Beatles 1: John
“Where we going Johnny?”
It’s been their catchphrase for a couple of years now, ever since the three of them came together, top deck of an 86 bus one night back in the spring of 1958 - John and Paul joined by George, Paul’s cocky little mate with the quiff who can pick out “Raunchy” on his Hofner guitar. Paul and George know all the fancy chords and harmonies, it’s true, but John’s still the leader of their peculiar pack.
Where we going? Right now Johnny doesn’t have a clue. 7 December 1960 and he’s on his own at the Hook of Holland, heaving his treasured Rickenbacker and his amp onto the Harwich ferry, pulling his collar up against the freezing North Sea gale, cadging fags from lorry drivers and hoping he can scrape together enough cash to get him on the train and back, tail between his legs, to Aunt Mimi.
These days, quite frankly, he’s lucky if he remembers his own name. The past few months are a blur of Prellies and Dexys, bevvies and schnapps, gangsters and bouncers, hookers, trannies and the bleeding gestapo. Since arriving in Hamburg in August, he and his band have played over 200 hours, drunk 2,000 beers, eaten countless dodgy Pfannkuchen and left a trail of disgrace the length and breadth of the Große Freiheit.
It’s a mighty long way from St Peter’s Church, Woolton. There’s a photo of John, July 1957, on the back of a truck with his school skiffle band, the Quarry Men, at the church fete where he first met Paul. Staring straight into the camera, playing his crummy Gallotone guitar tuned like a banjo, his hair tousled into a limp quiff, he looks like a kid playing dress up. Just three years later, a few days after his 20th birthday, and in the photos Astrid Kirchherr takes one grey October afternoon in a Hamburg fairground, he looks prematurely haggard, like he’s been through a war.
He’s served his time for sure, daydreaming on buses, hardening his fingers on cheap guitar strings, shredding his larynx in dank, acrid cellars across Merseyside. Most of all he’s been studying. He may have failed everything at Quarry Bank High School, and been at best an elusive presence at Liverpool College of Art, but he and the boys have passed their O levels in rock and roll with distinction. They’ve drunk it all in: everything from Elvis to Little Richard, Ray Charles to the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly. Not to mention Tamla, the girl groups, movie themes, show tunes, the Goons, TV jingles - it’s all stewed and steeped into their own dense scouse slumgullion.
For a while, while they were still nominally at school, that seemed to be enough: three little Billy Liars inventing their own private Ambrosia-on-Mersey. They’d write songs (“Another Lennon-McCartney original!” boasted the neat pages of Paul’s exercise book) and even plays. They’d record themselves (paying three and six each in July 1958 to make a shellac 78 in Percy Phillips’ front room in Kenny). And, always, they’d dream of Fender and Gretsch guitars. But even when they got a regular gig - in the summer of 1959 playing at Mona Best’s basement club the Casbah in West Derby - they struggled with the rudiments of finding a bass player or keeping a drummer.
Aunt Mimi’s words taunted him: “The guitar’s alright for a hobby. But it won’t earn you any money”. Unbelievably, by virtue of being willing and available, having recruited John’s pal Stuart to play three-note bass, and for once able to borrow a drummer, in May 1960 they luck into a paying gig - £75 for one week! - touring the wilds of Scotland as back up for Larry Parnes’ second division smoothie Johnny Gentle.
But Aberdeen and Banff are no preparation for Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller. Thanks to the wheeling, dealing indefatigable Allan Williams, the one man in Liverpool who sees something in their spirited shambling, they get booked for a Hamburg residency. Allan drives them himself, picking up Mona Best’s taciturn son Pete and his drum kit, strapping their crummy amps to the roof of this ramshackle Austin minivan, and trundling with them across England and Holland and Germany. On 17 August he finally deposits them at the Bambi Kino, the dismal fleapit toilet that is their new home, quite possibly the only dwelling in northern Europe to make John’s student digs in Gambier Terrace seem palatial.
And yet Hamburg is the making of them. Every evening the hated Bruno Koschmider barks at them to get up and “Mach Schau!” and somehow, seven nights a week, eight hours a night, they finally get it all together. Pete is a rudimentary drummer, Stuart a merely ornamental bass player, but if they stomp hard enough on the planks of the makeshift stage they can keep them in time.
The club don’t seem to mind what the boys play or what they wear. They don’t even seem to mind if John does Hitler impressions, goes into his Quasimodo routine or shows up onstage in his pants with a loo seat round his neck. Just as long as the backbeat keeps pounding and the punters keep drinking. They draw on every song they know - entire Elvis, Little Richard and Buddy Holly LPs, the theme from the Third Man, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. Soon they can vamp through Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” for an hour.
Eventually, after 14 weeks, they stomp right through the Kaiserkeller stage and the trouble starts. Bruno informs the authorities that George is only 17 and he’s sent on the first boat back to Britain. Pete and Paul are arrested, accused of arson and packed off on a plane home. Stuart meanwhile is all loved up with his German girlfriend Astrid, enjoying home comforts at her parents house in the Hamburg suburbs.
And now it’s John on his tod on the ferry back to Britain. He’s had to sell his cowboy boots to pay his fare home and his cheap old winklepickers are already soaked. His amp is strapped to his back and that Quasimodo stoop might soon become permanent. Where we going Johnny? Back to Woolton, a life of knuckling down to brummer striving? A few more years of art school squalor? Making a go of the band and maybe bagging a summer season at Pwllheli Butlins?
Maybe it’s the sea air, the old, familiar wail of ferryboats and seagulls, but at some point, as the Essex coast comes into view, a penny drops. John has found something in Hamburg and he’s not about to let it go. Over the past three years with Paul and George, he’s been the leader of the Quarry Men, the Moondogs and the Japage 3. For a night or two he was Long John fronting the Silver Beetles. Once or twice he and Paul had been the Nerk Twins. And in the Indra they’d be introduced every night as “Der Piedels”. But over the past few months, in stray moments in the Hamburg night, he’s caught a glimpse of the band, the gang, the high he’s been chasing, ever since April 1956 when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel” and Little Richard. As the Queen Wilhemina pulls into dock, he wipes the fog from his specs and sees clearly for the first time in months. The Beatles have finally come into focus.
