“Come on.” Walli picked up his guitar and amplifier. “Let’s go home.”

• • •

Dave Williams and Plum Nellie arrived in Hamburg with high hopes. They were on a roll. They were becoming popular in London, and now they were going to wow Germany.

The manager of the Dive was called Herr Fluck, which Plum Nellie found hilarious. Not so funny was the fact that he did not like Plum Nellie much. Even worse, after two evenings Dave thought he was right. The group was not giving the punters what they wanted.

“Make dance!” Herr Fluck said in English. “Make dance!” The people in the club, all in their teens and twenties, were mainly interested in dancing. The most successful numbers were the ones that got the girls out on the floor, bopping with one another, so that the men could then cut in and get paired off.

But mostly the group fell short of generating the kind of excitement that got everyone moving. Dave was appalled. This was their big chance and they were fluffing it. If they did not improve, they would be sent home. “For the first time in my life, I’m a success at something,” he had said to his skeptical father; and in the end his father had let him come to Hamburg. Would he have to go home and admit that he had failed at this, too?

He could not figure out what the problem was, but Lenny could. “It’s Geoff,” he said. Geoffrey was the lead guitarist. “He’s homesick.”

“Does that make him play badly?”

“No, it makes him drink, and the drink makes him play badly.”

Dave took to standing right next to the drum kit and hitting his guitar strings harder and more rhythmically, but it did not make much difference. He realized that when one musician underperformed, it brought down the whole group.

On his fourth day he went to visit Rebecca.

He was delighted to discover that he had not one but two relations in Hamburg, and the second was a guitar-playing seventeen-year-old boy. Dave had schoolboy German, and Walli had picked up some English from his grandmother Maud; but they both spoke the language of music, and they spent an afternoon trading chords and guitar licks. That evening Dave took Walli to the Dive, and suggested that the club hire Walli to play in the intervals between Plum Nellie’s sets. Walli played a new American hit called “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which the manager liked, and he got the job.

A week later, Rebecca and Bernd invited the group for a meal. Walli explained to her that the boys worked late into the night and got up at midday, so they liked to eat at around six in the evening, before going onstage. That was fine with Rebecca.

Four of the five accepted the invitation: Geoff would not come.

Rebecca had cooked a pile of pork chops in a rich sauce, with great bowls of fried potatoes, mushrooms, and cabbage. Dave guessed she wanted, in a motherly way, to make sure they got one good meal in the course of a week. She was right to worry: they were living mainly on beer and cigarettes.