"Performing blotto and belching, farting, chewing, swearing, smoking, drinking and making lewd signs fast became the norm, the way to do it, done six long nights every week. Rapidly, all the stage time they'd ever had was matched and multiplied..."
"In seven extraordinary weeks at the Kaiserkeller the Beatles had doubled the vast amount of stage time already accrued at the Indra. In total, inside just fourteen weeks, they'd rocked Hamburg for about 415 hours - like 276 ninety minute shows or 830 half-hours - and every night tried not to repeat themselves. No one stopped to realize it, and there was no way of knowing anyway, but the Beatles had to be the most experienced rock group in the world, not just Liverpool. And Hamburg didn't only multiply their repertoire, it toughened their voices, seasoned their characters, enriched their personalities, and strengthened their stamina." - Excerpts from Mark Lewisohn's "Tune In."
I'm about 400 pages into "Tune In," Mark Lewisohn's amazing book on the Beatles early years. It's a story that has been told many times, but not quite this way, not quite with this detail, so, in that way, the story is new and astonishing. In Pop Culture terms this is ancient history, I mean what happened last week is already "old news," but this story is rendered so vividly, it's like you are along for the ride in Hamburg and Liverpool in those early, early days (1960, 1961) of the band.
The Beatles were a punk band before punk. They were the Ramones & Sex Pistols and a harmonizing Girl Group like the Shirelles too. They were loud, and wild and they wore leather, and smoked on stage, and stomped around in boots doing their best to bring the rickety stage in the Kaiserkeller crashing to the ground.
They made friends with a group of German art students, one of them named Jurgen Volmer and another Astrid Kircherr who took some gorgeous b&w photos of these rock & rollers...
