The pills and the drink.”Īfter their initial residency was over at the Indra, the group began playing at Koschmider's bigger Kaiserkeller Club, which is where they became close with fellow Liverpool drummer Ringo Starr, who was then alternating nightly sets with the Beatles' main competition, Rory Storm & The Hurricanes.Įventually, after continually sitting in with fellow British performer Tony Sheridan at a rival club called the Top Ten, word got back to the Koschmider, who according to legend, had the underage Harrison deported. The only way to survive in Hamburg to play eight hours a night was to take pills. In 1970 John Lennon revealed to Rolling Stone that Hamburg was also the Beatles' first taste of drugs, as they learned to depend on the amphetamine preludin to combat their alcohol intake and keep up their strength for their marathon sets, remembering: “I've been on pills since. 'Cause everyone was out of it 'round about half-eleven and kept voting ( imitates a drunk) 'Ah, she's great!' And we'd come on - 'Oh God, how you gonna follow that?'” We used to keep getting beaten by this woman who played the spoons - this old lady. But eventually, we sort of got it together and decided we wouldn't do talent contests anymore. McCartney recalled the band's pre-Hamburg career as being pretty dire and humiliating at times: “Music? Nah, we couldn't even win talent contests. There was a lot of it about and we were off the leash.” So we got a fairly swift baptism of fire in the sex scene. Here was somebody who obviously knew something about it, and you didn't. If you had hardly ever had sex in your life before, this was fairly formidable. and suddenly you'd have a girlfriend who was a stripper. We were just Liverpool guys who, as far as we were concerned, could not get arrested back home. Paul McCartney added that sex played a tremendous part of the band's Hamburg era, explaining, “Hamburg was quite an eye-opener. everybody was just dancing and drinking, the band was up there just drinking and playing and, y'know, there was no big emphasis on how groovy you were.” Because before that, we played all them clubs, little clubs all over the place and in - particularly in Germany, we played months and months in these nightclubs. In many ways Harrison felt that it was all downhill for the Beatles as a band following their early Hamburg days: “In the Beatles, I think the sad bit came when we got famous. Saturday would start at three or four in the afternoon and go until five or six in the morning. We had to learn millions of songs, because we'd be on for hours - we'd make stuff up. George Harrison, who was only 17-years-old when the band first played in Germany, recalled in The Beatles Anthology that, “Hamburg was really our apprenticeship. once they'd actually seen us, people kept flocking in.”
But on that opening night, I'd turn around and say it was a quiet night. Pete Best recalled the scene of the Beatles' opening night in Hamburg on August 17th, 1960 at the legendary Indra Club: “We got some crowd in - but compared to the crowd that we built it up to before it closed, that happened very quickly.
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It was while performing in Hamburg that the group, who were barely professional upon arrival, grew into a tight rock n' roll ensemble by sometimes playing as much as eight hours a night.
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The band lived in squalor, rent-free, in the back of the Bambi-Filmkusttheater, a movie theater owned by the Indra's proprietor and the Beatles' employer, Bruno Koschmider. to 3:00 a.m., with Sunday's set starting at 5:00 p.m. Their Saturday shift ran between 7:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., and for six hours a night on Saturday and Sundays.
At that time the group consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison - all on guitars - along with Lennon's art college buddy Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and drummer Pete Best, who had joined the group only five days earlier.ĭuring their initial 48-date booking, each band member received less than four dollars a day, and was contracted to play four-and-a-half hours every weekday night - between 8:00 p.m. It was 60 years ago tonight (August 17th, 1960) that the Beatles began their first stint in Hamburg, Germany's Indra Club.
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