The Long and Winding Road
By: Gareth Meade
October 5, 2009
In 1959 Denis Mitchell released a short documentary about Liverpool entitled Morning in the Streets. Amid the images of broken bottles, schools that resemble prisons and destruction from a war that ended over a decade prior, disembodied voices speak of living on £3 a week and having to sleep up to five people in one bed. The grainy black and white footage is so stark it's hard to imagine that this time in history ever had colour. It's also hard to imagine that this is the same year that Mona Best decided to open the Casbah Coffee Club as a meeting place for her sons and their friends, who included John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
The origin of The Beatles is so well known and has so often been written about that it makes it difficult to shed any new light on the topic. But it is the blood, sweat, sex, drugs, toil and rock 'n' roll that simultaneously stands in stark contrast to, but also defines, the band The Beatles became that makes revisiting it so infinitely interesting.
Without the Casbah, Hamburg and eventually the Cavern Club, it's fair to say that The Beatles would not have stood out beyond any of the other groups capitalizing on the burgeoning ‘beat' scene at the time. In hindsight the perception is that there was always going to be a group out of the UK that would achieve what The Beatles eventually did. The 1950s saw a resurgence in skiffle, a genre of music largely based on a DIY ethic, which itself was a precursor to rock 'n' roll in the United States. Societal attitudes were changing and as so often is the case, optimism was found in creativity and the arts; a much needed distraction and unifying force. American rock 'n' roll had found its way to Britain by the mid 1950's, not, as mythology would have it, by merchant seamen returning home with records in tow, but by being released by UK distributors. And Mona Best witnessed a music club's success in London that gave her the idea to open the Casbah Coffee Club.
This gave Lennon, McCartney and Harrison (then known as The Quarrymen, along with Ken Brown) an outlet to perform and to perform regularly, which meant exposure where exposure had previously been limited. Even at this early stage, the very fact that The Quarrymen gathered a following and earned a residency speaks of their being the right people in the right place at the right time. Perhaps even key at this stage was Lennon and McCartney's relationship; their sense of humour, their dissatisfaction with education and most importantly their drive to succeed. In Lennon's case that could have been borne out of cynicism for his lot in life, but with McCartney it appeared to be more out of the desire to always better himself.
The Cashbah was also where (depending on whose version you read) George Harrison witnessed Pete Best's drumming, which eventually lead to his joining the group at the last minute before they shipped off to Hamburg. The trip to the then less than salubrious German port came about thanks to Allan Williams who owned the Jacaranda Club in Liverpool. On the coattails of Derry and The Seniors' success in Hamburg, the band that would become The Beatles (via Johnny and The Moondogs and The Silver Beetles) were also sent by Williams, who became their part-time manager. Further attesting to the bleak portrait of Liverpool in Mitchell's documentary, it was money that persuaded the bands' families to let their children go. At about £100 per week for the group, their wages were more than they could earn in Liverpool.
There is no understating the influence of their time in Hamburg. The people they met and the world they became privy to had such an impact on them, from the mundane (their haircuts) to the extraordinary (their musical prowess), that John Lennon famously remarked "I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg". If put in the context of five young men (at this point Stu Sutcliffe had joined on bass) leaving home together for the first time to ply rock 'n' roll to prostitutes and sea merchants, it's no wonder that Hamburg had such an impression on them. Aside from the promiscuous sex, sleep-defying drugs and horrendously inadequate housing, the city taught The Beatles how to play. Not only that but also how to entertain an audience during the long hours on stage at the Indra Club and the Kaiserkeller, seven days a week. Stuart Sutcliffe's future girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr and her then boyfriend Klaus Voorman would comment on being drawn to the club because of their performances, a sound they hadn't been introduced to before.
The familiar image of four be-suited youngsters from Liverpool singing "Love Me Do" in 1962 was nowhere to be seen at this time in their career. On the contrary, subsequent trips saw The Beatles switch to wearing all leather (emulating their American idols such as Gene Vincent), which was less expensive in Hamburg, and was also more durable than the fashionable collared shirts and jackets being worn in Liverpool.
The growth in their musical ability and their reliance on each other as friends was all thanks to the environment they inhabited in Hamburg. Some details in Beatles history are at odds with that view, such as the sacking of Pete Best. An act that Lennon would later admit was cowardly, it's hard to imagine how it could have happened without anyone from the band explaining the reasons to Best first. It makes you wonder if the attention, success and unrequited freedom of playing in Hamburg gave them a false sense of entitlement that meant they would do anything to escape the fate of their broken home town. Conversely it could be that because Pete Best was another in a long line of drummers who took the stool out of necessity, they didn't feel the same about him as they did each other.
Whatever the reason for this being handled so poorly, Best was part of The Beatles line-up until 1962, a period of vindication for the Beatles' hard fought glory abroad when they made their most famous early appearances and were eventually discovered by Brian Epstein at the now-famous Cavern Club. Although The Quarrymen had performed at the Cavern in 1958 between two jazz bands, it wasn't until 1961—when the club had changed owners and moved away from its jazz roots—that The Beatles would play on a regular basis. Similarly to their relationship with the Casbah Coffee Club, they is lead to a residency that from beginning to end saw The Beatles perform 292 times.
It's indicative of the state of the music industry at the time that The Beatles and their contemporaries were so hard working. There was a fascination within the media about how long a band might see their careers in music lasting, and both George Harrison and members of The Rolling Stones had commented that they would be lucky if they lasted three years. The legendary proficiency of The Beatles, certainly in those early years, was simply the effect of feeling like at any moment, it could be over. It's not unreasonable to correlate that attitude with their determination to endure hardship in Hamburg, replacing members at the behest of the recording company, or willingness to change their look and attitude if their management suggests it will make them more successful.
On August 3, 1963, the four-piece band we know as The Beatles today took the stage at the Cavern for the last time. Already having two charting records with "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me", they were just six months shy of embarking on their first tour of America. Changed from the ‘scruffy' lads who wore leather, swore and openly indulged in sex and drugs, they would even bow deeply at the end of their sets. So much naivety had been shaken from them over the course of their journey from The Quarrymen to The Beatles that the ‘innocent' image they achieved became the epitome of a cunning marketing tool. Even their charm and wit had a world weariness about it that bellied the fresh faces about to take over the world. It was such an interesting journey before the journey had even really begun.
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Video: "Some Other Guy" performed by The Beatles at the Cavern, 1962
