John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

most famous Reeperbahn story, told and retold in Liverpool dockside pubs, was that you could see a woman being mounted by a donkey with a washer around its penis to restrict penetration. Though this new concept of donkey work proved a myth, St Pauli had much else to shock and amaze. It had all the nudity it had been credited with and more—not coyly concealed by turned backs and crossed arms, as at home, but full-frontal, full-rear-al nudity, pulsing with youth and warmth and invitation. For all five teenage Beatles, sooner than they could ever have imagined, bouncing breasts and grinding, weaving G-strung bottoms became merely so much incidental furniture.

      In some clubs, they could see men and women have full, unprotected sex in twos, threes or even fours, in every possible and improbable configuration, often in the taboo combination of white and black. In others, they could see nude women wrestling in a pit of mud, cheered on by plump businessmen tied into communal pinafores to guard against the splashes. In the numerous Schwülen laden (queer dives) like Bar Monika or the Roxy Bar, they could watch men give each other blow jobs or meet male transvestites as beautiful and elegant as Parisian models who only in the final stages of intimacy would unveil their gristly secret.

      At the same time, Germanic bureaucracy, health regulation and anomalous concern for the moral welfare of the young were as omnipresent as neon tubing. To discourage organised crime, pimps were allowed to run only two prostitutes each, making their trade largely a spare-time one carried on by waiters and barmen. In some streets, club patrons were allowed to see female pubic hair, in others not. St Pauli’s pièce de résistance, the Herbertstrasse, where whores sat on display in shop windows, was screened from general view by a high wooden fence. Most relevant to the Beatles, a curfew came into force at 10 p.m., obliging all under-18s to leave the area. Each note that 17-year-old George Harrison played at the Indra after that time was a breach of the law.

      Many places, like Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller, were straightforward bars, vastly bigger than any Liverpool pub, where seafaring men of all nations and personnel from American and British NATO bases congregated by the riotous thousand before and after hitting the nudie joints. Reeperbahn waiters were renowned for toughness and ruthlessness, Koschmider’s most of all. When fights broke out, which they did almost continuously, a squad of waiters would swoop on the culprits like a highly-trained SWAT team, pulling lead-weighted coshes from under their white jackets. Koschmider himself went about armed with the leg of an old German chair in knotty hardwood, which he kept concealed 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