowd, examining passports. Ironically, the authorities never thought to check the band, and George, who was still seventeen, had skated free all these months. Suddenly, however, on the evening of November 20, he came under scrutiny. No one knew who tipped off the police, but everyone suspected it was Bruno Koschmider. At the same time it was discovered that George had no work permit. “
So I had to leave
[Germany],” he said. “I had to go home on my
own.” No grace period was extended; he was ordered to comply within twenty-four hours.