People make history – at the end of December 2020 that was the reason for the WELTHistory team to present a “head of the day” every morning from the beginning of the new year – a woman or a man who had done something that day worth remembering. Even without much theoretical superstructure, one thing is certain after 730 portrayed personalities: there are individuals who answer Johann Gustav Droysen’s question “what makes history out of business”.
The best realization was that it wasn’t always the biggest names that achieved the greatest success with the public. Of course there were emperors, generals, presidents and chancellors. But there were also the pilots, the boxers and mobsters, the police officers, the actors, the dancers and the women’s rights activists, to name just a few groups.
This is how the format turned into a very colorful club of historical stars from antiquity to the present day. And because the “head of the day” ends on December 31, 2022, it so happened that on the last day of 1969 in Hamburg on St. Pauli an establishment closed that immodestly called itself the “Star Club”. had written his entrance gate.
If you ask Hamburgers about this place these days, even merchants who would deliver their mother on time for a corresponding amount get a certain gleam in their eyes. Because the “Star Club” was two things: with the exception of Elvis Presley, whose manager Tom Parker demanded a fee that would have led to immediate bankruptcy, everyone who had made it big in rock’n’roll really played here: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Gene Vincent – and those were just the most famous.
The second dimension is determined by the Beatles: No, of course they weren’t yet the “Fab Four” who turned girls into animal screaming creatures when they opened the store at Große Freiheit 39 with a few other bands on August 13, 1962. They still wore too much black leather for that, sang outrageous songs like “Guten Abend, Ladies and Genitals” and otherwise threw down three-chord classics like “Shimmy Shake”.
How little the audience cared about them can be heard on a scratchy recording: “It’s exactly five minutes to twelve, no, five minutes to twelve. And we continue in the Schtarclub with our Schtars here from Liverpool, with the Biedels,” announcer Horst Fascher told the audience. This actually encouraged two or three people in the room to clap their hands briefly. It’s a tough job being on stage.
But at the same time – in contrast to other bands – it was already clear at this point how little the Beatles should creatively fulfill this program in the long run. They surrounded themselves with an avant-garde group around the photographer Astrid Kirchherr and her friend Klaus Voormann, who had very different ideas about contemporary music than the Star Club gang. This is neatly portrayed in Fascher’s 2005 memoir “Let The Good Times Roll” – here it becomes all too clear that the sailor’s son and ex-boxer “Hoddel” understood little of what the people who gave the Beatles their mushroom caps actually wanted .
The F-word dominates in Fascher’s book – and he honestly admits that he only realized much later that women should perhaps also benefit from sexual intercourse. He also describes with relish how the Liverpool boys decorated a pile of vomit with cigarette butts in their musicians’ apartment and called the result their hedgehog, which nobody was allowed to harm.
It should be obvious that such a man had little or nothing to do with someone like Stuart Sutcliffe: The Englishman had plucked the bass a little with the Beatles in previous engagements in other halls, but to the annoyance of John Lennon soon left. Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg, worked as an artist and was in a relationship with Astrid Kirchherr before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962 – just before the new club opened.
Nonetheless, this cooperation and opposition proves how lively the independent scene was in the neighborhood at the time. Something really new was created here in an environment to which the bourgeoisie had no access; a free world within the world, where maybe fights were the order of the day, but firearms didn’t play nearly the role they play in St. Pauli today. So everyone started and played. Fascher tried to talk Lennon out of his own compositions like “Love me do”, but fortunately without success.
The Beatles quickly became too big for the “Star Club”, which, despite the pioneering sound, was actually just a converted cinema. But that was financially manageable over the next few years. When the Beatles became the “Fab Four” in 1963, they often pointed out that they “grew up” in Hamburg. That attracted musicians who were still big enough to fill the club in the 1960s.
In his memoirs, Fascher has a special anecdote ready for every artist: Jerry Lee Lewis? Nice guy, no need to have sex, probably because he kept his energy on stage at the piano and otherwise was full of pills. Fat’s Domino? Supposedly filled himself up on stimulants until he was rocking like he’d never been in his life. Little Richard claims to have personally satisfied Fascher orally in the dressing room; Bill Haley is said to have been taken aback when the lady in the middle turned out to be a gentleman during a band member’s birthday group sex.
Well – and so on. The managing director and stoker tells all this as roughly as possible, so that unfortunately there are few nuances. However, one motive soon becomes apparent: The “Star Club” found no answer to the fact that pop should be political and experimental. Jimi Hendrix’s gig was a fiasco: there weren’t enough people who understood what was going on in the hit-and-run place – and on the other hand there were fewer and fewer Teds as regular audiences, to whom a “woof, woof , Huah!” (Astrid Kirchherr) was enough.
Some performers reinvented themselves as well—Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, as a country singer—but the bottom line was that fewer people were willing to pay for live music in a small shed anymore. If necessary, music from the turntable would do, which then grew into the disco movement in the seventies. You can regret that, like so much that happened in the past. It just won’t change anything.
On a positive note, there was a happy constellation in Hamburg’s Kiez for a while, which helped pop to spread. Authenticity may be a terrible word, but anyone who hears recordings of artists like The Beatles or Jerry Lee Lewis from this club today will know what is meant – a small footnote in the middle of the great drama of all growth and decay that we call world history.
Of course, we will continue to report on the WORLD story, with a special eye for the people involved. Because nothing interests people as much as people, and it still applies: people make history.
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