After signing contracts in German and English, they’re shown to their dank, dismal living quarters behind the movie screen of the Bambi porno theater—“a pigsty…a run down fleapit”—across from the Indra Club, where they’ll be working for Bruno Koschmider, a fiftysomething former circus performer who limps from a war injury.

“You’re to play four and a half hours during the weeknights,” Koschmider tells them through an interpreter. “You’ll get three breaks, thirty minutes each. Weekends, you play six hours.”

John feels the blood drain from his face. The longest we’ve ever played is twenty minutes. Now we’re being asked to play for up to six hours—for the next forty-eight nights?

The Beatles take the small podium stage. It’s eight o’clock on August 17, 1960. Twenty years earlier, Germany attacked Liverpool for the first time when Nazi planes dropped bombs on the docks.

Pete Best can’t maintain an even tempo, but he’s pretty good when he uses the pedal for the big bass drum. “We kept that big heavy four-in-a-bar going all night long,” recalls George. The crowds start to swell along with the noise.

The Germans love it.

Night after night.

During their time at the Indra, the Beatles log 204 stage hours—or, if they were playing back home, 136 ninety-minute shows.

“Your voice began to hurt with the pain of singing,” John recalls, not unhappily, of suffering what they called “Hamburg throat.” To “keep it up for twelve hours at a time, we really had to hammer. We never would have developed as much if we’d stayed home.”

By the time Allan Williams returns, in mid-October, he’s amazed at how good they’ve become. “We were the best bloody band there was,” John would reminisce about these early days. “There was nobody to touch us.”

Whenever they’re down and need a boost, John channels a clichéd cigar-chomping studio agent and, in a bad American accent, says, “Where are we going, fellers?”

They answer in their own awful American accents: “To the top, Johnny!”

“Where’s that, fellers?”

“To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!”

“Riiiiight!”

Bruno Koschmider offers them a new contract—October through the end of the year—at his bigger, more popular club, the Kaiserkeller, where they can split the weekend hours with another group.

“And who’s this other band?” John asks.

“Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.”

They’re on par with Liverpool’s top group.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Man, I was mean but I’m changing my scene…

—“Getting Better”

Paul needs a new guitar. The one he’s got now is breaking down from all the wear and tear. John has his eye on a Rickenbacker 325 with a natural blond finish and an American-made eighteen-watt Fender Deluxe.