A Revelation to Behold A Revelation to BeholdIf the Beatles weren’t the same when they returned home, neither was Liverpool. The city had drifted into a gradual but unyielding decline, and yet, the beat scene thrived like never before. Faced with such opportunity, the Beatles could hardly remain dormant for long. A week before Christmas, during another idle afternoon, Pete phoned George and suggested they comb Liverpool for potential gigs. A few days later John and Pete were reunited, meeting over coffee at their regular corner table in the Jacaranda. Still “disgruntled and very angry” over the Hamburg fiasco, armed with theories and eager to rebuild the band’s stalled career, they wanted to touch base with Allan Williams on the off chance of snaring a few stray dates.
But Williams was struggling with his own set of woes. Petulantly, he told the boys that Bruno Koschmider had failed to pay him the 10 percent commission promised for booking the Beatles into the Kaiserkeller. Plus, only two weeks earlier, his latest venture, a flashy Liverpool version of the Top Ten, had met with unexpected catastrophe. Intrigued by the explosion of beat music and the popularity of local bands, he’d rented an old bottle-washing plant on the periphery of town, hired a personality named Bob Wooler to manage it, and set out to cash in on the new phenomenon with lightning speed. In no time, he and Wooler had booked an impressive lineup of top London talent to alternate with native stock, the objective being that the headliners would focus attention on—and help groom—Merseyside bands, who would inevitably sign up with a talent agency Williams was mulling. For five memorable nights the Top Ten hosted packed, enthusiastic houses, and on the sixth night the club mysteriously burned down. (Wooler, to this day, claims it “was torched.”)
Williams was in no mood to throw in with the Beatles right now. As a means of shelving the subject, he introduced John and Pete to Wooler, who happened to be seated at a nearby table, licking his own wounds. Wooler had good reason to be dejected. In a span of a few days, he’d fallen from the lap of a promising future to sudden standing unemployment. Not only had Wooler resigned his “job for life” with British Transport Railways to run the now ashen club, he had tied his entire well-being to a rogue like Allan Williams, whom he suspected of hanky-panky. The earnest, high-principled Wooler had begun “drinking heavily” as a result.
The role of a pop impresario was a new one for Bob Wooler. He had spent most of his adult life in thrall of Tin Pan Alley. He had even taken a stab at songwriting, assuming the nom de plume Dave Woolander, because he was “convinced that the great songwriters were all Jewish.” After several failed attempts at the craft, Wooler abandoned his dream—temporarily, at least—and turned to artist management, spending evenings promoting a skiffle band from Garston called the Kingstrums. One night at Wilson Hall in Garston, near the end of a set, Wooler overheard one of the jivers say, “The band’s not bad, but—who are they?” Wooler stepped to the mike and “hesitantly and tremblingly” announced the Kingstrums.
Seemingly older than his twenty-eight years, Wooler looked nothing like the teds and surly scrappers who populated the dance halls. To these teenagers, he was more of a paternal figure, a slight man with a courtly, engaging demeanor, always meticulously groomed in a sport coat and tie. But the kids responded to him; in no time, they actually expected to hear Bob Wooler’s rich, melodic voice whenever a local band went onstage. Even after a long day at British Rail, Wooler spent virtually every night whirling from hall to hall: the Winter Gardens Ballroom in Garston, Holly Oak at Penny Lane, Peel Hall in the Dingle, the Jive Hive and Alexandra Hall in Crosby, Lathom Hall in Seaforth, the Orrell Park Ballroom in Aintree, Blair Hall in Walton, Hambleton Hall in Huyton, the Riverpark Ballroom in Hoylake, the Plaza in St. Helen’s, the Marine Club in Southport, Knotty Ash Village Hall, Litherland Town Hall, the Aintree Institute, Mossway, the David Lewis Theatre. “Long before the Cavern, these venues provided rock ’n roll havens for Liverpool’s teenagers,” recalls Wooler, who either bummed a ride with the bands or caught the bus and train. Usually he spent his entire night out, mixing with the kids and gabbing. When he wasn’t spinning records, he solicited bookings for the groups he liked, even calling from his stodgy office at the Garston Docks. “I had a Jekyll and Hyde existence,” he says, “spending days clerking behind a desk, then at night becoming the Alan Freed of Liverpool.”
Wooler was also a legendary soft touch, and the Beatles seemed like such decent kids. He couldn’t help himself. Working the phone in the Jacaranda kitchen, he booked them into a gig at Litherland Town Hall.
There was also the Casbah. Few people had a more unsung role in the Beatles’ young career than Pete’s enterprising mother, Mo. “She was always there to throw us a lifeline,” Pete has said over the years, and this time proved no different. Behind the dominating personality and owlish stare, beyond the keen sense for putting out fires with an appropriately leveled word, lurked a mom with a big, mushy heart. “She gave them the kind of work they couldn’t get at other venues,” says Bob Wooler. “Without her, it remains doubtful they would have held together so ably.”
The Casbah was exactly what the Beatles needed: it was familiar, intimate, and friendly, a good springboard for diving back into the ’Pool. There was a big, boisterous local crowd, which provided the kind of delirious reaction they’d been hoping for. Of late, Mo had anticipated something special. The Seniors had played there only a week earlier and briefed her about the Beatles’ transformation in Hamburg, but it was nothing she could have envisioned. The band took everyone by complete surprise, including Pete’s dumbstruck mother, who watched them—wordlessly, for a change—from her post behind the refreshment counter. Their look, their sound, their poise—it was “a revelation to behold.”
Word spread swiftly through Liverpool after the Beatles’ Casbah and Litherland Town Hall shows. All these months, bands had presented themselves as a likely alternative to Cliff Richard and the Shadows, each in neat little suits, with neat little songs. And now this band of black-leather creatures had popped up “and had the nerve to play hard rock ’n roll.” They made no concession to etiquette. “We’d been pussyfooting around… and the Beatles just came straight at you,” said a guitarist with Rikki and the Red Streaks. Look mean, play hard—it was a revolutionary concept and contradicted everything that had gone before it.
Whatever confidence the Beatles had managed to generate onstage of late was quickly dissipated in uncertainty. Stuart still hadn’t returned from Hamburg. Meanwhile, offers for the band were pouring in.
What had detained Stuart for so long? Everyone knew he was dazzled by Astrid Kirchherr. He had stolen every opportunity to be with her during the Kaiserkeller gig, courting her between sets and spending nights in Altona. Leaving her seemed out of the question. But everyone was surprised—flabbergasted—when Stuart wrote home that they were engaged.
No one had seen it coming, least of all his parents, who “were utterly, utterly devastated” by the news. Their hopes were pinned on Stuart, the family’s golden boy, for whom they had sacrificed beyond practical wisdom. This news, as they read it, wrecked everything: his art, his education, his enormous promise. He had written before Christmas to ask for their blessing, but they had a difficult time imparting it. As did George: “He didn’t seem keen on the idea of me getting engaged,” Stuart divulged in a letter to his sister Pauline adding that he hoped everyone would “become used to the idea” in time.
Of course, he was wrong. Upon his return in early February, Stuart’s mother was still suffering from the shock, anguished that “anybody would be taking her son away” from her. And the Beatles, in their own way, proved no more receptive. They needled Stuart mercilessly about the engagement, “picking on him” for being weak, distracted, foolish, pussy-whipped. At face value, it seems absurd that a band in the grasp of hard-earned recognition should react with such vitriol toward a mate’s personal happiness. There was nothing in the way Stuart presented it to them that was either glib or contentious. Yet they did care, refusing to let up even as he rejoined the Beatles fold.
Even Stuart must have realized it wasn’t just about Astrid. For several months a rancorous dissension had been sowing over Stuart’s ersatz role in the Beatles. Now it seemed only underscored by their success. They’d felt it sorely since returning to Liverpool, with either Paul or the Blackjacks’ Chas Newby standing in for him. Wrote George: “Come home sooner…. It’s no good with Paul playing bass, we’ve decided, that is if he had some kind of bass and amp to play on!”* But that was so much blather. Friendship aside, everyone knew Stuart was holding them back. Yet no one had the heart or the wherewithal to suggest that he step aside. That responsibility was John’s burden, and he clearly wasn’t ready—or able—to shoulder it.
Despite this growing dilemma, the Beatles clung to their ambition, working steadily, if not furiously, at the lavish number of dates available each week. They were playing somewhere almost every night, occasionally doubling up gigs and commuting between them at a dizzying, exhilarating pace. “For the first time people were following us around,” George noticed, “coming to see us personally, not just coming to dance.”
Toward the end of 1959, Alan Sytner sold the Cavern to the family accountant, a tidy thirty-two-year-old man named Ray McFall, who, like Sytner, loved jazz and had worked in the club gratis as a means of indulging his passion. Nothing really changed in the transition of ownership. Jazz still ruled supreme—McFall rather brazenly announced his intention to “put Liverpool on the map as the leading jazz center in the country outside London”—but in a gesture to diversity, he hired the Swinging Blue Jeans once a week to help lighten the frowsty atmosphere. The Blue Jeans were an anomaly: not quite jazz but not quite skiffle, either. Falling somewhere in between, they played a kind of pop-inflected swing that appeased the Cavern purists while catering to disgruntled teenagers. Soon after the Blue Jeans came aboard, McFall arranged for them to take charge of a Tuesday night showcase, when the club was normally dark. Rory Storm, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and the Searchers made initial appearances there, and while the Blue Jeans continued “doing the jazzy-type stuff,” their guest artists played rock ’n roll. Normally, crusader McFall would have pulled the plug, but the accountant in him overruled his heart. Not only was the turnout a phenomenal success, but, as the Blue Jeans’ Ray Ennis reports: “Tuesday’s show became the most popular Cavern night of the week.”
In fact, attendance for the jazz shows had fallen off to such a degree that “Ray eventually had to make the choice of switching totally over to rock ’n roll or to close the place down,” Ennis recalls. McFall bit the bullet. Henceforth, from May 1960 on, the Cavern presented an array of local beat acts, reserving Thursdays—ordinarily the slowest night of the week—for the last handful of its earnest jazz disciples.
The Cavern was still a filthy, sweltering, fetid, claustrophobic little firetrap of a club. The walls and ceiling sweated absolute humidity; there was no exit aside from the main entrance, which was located three stories above the cellar and accessible only by an unlighted stone stairway. An ersatz ventilation pipe had been installed as a concession to the public health department, but as it extended only about thirty feet up a shaft between two taller buildings, it was functionally worthless. The plumbing was marginal, Victorian, a disaster. And with eight hundred to a thousand smoking, wasted teenagers sardined into a space fit for six hundred under ideal conditions, it was an accident waiting to happen. Adrian Barber puts it quite plainly when he says, “The Cavern was a shithole—but with soul. No place was more conducive to the spirit of rock ’n roll.”
Barber had played there in the dying days of trad jazz, intruding on its turgidity with Cass and the Cassanovas. They were the first all-out pop band to invade its yellowed arches, not as a featured attraction with the dignity accorded a jazz outfit but as noontime bait to attract the local office staff on their lunch breaks from neighboring businesses. Ray McFall decided to revive the lunch session with rock ’n roll in the hope that it might generate a new audience.
Even so, it remained a distasteful venture. “You could see Ray putting his rubber gloves on,” says Barber. “We were what he called toxic. And we were warned: ‘If you make too much noise, you’re out!’ ”
News had drifted back to Bob Wooler that something special was occurring at the Cavern, and he wandered over there during a lunchtime to see what the fuss was about. As hard as it is to believe, he’d never been there before. The whole oddness of it amused him, especially the setting—three misshapen tunnels, linked by arches, dug out from the core of Liverpool’s mustiest substratum; there was a wee patch of a stage, no curtain, with kids dancing, “kicking up a storm,” in between the chapel chairs that lined a vaulted middle chamber. “At first, it was difficult to breathe down there,” Wooler remembers. And cranking up the heat was the Big Three, whom Wooler knew casually from gigs at the halls he’d emceed.
He watched them for a while, amazed by the vigorous scene—and despondent that he wasn’t a part of it. The experience with Allan Williams and the star-crossed Top Ten still rankled him, Wooler tending to it with alcohol “because everything was going so awfully.” As the Big Three came offstage, Johnny Hutch thrust a microphone at Wooler and said, “Come on, say something, Bob.” Wooler, momentarily flustered, asked Hutch for a suggestion. “Tell them who’s on tomorrow,” the burly drummer grunted. Wooler hesitated, thinking. He’d overheard Hutch refer to the club as “the cave,” so in inimitable form, Bob crooned, “Remember, all you cave dwellers, that the Cavern is the best of cellars. Tomorrow, it’s Tommy and the Metronomes who will play your lunchtime session. Make sure you don’t miss it.”
Ray McFall, who was at the other end of the club, talking to the sound system consultants, asked: “Who was that?” “It sounds like Bob Wooler,” said Charlie McBain, who knew Wooler from Wilson Hall. A few days later, on a return visit, Wooler was confronted by McFall and offered a job as the Cavern’s lunchtime deejay. In no time, Wooler and the Cavern became a local institution. But it was more than spinning records and frisky announcing, which he did with great flair; Wooler was the personality the rock ’n roll scene had been waiting for, its spokesman, its guiding star. And unlike the promoters, who were strictly bottom-line men, Wooler genuinely loved the scene and its offbeat components. He wasn’t tough, he wasn’t commanding, but he oozed stature, and that gave him plenty of influence with his audience.
More than anything, however, Wooler had a wonderful touch. Every song benefited from a splash of his fine, flamboyant patter; every artist got the full star treatment. From noon until 12:30 Wooler played records—on a single turntable, no less, unthinkable by today’s standards—that he personally collected and carried there himself in a handsome, blue wooden case made by a joiner on the Garston Docks. The band performed from 12:30 to 1:10, came off for half an hour, and went on again at 1:40 until 2:15. Wooler provided “time checks” at every interval for those who had to keep an eye on the clock; most everyone there was on a strict lunch break from their jobs, so there was much to-ing and fro-ing throughout the two-hour session.
The Beatles had gravitated to the Cavern in early February to check it out, although no one had to sell them on its virtues. A daytime gig there would be the perfect complement to their already overbooked evening schedule, but hard as they tried, it seemed impossible to break into the lineup. Mona Best had put the moves on Ray McFall without success. Even Bob Wooler, who sung their praises, got nowhere with his boss. According to Wooler, “McFall was the law unto himself and you had to go easy on him with a new act. I was constantly saying, ‘The Beatles are available for lunch, Ray.’ ‘I’ve never heard of them.’ I knew he had, but I played along. ‘They’re quite marvelous, Ray.’ He’d put on that pained expression of his. Then, one day, he came up with the idea of booking them—all by himself.”
Following Ray McFall’s initiative, the Beatles debuted at the Cavern on February 21, 1961, playing a lunchtime session to a solidly packed house. Little is known about the particulars of the show aside from the fact that they got £3 for their efforts; in the months and years to come, the band played the club so often that individual details have become blurred in the retelling. But suffice it to say, their performance made an impact on the Cavern regulars that sent the band’s stock soaring smartly. While the Big Three were loud and Rory’s antics entertaining, no band sang with more finesse and more style, or provided more drama in their delivery. What the Beatles had was stage presence, personality that conveyed a real intimacy with the audience. The girls there locked into it right away, and much to emphatic denials, the boys soon followed suit.
Even Ray McFall caught the vibe, sending word through Bob Wooler that the band was welcome back at the first opportunity. He had to stand in line, however. The day of their Cavern debut, for instance, they played two additional gigs—at the new Casanova Club, across town, and at the scene of their breakout, Litherland Town Hall—a situation known among the musicians as “piggybacking.” Suddenly they were in great demand; work was everywhere. Each great performance led to further offers. For musicians who had been living on handouts, the goodwill of parents, and the occasional £2 gig, they were finally pulling their own financial weight. No doubt, Paul and George were outearning their fathers, and while Mimi continued to hammer John about certain failure, she couldn’t have been too disapproving of his £25-per-week income. The Beatles had never strayed from their game plan to play music for a living and they never blinked in the face of serious money woes, but no one really expected it to materialize in this manner—not in Liverpool, not in such a gratifying way. Becoming a rock ’n roll star, making records, was still the ultimate goal, but for the time being there was plenty of action to groove on.
Both Dot Rhone and Cynthia Powell had waited enduringly for their boyfriends to return. “It was as if they’d gone off to war,” Dot recalls—except that in this case, only the girls stood a chance of being wounded. During those long, lonely months, Paul and John had written faithfully, John to an almost obsessive degree, often scribbling twelve to twenty pages to Cynthia, the same simplistic pledges of love, over and over and over: “Lovely lovely lovely lovely Cyn Lovely Cyn I love lovely Cynthia Cynthia I love you You are wonderful I adore you I want you I love you I need you…” Of course, the Beatles reported only selective highlights from their Hamburg adventures, leaving out anything that so much as hinted at promiscuity. But the letters served their purpose and kept the relationships intact.
Presumably, Dot and Cynthia knew the score. Hamburg’s earthly delights were legendary, especially now that so many musicians had returned home. Neither had any illusions about the Beatles’ fidelity. As Cynthia expressed it, “John was a flirt.” But it seems doubtful she understood the full extent of his exploits. “As long as they were happy, we were happy,” Dot says.
Neither young woman summoned the courage to press her man about plans to go back. Getting back had become an obsession for the band, but there were so many hurdles: an outstanding charge of arson, Paul’s and Pete’s deportation ban, necessary work permits. One obstacle was lifted on February 25, when George turned eighteen; however, that appeared minor compared with the other snags.
One by one, those snags began to unravel. For months, Peter Eckhorn, the Top Ten’s receptive owner, had appealed to the West German Immigration Office for a concession on the Beatles’ status. Pete Best worked the same angle from Liverpool, papering the German consul’s office with requests for visas. In the meantime, Bruno Koschmider withdrew his ridiculous arson charge against Pete and Paul and promised not to oppose their return, somehow hoping, one might presume, to engage the Beatles again.
Stuart got there first. In the bleakness of a Liverpool winter, he brightened at every thought of Astrid and in early March headed back to her without a thought to anything else. Impervious to his parents’ dismay, he intended to marry Astrid. Unapologetic, he resigned from the Liverpool College of Art—a drastic, definitive move—applying to the State College of Art, nicknamed the Hochschule, Hamburg’s leading conservatory. The decision practically broke his mother’s heart. Forsaking his scholarship seemed like such a tragic mistake to Millie, who was also terrified for her son’s safety. In January he had been beaten up again, this time more severely, fracturing his skull, following a gig at Lathom Hall.* But no matter how Millie begged him to reconsider, Stuart stood his ground.
The Beatles were somewhat less despairing. As far as performing went, they were better off without Stuart, and his absence gave them time to regroup for Hamburg without having to compensate for his unhandiness. In fact, as soon as he left, they plunged into a heated round of rehearsals, with afternoons devoted almost entirely to rejuvenating their tired repertoire. With two months at the Top Ten scheduled to begin on April 1, they were in desperate need of new material. A contract negotiated with Peter Eckhorn engaged them for seven hours a night, seven nights a week. Even at the peak of their skill, this would prove daunting. On top of that, they’d be costarring with Tony Sheridan, whose song bag seemed bottomless. It was important that the Beatles hold their own.
Why didn’t they simply perform the songs Paul and John had written? Even a wildcat such as Sheridan couldn’t compete with the punch of original tunes. Certainly there were already several dozen Lennon-McCartney numbers polished to perfection. With a backward glance, it seems doubtful that “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “P.S. I Love You” would have survived the near-convulsive pace of a Hamburg jam. Any one of them might have brought a set that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Do You Want to Dance,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and “Money” to a screeching halt. Later, at the Cavern, when the Beatles established their quirky song sequence, they could mix and match numbers as they saw fit, but until that time they exercised good judgment in bagging their originals for the future.
No one knew better than the Beatles how to fatten their repertoire. At NEMS, they routinely scanned the new releases that were piled in a box near the cash register. Selecting a batch, they relied on the salesgirls—many of whom were budding Beatles fans—to play them while they squeezed into one of the listening booths. “We’d listen to both sides of a record, not just the ‘A’ side,” Pete Best recalled of a process that recurred “three or four times a week.” If anything caught someone’s ear, he simply claimed it for a solo spot in the show. Then the clerks were enlisted to play the song two or three additional times until the band had the words and proper chord sequence down, or they “clubbed together” and bought it.
The Top Ten was a definite “step up” from the Kaiserkeller (which itself would soon close), beginning with its street-level location on the bustling Reeperbahn. It was also a step back into Germany’s violent past. The kellners (waiters), under the brutal command of Horst Fascher (who had served in the same capacity at the Kaiserkeller), carried gas guns and “knuckledusters” in addition to the ubiquitous truncheons—and they relished using them. “If someone got out of line,” a musician recalls, “the waiters simply dragged them outside in the alley… and pounded these people to shit.” On the other hand, the Reeperbahn drew a better class of nightcrawler, if that was a reasonable consideration. Even the exis found it a sociable hangout, turning out in such numbers that rockers often formed a minority constituency. At the Top Ten, feeling more relaxed and confident, they mimicked the rockers’ burly leather gear with their own take on the look: a sleek, sophisticated version in glove-soft jackets and matching pants. Stuart, of all people, strove to personify the trend. He and Astrid, lately inseparable, showed up at the Top Ten looking stunning in identical expensive licorice-stick suits that were the envy of their Liverpool friends. Certainly the Beatles approved of the style; in time, they would all buy similar getups.
Among his potential costars, there was always some trepidation about opening for Sheridan—or following him. But the Beatles looked forward to it: his shows were as riotously loose as theirs, with more energy and interaction than other bands in the district. He was restless and unpredictable, sure, but stylistically he was always moving forward, pushing, pushing, pushing to break up the monotony of the standards everyone played. Recalled Pete: “He liked us backing him… because of the great harmonies we used to do for him…. [H]e’d have three people harmonizing with him, which produced a great overall sound.” Reciprocally, adding Sheridan’s guitar to their lineup thrust the Beatles into instrumental overdrive. It also gave them something to shoot for. As guitarists they were good, they were very good—but musically, Sheridan was light-years ahead of them.
The only drawback was durability. With both acts onstage all night, it became impossible to maintain the sky-high energy. There were fewer opportunities for breaks, or “powsas” (pauses), as they were called; stage jams seemed to go on forever, sapping their strength. No one complained, but the cumulative effect took its toll. Spirits flagged, tempers flared. Fortunately, Sheridan came to the rescue with his bottomless stash of amphetamines. “Here’s something to keep you awake,” he’d offer the Beatles, doling out handfuls of Preludin with which to fortify them.
Stuart’s former plans to quit the Beatles, once clear-cut and firm, seemed to have evaporated. According to his sister Pauline, “in letters from Germany, he states quite emphatically that he’s improving [as a musician]… that his repertoire was expanding.” Elsewhere, Stuart wrote about the satisfaction he derived from performing solo each night, when he came center stage to sing “Love Me Tender”:
Everybody says I sing it better than Elvis…. Just before I sing, I receive the best applause of the night. Minutes after I finish singing the people all look at me with sad eyes and sad looks on their faces. Recently, I’ve become very popular both with girls and homosexuals who tell me I’m the sweetest, most beautiful boy…. Also it appears that people refer to me as the James Dean of Hamburg.
Clearly he loved the spotlight, just as he was conflicted about leaving the band. Appearing on that stage provided a release, emotionally and artistically. It made no demands on him, unlike a canvas—or Astrid, for that matter. Meanwhile, the others rode him mercilessly—about his appearance, his size, his dependence on Astrid, anything that crossed their minds. Stuart had always been the butt of some rude “mickey-taking,” as the Scousers called it, but as the gulf between the boys widened, the ragging turned nasty, with an edge of abusiveness. Hardly a night went by that John didn’t turn on Stuart, needling him, severely berating some aspect of his fragile character. As Stuart ventured further from the band, it was harder to regard him as one of the gang. As he withdrew from the pack, moving into Astrid’s house seemed like the final straw.
Over the years, the Beatles faced many tough judgment calls that fared as high drama in their overall saga, each one handled definitively but carelessly (in fact, badly), ending with their inevitable split. The first—dismissing Allan Williams—was only a prelude.
Williams had never formally served as the Beatles’ manager—or anybody else’s. Says his first wife, Beryl, “It was loose and always rather benevolent. There was a day-to-day routine he went through: ‘Oh, here’s a letter. Let us send a group to Hamburg—or the south of France. Which group is available? Oh, you can go.’ He never really referred to himself as anyone’s manager.” But for almost a year, he’d exclusively booked the Beatles’ Liverpool gigs and not only introduced them to the exotica of Hamburg but actually took them there by hand. A business card that read THE BEATLES / SOLE DIRECTION: A. WILLIAMS was passed to promoters when they inquired whom to contact for bookings, leaving no uncertainty about his intent. And if there were doubts, it was settled by the 10 percent commission he collected—and they paid without any coercion—from their wages.
But the way they saw it, Williams had played no role whatsoever in their engagement at the Top Ten, despite the fact he had issued a contract for it. Pete Best arranged the booking himself, and upon the Beatles’ arrival in Hamburg it was decided that paying a cut of their fee was unwarranted.
Shortly thereafter, most likely at John’s urging, Stuart informed Williams by letter that the Beatles had no intention of paying his commission. Their refusal was based on the pretext that an extraordinary income tax was being deducted from their Top Ten earnings, leaving them no cushion with expenses from their weekly draw, but that was clearly an excuse. Dismissing the seriousness of its contents (“[It] struck me as being completely unfair,” Williams recalled), he wrote back, explaining that all workers had tax withheld from their income, and if they hadn’t before, then they were extremely lucky.
It made no difference to the Beatles. Stuart’s follow-up letter instructed Williams that the band was taking a hard line. There would be no commission: that much was final.
Later, Williams would claim that “he wasn’t disappointed” by their decision. There were other bands, better bands, worth his attention and expertise. At the time, however, he angrily banned them from setting foot in the Blue Angel and warned of repercussions.
In Hamburg, far away from the storm’s epicenter, his threats hardly seemed worth taking seriously. Their shows with Tony Sheridan were models of the smoldering rock ’n roll rave-up power extravaganzas that stretched on for hours at a clip. As a performer, Sheridan was as electrifying as ever, but with the Beatles at his back, his act leaped into the stratosphere. “It was loud,” recalled a regular who marveled at the intensity level. The sound they put out was “amazing, unlike anything Hamburg ever heard before—or since.”
This was an entirely new experience for them, being the center of attention, the talk of the town. And it allowed them to experiment with new roles and identities that were far beyond Liverpool’s grasp. Of all the Beatles, Stuart was the one who proved most open to new experiences. The first to don a leather suit, he made use of flamboyant clothes and accessories to transform himself. Part of this enthusiasm stemmed from Astrid’s fascination with clothing and image. Her sense of drama was beguiling. None of the Beatles pushed the envelope further than Stuart, and when he showed up at the Top Ten one night sporting a flashy new haircut, it set off a bomb in the Hamburg music world that resonated for years to come. The style was a takeoff on the exis’ “French” cut, combed long and splayed across the forehead in a soft, sculpted fringe. “Astrid had styled it,” said Jürgen Vollmer, who wore his hair in a similar fashion. To the Germans, the look was nothing extraordinary. “In my art school… all the boys used to have this haircut,” Astrid acknowledged sometime later. While dating Klaus Voormann, she had urged him to cut his hair that way, to please her aesthetically, as well as to show his dedication; with Stuart’s accession, it became his dutiful rite of passage.
There is no clear way of knowing how the other Beatles responded in truth to Stuart’s deviant hairstyle. Out of ignorance—or envy—they lashed out defensively, pelting Stuart with an arsenal of childish taunts. But two days later a hesitant George followed suit, brushing his pompadour into an informal shaggy mop, and, like that, the mold for the Beatle haircut was indelibly cast.
The Beatles’ first few weeks back in Hamburg had been another lusty fun-filled adventure, but things took a sedate turn when Cynthia and Dot showed up to visit. As expected, they appeared in Hamburg like misplaced, long-lost relatives, and John and Paul were almost immediately swallowed up in their girlfriends’ needy demands.
A noticeable gulf formed between them from the very start of their reunion. Cynthia got off the train in Hamburg and noticed a shift in the boys’ personalities. “The pills and booze they had been stuffing into themselves had heightened their senses beyond our reason, and they overwhelmed us with their nonstop chat and frenzied excitement.” The amphetamine rush had caught the girls off guard, but after “two weeks in Hamburg,” she noted, “we were all on them.”
There were other changes, too, changes that proved more heart-warming and encouraging. From the moment Dot rushed into Paul’s arms, she noticed that “he seemed more grown-up… more confident.” She could tell right off that “he loved being in Hamburg, he was so excited about all it had to offer.”
And though no one said as much aloud, the prospect of marriage was on everyone’s mind. Cynthia and Dot certainly discussed it with breathless enchantment, and if letters home were any indication of John’s true feelings, he was similarly marriage-minded. And yet there were lingering questions, not the least of which was their age. Also, the band was on the verge of something important; everyone could feel it. The vacation in Hamburg was the first measure of how the girls would take to the Beatles’ expanding success. This was the world they’d all left home in pursuit of.
As it turned out, the reunion with the girls was a glorious one. John and Paul, enormously attentive, romanced them with Hamburg proper by day and St. Pauli by night. “We did a lot of sightseeing,” Dot recalls of her “idyllic time” with Paul. “There was a boat tour of Hamburg harbor and visits to churches.” John took Cynthia to more familiar turf, the port, where they clutched hands and watched ferries scuttling the waves around the Elbe’s endless basins. And when the sights became burdensome, everyone shopped. After embracing Hamburg’s everyday charms, each girl was treated to a glimpse of kinky street life, taken for a stroll along the Herbertstrasse in an attempt to shock them silly, which amused the boys.
The seedy sideshow produced the desired effect, but the girls were more shocked and initially speechless when Astrid Kirchherr appeared. They had been hearing endlessly about her since the Beatles’ brief homestand—Astrid’s beauty, style, sophistication, sexiness, and, on top of everything, her extraordinary photographs. Astrid, Astrid, Astrid: she seemed like a dream girl to her Liverpool counterparts, gifted and impossibly gorgeous—not to mention an A-number-one threat. “She sounded as though she could run rings around me in every way,” Cynthia recalled in a 1978 memoir. Astrid and John gobbled Prellies together and gossiped like magpies; they even occasionally held hands. Of course, few women could have satisfied John’s Brigitte Bardot fantasy more ably than Astrid. Like the art college beauty Johnnie Crosby, she was a blond, slim-hipped, heat-seeking woman oozing mystique. But as far as is known, John’s relationship with Astrid never got more physical than a brotherly hug. It wasn’t that he didn’t lust after her—he did, most likely in a big way, too. But she was Stuart’s girl, so that’s where it began and ended. And as it happened, the girls hit it off, which was fortunate since it had been arranged that Cynthia would board with Astrid, while Paul and Dot bunked on a houseboat owned by Rosa Hoffman, the Kaiserkeller bathroom attendant who, like Horst Fascher, had decamped to the Top Ten.
Even though she “felt uncomfortable around the boys,” with “no self-confidence” to ground her, the Hamburg nights were filled with a devil-may-care vitality that Dot had never experienced before. “Everyone was so alive,” she remembers, “so full of hope.” But despite the esprit, she detected cracks in the facade. “You could see it if you just watched Pete Best,” she says. “He was very quiet in those situations, unable to join in the conversation with the other guys. He was never fast enough for their comments. John and Paul were fierce, and George was no threat to them.” But Pete was not the main issue. “Even though the girls loved Pete, Paul wasn’t really jealous of him. But he hated Stu.” In fact, everything Stuart did now seemed to enrage him. And after years of excusing this travesty, suffering Stuart’s arrogance and capitulating to John’s apologies—still, Paul was forced to swallow his anger. It wasn’t just the music and the hair and the clothes. “It’s true that Paul had his eye on Stu’s bass,” Dot says, “but, in fact, he was jealous of Stu, especially of Stu’s friendship with John.” What’s more, Stuart flaunted it. Time and again, he put it under Paul’s nose and gave it a scornful swish.
Dot must have sensed things were coming to a head, because the next night, while she and Cynthia were “dollying up” at Astrid’s house, the phone rang. It was Stuart, convulsed by a white rage, sounding completely irrational. When he learned that Dot was there, “he insisted that Astrid toss me out,” Dot recalls. Astrid calmed him down enough to determine what had happened: Paul and Stuart had finally had it out, not in private but onstage in the middle of a set, in full view of an astonished German audience.
They had been backing Tony Sheridan for the nine o’clock set. Paul, at the piano, where he had recently been pounding out guitar chords with innate flair, was muttering to himself, vexed by the enormity of Stuart’s mistakes. At some point he let go with an utterly outrageous comment about Astrid that hit a nerve. Stuart dropped the bass in the middle of the song, lunged at Paul, and caught him “with such a wallop that it knocked him off his stool.” The fight, which had been brewing for months, was wild and fierce. Stuart and Paul rolled around on the floor, punching and stomping each other, while the other Beatles and Sheridan soldiered on. “They beat the shit out of each other,” says an observer, and thrashed about until the song ended, when John, George, and Pete finally pried them apart.
Nothing was settled by the fight, but as Pete Best interpreted it: “It was the beginning of the end of Stu as a Beatle.” Sutcliffe realized the situation was untenable. There was no place for him on that stage anymore; Paul—and even John, by his neutrality—had made that absolutely clear. Stuart moped around for a few days, disillusioned with the band and with himself. The constant insults, the humiliation—he’d had enough. There were more important things than playing with the Beatles. He had barely touched a paintbrush in months. That alone struck him as absurd. He’d made a horrendous mistake in ignoring his art for so long and needed to reclaim that part of his life.
Despite the consequence of Stuart’s decision, there was no formal resignation. Later that week he simply turned up at the Top Ten and told the others he was through with the band. It was all very matter-of-fact, devoid of lingering resentment or even drama. If any of the Beatles were surprised, no one let it show, nor did anyone try to discourage Stuart from leaving. Stuart, for his part, couldn’t have been more accommodating. In a magnanimous gesture, he even handed his bass over to Paul in an acknowledgment of proper succession, but as Paul pointed out, “he was only lending it to me, so he didn’t want me to change the strings around.”*
The departure of Stuart Sutcliffe coincided with the end of Cynthia and Dot’s Hamburg vacation, unburdening the band of any external distractions. The girls’ brief stay vibrated with many good feelings. Dot, especially, was given an unexpected boost when Paul presented her with a gift—a gold band—as a keepsake from Hamburg. The seriousness of the present caught everyone off guard. Dot remembers staring at it, unable to grasp its significance. A wedding band! She was speechless. Finally, Paul suggested smoothly that she try it on. “Turns out, it was an engagement ring,” Dot recalls. “He told me that in Germany you buy a ring that looks like a wedding band and, for the engagement [period], you put it on your left hand. When you get married you just change it to your right.”
Married: this was the first that she’d heard as much from Paul. All this time, she “felt [she] was never good enough for him,” and here he was in love with her. “I was thrilled,” Dot says. Paul had everything she secretly desired. He was charming, talented, as good-looking as any movie star, and from a solid, loving family. Dot made no secret of her happiness when she returned to Liverpool in May, moving out of her parents’ house and into a flat, in anticipation of Paul’s return.
Behind their pronouncements and gestures of love, the Beatles’ front men had more practical matters on their minds. Music remained the top priority. Now that their stage shows were sharp, next on the agenda was making a record.
The route to the recording studio in the early sixties was mazy and exclusive. Unlike the opportunities in America, where A&R scouts practically herded singing groups off the street corners and into the studio, European openings were scarce. A scant four labels operated in all of England, each with one meager recording facility to its name. There were only a handful of independents on the order of Sun, J&M, Chess, Radio Recorders, or Atlantic, and none as exquisitely appointed or technically proficient. Although any yabbo with £5 could cut a disc at the HMV store in London, conditions there were less than primitive and not unlike the Quarry Men’s experience at Percy Phillips’s studio. Bands weren’t simply discovered and recorded in England; they underwent a long, involved process that meandered through interviews, courtships, showcases, auditions, rehearsals, teas, and finally the rare, exalted session. The Beatles were well aware of that; moreover, they knew that the inside track was clubby and that most opportunities fell to London bands or twinky acts like Cliff Richard, who’d showcased at Two I’s. Provincial rock ’n roll bands were regarded “like lepers.”
It was only a matter of time, however, before word of their talent spread past the ghetto of St. Pauli and into the stiff-necked musical establishment. Tommy Kent, a German rock ’n roll star on the magnitude of Billy Fury, was the first local celebrity to “discover” the Beatles. “He said we were the best group he’d ever heard,” Paul wrote to a friend in Liverpool, quoting the highlight of a backstage visit. It sounded, to be sure, like extravagant praise, but Kent’s enthusiasm was apparently sincere. Following a repeat visit to the Top Ten, he alerted Bert Kaempfert, a popular German bandleader whose company had struck a recent production deal with Polydor Records, a subsidiary label of mighty Deutsche Grammophon. Kaempfert was no ordinary kappellmeister. A handsome, charismatic composer and popular recording artist, he spent the postwar years stringing together an impressive array of instrumental hits, including “Wonderland by Night” and “Strangers in the Night,” and as an icon-turned-entrepreneur, he began building a small but accomplished pop talent roster.
Tommy Kent urged Kaempfert to go see the Beatles after his visit to the Top Ten. Kaempfert’s response was polite but noncommittal. He was more focused on Tony Sheridan, whose talent he recognized the minute he saw it. A performer such as Sheridan would add panache to his roster; the energy he put out would create its own demand. He offered Sheridan a recording contract, which included the Beatles as his backing band. The Beatles were stunned and overjoyed by the offer. Unable to restrain themselves, they scrawled their signatures on an undated contract written completely in German whose only copy was given to Kaempfert. The terms were simple: they’d be paid a total of DM 300 per person—comparable to a week’s wages at the Top Ten—which precluded them from a share of future royalties; moreover, the contract would be in effect from July 1961 until July 1962, with an option—Kaempfert’s—for a year’s extension.
It was a sticky piece of business, a kind of take-it-or-leave-it offer in the spirit of deals signed by doo-wop groups in the early fifties. Even among London musicians it was rare to receive anything more than a standard flat fee for studio work. It remains doubtful that they had legal counsel or that the terms were even explained to them. Not that it would have mattered. To their grand satisfaction, the boys felt: “What the hell, we’re recording!” A dream had come true: the Beatles were finally making records.
But they were records in name only—and not even in their name. As a concession to German slang, in which the word peedles skewed as “tiny dicks,” the band appeared as the Beat Brothers, the collective name used for all of Sheridan’s backing groups between 1961 and 1965. Otherwise, they performed a lineup of songs similar to the one played on the Top Ten stage six times a night, seven nights a week.
Kaempfert must have planned on a set that strove to rock out without offending his loyal mainstream audience. Why else would it have been weighted with souped-up standards like “My Bonnie” and “[When] The Saints [Go Marching In]?” Even the Beatles’ showcase—“Ain’t She Sweet”—was a retread of the old music hall number.* As novices, the Beatles were too impressionable and excited to stage a protest, but Tony Sheridan, arguably no greenhorn, merely followed orders. Although it seems thoroughly out of character, it is reasonable to assume he viewed the session as a comeback opportunity and chose not to make waves. Kaempfert and his staff worked briskly and diligently, seldom requiring more than two takes on any song. Each track rolled out with Germanic precision, and along with George’s instrumental debut on the self-penned “Cry for a Shadow,” the whole session went down without so much as a hiccup. For a single release, “My Bonnie” sounded like the obvious choice, but it would be up to the suits at Polydor to make that decision. Convinced that the sound “represented something new” and unusual, the engineers and technicians left the session feeling upbeat about their work.
No one felt the flush more acutely than the Beatles. Not even guarded restraint from an experienced hand like Kaempfert put a damper on their sanguine outlook. However naively, they regarded the session as their big break, the break that would lead to inevitable stardom. It didn’t matter that the release was still a ways off or that the spotlight, if it shone, would fall on Tony Sheridan.
In fact, the Beatles wouldn’t even be around to partake in the launch. Less than a week after the session, their engagement at the Top Ten concluded and, like it or not, they were on their way back to Liverpool.