Brian Epstein is despondent. He confides in Bob Wooler about his struggles with the London agents, who are saying that “as the name Beatles doesn’t mean anything they’ll have to change it.”

Wooler disagrees, not only because the band already has a large local following but also because there’s power in a brief band name. He says, “When you put it on posters, the shorter the name the bigger the print.”

John loses patience with Brian, lashing out that the manager is doing nothing and they’re doing all the work, though he knows that’s not true. After John cools down, he assures Brian that the band knows how hard he is working. “It was Us against Them,” John says later.

But it’s hard to keep the faith when by March of 1962, every record label has turned down the Beatles.

“Bloody hell,” Paul says. “What are we going to do?”

They keep playing.

They’re off to Hamburg again for April and May. Brian’s cleared their deportation troubles and has booked them at the Star-Club, Hamburg’s top rock venue. The Beatles feel like real headliners now.

On April 10, 1962, John, Paul, and Pete fly from Manchester to Hamburg. The next day, the three return to the airport to meet Brian and George’s flight. They’re surprised to find Stu’s fiancée, Astrid, and their German friend Klaus Voormann also in the arrivals terminal.

“Hello, where’s Stu?” John asks.

Astrid answers, “Stu’s dead, John.”

*  *  *

This news makes no sense to John. He starts “saying ‘No, no, no!’ and lashing out with his hands,” Astrid recalls. Though in letters and during a recent trip home to Liverpool, Stu’d complained of debilitating headaches, he’s only twenty-one. How can he be dead?

“Paul tried to be comforting; he put his arm around me and said how sorry he was. Pete wept—he just sat there and cried his eyes out. John went into hysterics,” Astrid says. “I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.” But none of them really knows how to react.

“Not many of our contemporaries had died,” Paul later reflects. “We were all too young. It was older people that died, so Stuart’s dying was a real shock. And for me there was a little guilt tinged with it, because I’d not been his best friend at times.”

It turns out that Stu’s nasty headaches were signs he had a growing brain aneurysm, and he’d had a massive seizure and died of a cerebral hemorrhage just the day before.

Stuart’s mother, Millie, is on the same plane with Brian and George, coming to claim her son. John and the boys remain in Hamburg while Millie accompanies Stu’s body back home, but when Astrid returns from the funeral, she brings John and George over to her attic, where Stuart painted.