Beatles vs. Stones (3 page)

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Of course it would be unfair, and even stupid, to draw too much from this—to infer that the Beatles were “thugs” or that the Stones were “gentlemen”—based upon where they came from. More relevant is the knowledge that growing up, three of the four Beatles were known troublemakers, and the charismatic John Lennon was easily the group’s most loutish member. On that last point, the historical record is so unequivocal
that it is almost unseemly to delve into the details. Going all the way back to primary school, Lennon is remembered as a garden-variety delinquent—the type of kid who would pocket the change he was instructed to deposit in the church collection box, and pilfer from his aunt’s handbag. He would hitch free rides on the bumpers of tram cars, steal cigarettes and then sell them, pull down girls’ underpants, vandalize phone booths, set stuff on fire, act the clown in class, skip detention, gamble, pick fights, and arouse fear in others as he and his friends tooled around on their bicycles.
He was, by his own admission, the “King Pin” of that age group, and many years later, an erstwhile neighbor could only remark, “Running into John Lennon and his gang in Woolton on their bikes was not an enjoyable social encounter.”

Lennon continued in this vein when he attended the Liverpool College of Art, where, according to biographer Ray Coleman,
“His work, erratically presented, was the last thing [his teachers] worried about.” Instead, they fretted about his incredible capacity for causing trouble. Armed with a caustic wit, Lennon could be spectacularly cruel; one classmate remembered,
“He was the biggest micky-take I’ve ever met. He picked on all kinds of characters in school, whatever their backgrounds, and tried to find some way of laughing at them.” For some inexplicable reason, anyone who was physically afflicted, whether by disability or injury, was especially likely to be targeted by Lennon. Drinking only seemed to exacerbate his meanness, and according to his first wife, Cynthia,
“he had a very small capacity before he became aggressive.” With women, Lennon was a notorious cad. He was obnoxiously possessive of whomever he dated, yet rarely faithful to anyone and disparaging of those who were too timid to go to bed with him. His best childhood friend, Pete Shotton, explained that Lennon
“came to be regarded, by all but his small circle of friends, as thoroughly bad news. Even I sometimes worried that he seemed destined for Skid Row.”

Of course, Lennon had many appealing qualities as well. It was not unusual for him to show flashes of the warmth and sensitivity that
he would later become well known for, and his friends always reckoned that his obnoxious behavior was merely his way of camouflaging his pain and vulnerability.
Though Hunter Davies’s authorized biography of the Beatles implies that Lennon may have had a happy childhood, in fact he had a terrible one. His father, Alf, abandoned him when he was very young, and later his mother, Julia—always a bit of a floozy—left him in the custody of his aunt Mimi and uncle George (the latter of whom died unexpectedly in 1955). As a young teenager, Lennon began reconnecting with his mother, but the rapprochement was confusing, to say the least: In 1979, Lennon recorded an audio diary, which surfaced in 2008, in which he reminisced about a time he’d laid in bed with his mother when he was fourteen.
Somehow, he touched her breast, and then he wondered about trying something more. Then when Lennon was seventeen, Julia was struck and killed by an errant driver.
“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Lennon said. “We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years.”

In losing a parent, Lennon had something in common with Paul McCartney, whose mother Mary died from complications of breast cancer surgery when he was just fourteen. His choirboy looks notwithstanding, Paul likewise sometimes engaged in aberrant teenage behavior, though nothing to rival Lennon’s. He would merely play hooky and steal trifling things, like cigarettes, and on one occasion he may have helped steal some valuable audio equipment from a local church. Later, McCartney seemed chagrined about his uninspiring values:
“All I wanted was women, money, and clothes,” he said. According to one biographer,
“Without question one of young Paul’s greatest natural attributes was his smooth sense of diplomacy and persuasive charm. Apprehended red-handed perpetrating any number of naughty boyish pranks . . . he generally managed to weasel his way out.”

The youngest Beatle, George Harrison, likewise managed to stay clear of any real trouble when he was growing up, in spite of being incredibly laxly supervised.
“They let me stay out all night and have a
drink when I wanted to,” he said of his parents. “That’s probably why I don’t really like alcohol much today. I’d had it all by the age of ten.” Still, George embarked on a classic anticonformist, teenage rebellion trip, stubbornly disobeying his teachers, altering his school uniform, slicking his hair back with gobs of pomade, and tramping through Liverpool in blue suede shoes.
“From about the age of thirteen, all we were interested in was rock ’n’ roll,” remembered one of his friends. Of the four Beatles, Ringo is the only one whose childhood reputation seems unblemished by any dubious activities. Whether this speaks to his affable good nature, or his instinct for self-preservation, is hard to know. The hoodlums who prowled around the Dingle operated on a whole different order of magnitude than, say, John Lennon’s bicycle gang. It was the type of place, Ringo recalled, where
“You kept your head down, your eyes open, and you didn’t get in anybody’s way.”

Ringo also was not with the Beatles during most of their trips to Hamburg, Germany (though he, too, regularly performed there, as the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes). Still, Beatles scholars agree that the Hamburg experience was formative. Forced to adhere to a brutally demanding schedule, that is where they honed their individual skills, matured into a tightly knit unit, and were introduced, via the beautiful photographer Astrid Kirchherr, to the haircuts that evolved into the mop top. Hamburg is also the place where the Beatles—consisting of John, Paul, George, drummer Pete Best, and bassist Stu Sutcliffe—enjoyed an almost unimaginably debauched lifestyle of drink, women, and pills punctuated occasionally by violence (though Pete refrained from the pills, and Stu shied away from the women except for Astrid). If a few music-industry insiders in the early 1960s regarded the Beatles as “thugs,” their sojourns in Hamburg—where they held residencies at four different nightclubs over a twenty-eight-month period—are part of the reason why.

Hamburg bears some similarities to Liverpool—both are seaports, home to migrant communities, that endured strafing attacks during World War Two, and the two cities even share the same line of latitude
(56 degrees North). But the St. Pauli district, where the Beatles played, made Liverpool’s roughest neighborhood, Scottie Road, seem almost tranquil. St. Pauli may even have been the most stereotypically “sinful” place in the world. All of the clubs the Beatles played—the Star-Club, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten, and the Indra—were on or around the Reeperbahn, the street known to Germans as
die sündige Meile
(the sinful mile). It teemed with strippers, prostitutes, petty criminals, and the worst types of itinerants who intermingled in brothels, sex clubs, and dark and grotty bars controlled by mobsters. The Beatles, meanwhile, ranged in age from seventeen to twenty when they initially visited Hamburg, and for the first time in their lives, they had a wee bit of money in their pockets. It was a recipe for mayhem.

As performers, the Beatles were famously encouraged to “
mach shau
” (put on a lively show), and when they were jacked up on amphetamines and saturated with beer—as was often the case—they had little trouble generating excitement. Though merely a bar band at this point, specializing in American rock ’n’ roll numbers from the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Carl Perkins, they played faster and harder than most of their peers, and their inspired performances quickly helped them to earn an intense following. With his open-legged stance before the microphone, Lennon was an especially physical presence, and he is said by biographer Philip Norman to have sometimes gone “berserk” in Hamburg’s clubs, “prancing and groveling in imitation of any rock ’n’ roller or movie monster his dazzled mind could summon up. The fact that their audience could not understand a word they said provoked John into
cries of
‘Seig Heil!’
and ‘Fucking Nazis!’ to which the audience invariably responded by laughing and clapping.” Other times, Lennon would pass out drunk behind a piano, leaving the others to play without him. A 1962 bootleg recording documents a performance at the Star Club where Lennon sung the lyrics to
“Shimmy Shake” as “shitty shitty,” and Paul introduced “Besame Mucho” as “a special request for Hitler.”
The entire band ate, drank, and smoked on stage, and occasionally they found themselves throwing furniture around while staging mock fights. Once, Lennon played in his underwear, with a toilet seat around his neck. Locals sometimes referred to them as the
verrüchte
Beatles (the crazy Beatles). And of course, the Beatles outfitted themselves in leather gear from head to toe.

Sex in Hamburg was easily obtained for the handsome Beatles—
far more so than in England—and their attitude toward it was unembarrassed. Pete Best claims that the band regularly took to partner swapping, and that each member averaged
“two or three girls each night,” depending on their stamina. Even if he’s exaggerating (as seems likely), his bandmates have confirmed that they regularly brought women back to their cramped quarters for late-night romps.
“It was a sex shock,” McCartney explained. “We got a very swift baptism of fire into the sex scene. There was a lot of it about and we were off the leash.” Lennon put the matter a bit more forthrightly:
“Between the whores and the groupies our dicks all just about dropped off.”

Amid all of these chaotic indulgences, dangerous undercurrents of violence pulsed through Hamburg. Many of the waiters and barmen in the clubs the Beatles played doubled as professional criminals; the whole lot of them carried switchblades, truncheons, and lead-weighted saps. Sometimes, as the Beatles were packing up their gear at the end of a long night, patrons who’d run afoul of the waiters would still be lying half dead on the floor. In other instances, bar fights became so riotous they could only be quashed with teargas, which of course sent everyone (Beatles included) pouring out of the club, crying and wheezing.
“Virtually every night at the Indra some poor bastard was either bottled, knifed, or worse,” Lennon recalled.

Usually the Beatles merely witnessed the horrific violence, but on a few occasions they acted like common roughnecks. Some of their worst behavior may have been accentuated by the fact that they grew accustomed to gobbling slimming pills called “Prellies” (Preludin). Now off the market, these little blue pills could loosen a person’s inhibitions,
keep him awake, and put him seriously on edge. In one legendary incident, Paul and Stu
schau gemacht
(made a show) when they fell into fisticuffs during the middle of a set. Another time, while playing cards in their flat above the Star-Club, John drunkenly struck someone upside the head with a beer bottle.
“Within seconds the fellow [Lennon struck] had gotten up and knocked the hell out of John, pasting him all over the flat,” remembers a friend. “And all of us stood there and let him do it, because we agreed that you don’t go round hitting people on the head with bottles and expect to get away with it.” A long-circulating rumor holds that when he was especially sozzled, Lennon would sometimes find a perch from which to urinate on the heads of nuns who passed by on the streets below.
In another despicable episode from his Hamburg career, Lennon once proposed that the Beatles should mug a drunken sailor they’d just met. Paul and George proved too timid to execute the plan, so John and Pete were left to attack the tipsy mariner on a dark corner, at which point they got more than they bargained for: their victim retaliated with a fierce volley of punches and then whipped out what the two Beatles thought was a pistol. In fact, the sailor’s gun only shot teargas pellets, but it was enough to send two assailants scrambling for their lives.

Whenever the Beatles returned to Liverpool clubs and dance halls, they brought a little bit of Hamburg with them.
“They liked us because we were kind of rough, and we’d had a lot of practice in Germany,” said Harrison. “There were all these acts going ‘Dum de dum’ and suddenly we’d come on, jumping and stomping. Wild men in leather suits.” An early fan described them as
“raw. . . . They were always in their leather jackets, Cuban heels, and their hair everywhere. It was so different from the run-of-the-mill groups at the time with their suede-collared jackets and matching colors, all blues and yellows.” Liverpool disc jockey Bob Wooler remembered Lennon
“commanded the stage . . . the way he stared . . . and stood. His legs would be wide apart, that was one of his trademarks. And of course it was regarded as being very sexual. The girls up front would
be kind of looking up his legs, keeping a watch on the crotch, as it were. It was a very aggressive stance that he adopted.” The group continued taking Prellies and Purple Hearts (supplied by Paul’s girlfriend, who stole them from a pharmacy she worked at), and when the band played lunchtime engagements, Lennon would banter sarcastically with the audience—especially with those who worked in nearby offices.
“ ‘Shurrup, you with the suits on,’ became a regular Lennon message,” one biographer said. “He mocked them for taking ‘regular jobs.’ ” And since the enthusiasm that the Beatles stimulated in teenage women sometimes elicited an inverse response from Merseyside’s tough young men, the Beatles still got into the occasional brawl. According to Best, George was too puny for real fighting, and sometimes called for rescue, but
“John . . . was always ready to have a go.”
After Stuart Sutcliffe died from a brain hemorrhage in 1961, an autopsy found an indentation in his skull, and some have speculated that the trauma might have occurred when a group of Liverpool teddy boys attacked him earlier that year.