The Beatles: Their Influences and Early Years

Hamburg had a street called Reeperbahn which had more strip clubs than any street in the world. Hamburg also had a really high crime rate because all the gangs from Berlin moved to Hamburg due to the Berlin Wall (Davies 80.) This makes me think this is why their parents were hesitant about letting them go. They played in an Indian club called Indra. They became very good, so good that they started playing 7 days a week until 2 am. Eventually the club got so loud that they had to move due to complaints by the neighbors (Davies 82.) They would play so much they would usually get around 5 hours of sleep. This shows that if you want to be really good at something you must work really hard. They wanted to play and wanted to be successful and were willing to work for it. The Beatles were not only headliners at parties; the Beatles also were big partiers themselves. There were also fights in the club while they were playing. There was so fighting and alcohol that the people inside the clubs would be half dead (Davies 83-84.) This also caused some on-stage fight or arguments. Sometimes they would throw food at each other while performing. It did get out of hand sometimes. The group made very few friends while they were in Hamburg. They didn’t like the Germans. John said,” They are all half-witted.” They didn’t make friends with the British people there because they would start arguments with Germans (Davies 85.) Eventually they had to come back home. When they came back from Hamburg, one of their friends put up a sign that said: The Beatles, Direct from Hamburg. This lead to people thinking they were German. People actually complemented them on how well English they spoke (Davies 97-98.)

After they came back from Hamburg, the Beatles started playing in ballrooms, in these ballrooms fights would occur very often. Once, Paul got grabbed by a random guy, slammed into the wall, and told not to move at all. Another night, people were fighting each other with fire extinguishers (Davies 101). I find this to be an odd coincidence because in Hamburg, the same stuff would happen to them there. Trouble just followed the band everywhere they went. Awhile after they were home, they decided to go back to Hamburg for a second time. While in Hamburg they met up with an old friend, Astrid. She was married to Stu, one of the early members, and greeted them with leather jackets. She wanted to change Stu’s haircut, so she brushed it down and cut parts off. This then caught on with the other band members and became the signature haircut (Davies 106). That was the birth of one of the most iconic haircuts in history, the 60’s, and Rock & Roll. They had to come home again but this time, Stu decided to go to Art College in Hamburg instead of continuing on with the band.

When the Beatles arrived back from Hamburg, they heard about a newspaper called Mersey Beat. This was the first ever newspaper in Liverpool devoted to only music. A guy named Bob Woller had written an article about them in the newspaper (Davies 107). This was their first big sign of attention they got. They didn’t find out about the article until they came back from Hamburg. They were worried they had become irrelevant in Liverpool. While they were gone, they got a lot more offers from clubs to play and they had to travel constantly. Pete’s friend Neil Aspinall bought a van and became the road manager of the Beatles. He quit his other job and worked full time with them (Davies 109). Neil was their road manager for every year they played tours.

The Beatles kept playing and got much better as time went on. They got the attention of record store owner Brian Epstein. In December of 1961, the Beatles met with Brian Epstein to work out a contract. After negotiations a contract was signed and Brian became the manager of the Beatles (Davies 128-129). This jump started their band career; they finally had someone who could represent them in business stuff. Brian whipped the Beatles into a polished band. He got them 40 euros a week for a club in Hamburg. He was put in charge of all the bookings and made sure everyone knew what they were doing (Davies 130). Brian also started negotiations with the recording studio Decca, and got them a demo (Davies 133). The recording demo didn’t work out though. They said Paul and George didn’t play well. John said it was because they were ne...

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...keep up with Brian Epstein’s goal of releasing a new album of songs every 6 months, plus a Christmas release for their fan club. Of course, this was in addition to touring, interviews, and movie work (Hartzog). This was a tough schedule for them to follow and it is why the eventually ended up stopping touring altogether. George Martin was a huge fan of the way the Beatles made their music. He liked how they could pile tracks on tracks and still make it sound so amazing. George also liked the creativity they had with all of their songs and their lyrics (Davies 289). They were the perfect song writing duo and it was like they would spew out number one song after number one song without any pause.

As the Beatles' late-1967 single "Hello Goodbye" went to Number One in both the U.S. and Britain, the group launched the Apple clothes boutique in London. McCartney called the retail effort "Western communism"; the boutique closed in July 1968. Like their next effort, Apple Corps Ltd. (formed in January 1968 and including Apple Records, which signed James Taylor, Mary Hopkin, and Badfinger), it was plagued by mismanagement. In July the group faced its last hysterical crowds at the premiere of Yellow Submarine, an animated film by Czech avant-garde designer and artist Heinz Edelmann featuring four new Beatles songs; a revised soundtrack featuring nine extra songs was released in 1999 (The Beatles Biography) .

In August they released McCartney's "Hey Jude", backed by Lennon's "Revolution", which sold over 6 million copies before the end of 1968 — their most popular single. Meanwhile, the group had been working on the double album The Beatles (frequently called the White Album), which showed their divergent directions. The rifts were artistic — Lennon moving toward brutal confessionals, McCartney leaning toward pop melodies, Harrison immersed in Eastern spirituality — and personal, as Lennon drew closer to his wife-to-be, Yoko Ono. Lennon and Ono's Two Virgins was released the same month as The Beatles and stirred up so much outrage that the LP had to be sold wrapped in brown paper (The Beatles Biography).

Works Cited

Beatles: An Authorized Biography