John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ down one trouser leg. Sometimes, rather than merely ejecting a troublemaker, the Kaiserkeller waiters would carry him into their employer’s office for a prolonged workover. When the victim was pinned down and helpless, Koschmider would weigh in with his antique chair leg. ‘I’ve never seen such killers,’ John remembered.

      Even by northern British standards, the German intake of beer was prodigious, and the Liverpool lads were soon competing with the best of them. This was not the tepid, woody ale they were used to, but chilled draft lager served in fluted, gold-rimmed glasses that, back home, still featured only in upmarket cocktail bars. After 90 minutes of mach schau on the Indra’s stage, their thirst for this frosted gold nectar was almost unlimited. Any customer for whom they played a request would show appreciation by sending them ein bier each; by the end of an average night, the stage front would be littered with empty and half-empty glasses.

      Playing and drinking at these levels brought on fatigue such as none of them had ever known before. On the round-the-clock Reeperbahn, it was a common complaint, with its own well-tried remedy. Friendly Indra staff introduced them to Preludin (phenmetrazine), a weight-loss tablet available over the counter at any chemist’s, which made the metabolism work at roughly twice normal speed. A secondary effect was to make the eyes bulge like ping-pong balls, dry up the saliva, and so redouble the craving for cold beer.

      None of the five except George was a virgin when they arrived in Hamburg. But, as soon became clear, even their best results with Liverpool girls had taught them next to nothing. Sex was the Reeperbahn’s main recreation as well as its currency. And five relatively innocent Liverpool lads were the freshest and tenderest of meat. As they built a following at the Indra, they found themselves besieged by invitations from female customers, barmaids and waitresses, or dancers and strippers who would drop by the club after a night’s work. It was done in a casual, no-nonsense style that antedated socalled sexual liberation in the rest of the world by a full decade. A woman who fancied a bit of boy-Scouser would indicate her choice by pointing, or sometimes reaching up in mid-song to fondle his leg. Many dispensed with even these slight formalities, going directly to the Beatles’ squalid quarters at the Bambi Kino, finding their way behind the screen and waiting in one or other of the ratty beds until their quarry arrived. As Pete Best later recalled, such encounters would often happen in pitch darkness, the girl not knowing which Beatle it was and he never seeing her face—hence the almost dehumanised term ‘muff-diving’ that the Liverpudlians coined for them.

      Living at such close quarters meant fucking at close quarters also. When George did finally lose his virginity, John, Paul and Pete were all in the same room and, as he would recall, ‘clapped and cheered at the end’. Paul remembered that ‘I’d walk in on John and see a little bottom going up and down and a girl underneath. It was perfectly normal, you’d go “Oh shit, sorry…” and back out of the room.’ Pete Best, himself no mean sexual athlete, was amazed at John’s capacity, and that he still had enough libido left over to be a connoisseur of the Reeperbahn’s spectacular ‘wank mags’.

      Freed at last from the long lead of Woolton and Mendips and the choke chain of his Aunt Mimi, John went wild. While the other four all recognised the need for some caution and self-control, he knocked back the cold yellow beer and gulped the tiny white Preludin tablets, never bothering to keep count. The lethal, eye-popping, thirst-inflaming mixture of pills and alcohol spurred him to ever wilder onstage antics in the name of mach schau. Limping and lurching around in his demented parody of Gene Vincent at the Liverpool boxing stadium was only the beginning. He would jump up onto Paul’s shoulders and cannon sideways into George or Stu, and leap off the stage to land among the dancers on his knees or in the splits. At unpredictable moments he would stop singing and taunt his audience as ‘fuckin’ Nazis’ and ‘Hitlerites’ or, with appropriate idiot grimaces and claw hands, as ‘German Spassies’ (spastics). Punk rock, 25 years into the future, would have nothing on this.

      Though not the vicious and racially-torn gangland it would later become, St Pauli in 1960 was still a highly dangerous place. The Polizei might be scrupulous about checking papers and issuing medical certificates, but they paid little attention to the grievous bodily harm inflicted nightly throughout its neon wonderland by blackjacks, knives, brass knuckles and tear-gas pistols. Yet by an unwritten law, so long as they observed a few basic rules, Liverpool’s boy rock-’n’-rollers were immune from all harm. Friendly waiters advised them where to go and not go, to whom to be polite, and whose girlfriend never to muff-dive. Horrific fights would break out around them, leaving them unscathed like a scene from some Marx Brothers film. Most extraordinarily, in all the drunken mêlées through which they passed, not one person ever called them to account for the ruin and death their countrymen had so recently inflicted here. John’s ‘Nazi’ taunts were either not understood or taken in a spirit of badinage.

      The few hours between playing and sleep they spent mostly out on the street, drifting from bar to café and doorway to doorway with the tide of sex tourists, and touts peddling anything from dirty books to diamonds. A short walk from the Reeperbahn was a music store named Steinway, which stocked an impressive range of imported American guitars and amps, and proved just as accommodating about hire-purchase agreements as Hessy’s back in Liverpool. Here John found the guitar of his dreams, a double-cutaway Rickenbacker Capri 325 whose shorter-than-usual neck gave it the look of a skirmish weapon as much as a songbox. Although still theoretically paying off Hessy’s for his Hofner Club 40, he put himself in hock a second time for a Rickenbacker with a ‘natural’ ivory white finish that was to be his faithful companion throughout all the tempests ahead.

      Despite his countless new bedfellows, he suffered bouts of missing Cynthia and sent her regular, edited accounts of his Hamburg life, marking the envelopes SWALK (Sealed With a Loving Kiss) or ‘Postman, postman, don’t be slow / I’m in love with Cyn’ so go man go’ like any ardent young swain. Back in Liverpool, Cyn—and Paul’s girlfriend, Dot Rhone—kept rigorously to the code their lords and masters had laid down for them, refusing even the friendliest, nostrings offers of dates from other young men; regularly photographing one another as proof that their regulation Brigitte Bardot look was being kept up to scratch. If Dot was not around to take Cyn’s picture, she would squeeze into a Woolworth’s photo booth, wearing her sexiest outfit, with her hair newly done, and give sultry come-hither looks to an invisible John as the impatient light flashed. John responded with similar passport-size snaps of his most deformed hunchback poses and leering ‘spassie’ grimaces.

      Like others before him, Pete Best saw how John’s fondness for mimicking deformity turned to horror and revulsion at any sight of the real thing. Once as the two sat in a restaurant, a badly maimed war veteran was helped to a nearby table. Though John had already ordered his meal, he jumped up and bolted.

      Given their different personalities and very different levels of musical prowess, the five Hamburg Beatles shook down together remarkably well. At this point, it was hardly an issue that the lineup included John’s two closest friends, who had always pulled him in diametrically opposite directions.

      Paul McCartney and Stu Sutcliffe were never going to be close, but both were civilised for their young years and thus got along tolerably enough. What chiefly concerned Paul was Stu’s commitment to the group: that he should apply himself fully to his bass playing and not distract John with impractical questions of art and aesthetics. And for a time, both those requirements seemed to be being met.

      Stu saw the trip to Hamburg as a clean break from his life at art college, his home city’s predictable subject matter, and the ‘tricks’ he believed he had come to rely on in his work there. Despite the garish colours and teeming subject matter around him, he resisted all temptation to paint or draw, let alone to encourage John to do so. With the disillusionment that in youth can be actively pleasurable, he described himself as ‘a romantic gone sour…I have shrivelled like a sucked grape. I must dig deep and plant myself and grow.’

      As even Paul conceded, Stu was a strong visual asset to the СКАЧАТЬ