The Beatles are one of the most celebrated and successful bands in the history of rock and roll. What many people don’t know about them is how they achieved their greatness. It wasn’t just their ear-catching tunes and memorable rhythms. The Beatles had an unprecedented work ethic. They spent their early years playing thousands of shows in front of scant audiences. The years of practice formed them into an impeccable rock quartet poised to explode upon the world of music. Hard work can transform men from average to great, no matter what the pursuit.
Before “Beatlemania” took the world by storm, the Beatles were an unknown high school rock band from Liverpool, England. Before 1960 they had yet to record an official track and they hadn’t donned their famous haircuts.
In search of more playing time and popularity, the Beatles’ booking agent, Allan Williams, sent the group to Hamburg, Germany, in 1960. The local clubs of Hamburg were seedy areas frequented by gangsters and prostitutes. The entire music scene was abysmal and not anything you would naturally associate with the future kings of rock and roll.
The original members of the group—Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe (bass), and Pete Best (drums)—quickly discovered that the road to success was anything but easy. (Sutcliffe left the group in 1961 and Best was replaced by Ringo Starr shortly after in 1962.) They were underpaid. They slept in unheated storerooms behind the screens of a cinema. Their equipment was shoddy and the acoustics of the clubs were wretched.
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What did the Beatles gain from their Hamburg experience? One priceless thing: practice. Even though they were playing in low-life bars and clubs, by 1962 the Beatles were playing eight hours a day, seven days a week. When the “Beatles revolution” came to America, it is estimated that they had already played more than twelve hundred concerts together. Most bands don’t play that much in a lifetime!
George Harrison said, “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.”* In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell wrote that, with talent, mastery of a skill or art often comes after ten thousand hours of practice. He estimated that the Beatles surpassed that number in their time in Hamburg, making them one of the greatest bands of all time, not primarily because of luck or talent but because of hard work.
Gladwell cited John Lennon’s explanation: “We got better and more confident. We couldn’t help it with all the experience we gained from playing ALL night long—it was handy being from Liverpool because we had to try even harder than the locals, put our heart and soul into our performances to get ourselves over (to Hamburg). In Liverpool we only ever did one hour sessions and we only did our best numbers—the same ones, over and over. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours so, we really had to find a new way of playing.”
When the Beatles arrived in America in 1964, they were a seamless, talented rock group. They went from playing in abysmal, alley dive bars to premiering before almost 74 million viewers, over 40 percent of the U.S. population, on the Ed Sullivan Show. The Beatles hadn’t achieved stardom overnight. It took years of sweat and hard work for them to create a sound that was distinctly their own, and one that revolutionized rock and roll forever.
* Hillman, Bill. “Reeperbahn.” Hillmanweb. http://www.hillmanweb.com/BEATLES/reeper.html. Retrieved May 15, 2009.