FROM: The Local (news@thelocal.de)
[Excerpted (...) n Pictures added by Tiwaz rr02uah]
It was fifty years ago today...
Published: 16 Aug 10 17:53 CET
The Beatles might have hailed from Liverpool, but the band that changed the world got its big break in Hamburg. David Sharp traces the steps of the Fab Four fifty years later.
When John Lennon was once asked what it was like growing up in Liverpool, he quipped: "I didn't grow up in Liverpool. I grew up in Hamburg."
That’s because though The Beatles formed in Liverpool, they learned their licks in the backstreet clubs of the gritty northern German port city.
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When the Beatles rolled into the shabby dockland neighbourhood of St Pauli in a small van early in the morning of August 17, 1960, Hamburg’s post-war resurgence was just beginning.
That same night, the then Fab Five of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, a raggle-taggle gang of leather-jacketed, pompadoured Scousers played their first gig at the Indra, a self-styled ‘music and vaudeville’ club. This tiny venue, at Große Freiheit 64, is still going strong today.
Fuelled by a heady mix of youthful enthusiasm, raw talent and Preludin pills, the nascent Beatles hurtled through an eclectic assortment of rock, pop, and R & B covers at high volume and breakneck speed. The boys bunked in a windowless cell behind the screen of a local cinema, the now defunct Bambi Kino, at nearby Paul-Roosen Strasse 33.
After two months of incessant gigging at the Indra, five hours a night for 30 marks each, owner Bruno Koschmider promoted The Beatles to his flagship club, the Kaiserkeller, a short stroll down Große Freiheit towards the neon lights of the Reeperbahn.
The band shared the bill with rival Liverpool group, Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, whose drummer happened to be Ringo Starr. ...
A broken bottle’s throw away is the site of the Star Club (Große Freiheit 39), where The Beatles shared the bill with fellow Liverpudlians Gerry & the Pacemakers and big-name US acts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. It went up in smoke in 1983 and only a gravestone-shaped plaque remains etched with the names of other Star Club legends such as Gene Vincent and Jimi Hendrix.
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Round the corner is Paul Hundertmark’s Western Store where the Beatles assembled their trademark Hamburg look: cowboy boots, drainpipe jeans and Gene Vincent-style leather jackets. You can still go and get yourself kitted out in Beatles clobber at Paul’s store at Hundertmark 9. Then head for Wohlwillstrasse 22 and re-create the publicity shot taken by local snapper Jürgen Vollmer, who became a fast friend of the band, in 1960. John Lennon posed in the doorway of Jäger-Passage 1 as three blurry figures walked past him in the foreground. Those figures are McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe. The photograph was unearthed years later and became the iconic front cover of Lennon’s 1975 Rock ‘n’ Roll album.
When The Beatles returned to Hamburg in April1962 for their residency at the Star Club they were broken the news of bass player Stu Sutcliffe’s tragic premature death from an aneurysm. By the time of their second stint in November, Ringo Starr had become the group’s drummer, and the, now officially, Fab Four were big enough to warrant actual hotel rooms; first at the Germania (Detlev-Bremer-Strasse 8) and then at the Pacific (Neuer Pferdemarkt 30). Both hotels are still running and are a short stroll away from Heiligengeistfeld (Holy Ghost Field) where Astrid Kircherr, Sutcliffe’s German girlfriend, took the famous fairground photos at the Hamburger Dom that launched the new image she’d inspired them to adopt: collarless jackets and mop top haircuts.
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John Lennon once bought a pig here, christened it Bruno after his boss at the Kaiserkeller, and chased it round the market causing such a commotion that someone called the cops. This time they weren’t arrested, or deported, but The Beatles’ love affair with Hamburg was in its final year anyway. They got back to where they once belonged, Liverpool, and recorded their first single, “Love Me Do.” The rest is history.
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