The sex workers who inspired a classic 1965 Beatles song: “Worked the streets in Hamburg”
Every single piece of musical history tends to look at The Beatles like a sacred piece of rock and roll.
They weren’t always perfect by any stretch, but when you look at all of their movies from their early years and the way that they interacted in interviews, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were nothing but unassuming young men who happened to be having the time of their lives playing music together. If you look through their back pages, though, it’s not like they were absolute angels by any stretch.
And if you end up going further back, there are more than a few moments where their time offstage could get more than a little bit hairy. There has already been enough said about John Lennon being the more rage-fuelled member of the band who would let his anger get the better of him when he abused some of his girlfriends, but it’s not like every member of the band was having to cover up what he was doing.
They were all comfortable enough in their own skin to talk about their back pages, and the most that we can hope to do is try to forgive the more nasty things that they’ve done in the past. But when you look at their time before they were famous, they were already indulging in the kind of debauchery that would have made The Rolling Stones blush when they first got started making music.
Their Hamburg days were already full of some of the wildest shows that they had ever played. George Harrison was barely out of his teens when he first came over to Germany to play those shows, and while being forced to play for hours on end in one of the naughtiest cities in the world was all part of paying their dues, Lennon did have a few fond memories about the sex workers who worked there at the time.
There had already been people trying to misinterpret the band’s songs as being about prostitutes and lesbians around that time, but even if Paul McCartney took all of them in stride, ‘Ticket to Ride’ had a bit more of a nasty angle behind it. Because while the song is lauded as the “first heavy metal song” by Lennon, he was a little bit coy about what the song’s meaning might have been about.
It was true that they the band had gone on vacations to Ryde in the past, but according to one of their journalist friends, Don Short, it was also about a few more nasty habits that they got into with the sex workers in Hamburg, saying, “The girls who worked the streets in Hamburg had to have a clean bill of health and so the medical authorities would give them a card saying that they didn’t have a dose of anything. I was with The Beatles when they went back to Hamburg in June 1966, and it was then that John told me that he had coined the phrase ‘a ticket to ride’ to describe these cards.”
Then again, you have to take anything that Lennon said with a grain of salt as well. There was never a moment when he told the entire truth during that time in his life, and since they were already about to enter the free love movement once the Summer of Love began, Lennon could have been making a few salacious comments so that they might be able to sell more publicity about themselves.
But since Lennon was already dealing with the ‘bigger than Jesus’ controversy around this time, the fact that he never walked back the comments about ‘Ticket to Ride’ gives more credence to the idea that it was true. So while everyone can go right ahead and pretend that they’re listening to a sad breakup song, there might be a bit more nastiness behind what Lennon was thinking back then.
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