“He was pissed off”: the argument that led to The Beatles becoming popular
The Beatles had always preached that all we ever needed was love. Since the topic takes up a good 95% of their catalogue, it’s safe to say that the Fab Four either cracked the code on pop music’s most popular emotion or are still trying to find the meaning behind it all to this day. For all of the great songs that are about the butterflies that get into one’s stomach when seeing their other half, though, the whole reason why their legacy exists today came from one of their friends coming to the end of their relationship.
Because when John Lennon and Paul McCartney first got started, they weren’t exactly ready for prime time just yet. They had the potential to become the biggest band in the world, but a lot of what they were playing was clearly indebted to the kind of skiffle groups that were a dime a dozen in Liverpool. Their debut single with George Harrison, ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’, was still fine for what it was, but it wasn’t going to set the world on fire.
What they needed was to refine their sound, and they got the opportunity to hone their chops the minute they got to work in Hamburg, Germany. For anyone who thought that this would have been some exotic adventure in a foreign land they were left with a rude awakening when they found out that they were going to have to play for eight hours a night nonstop for drunken patrons.
Their trademark venue, the Kaiserkeller, was known to be on the seedy side of Hamburg, and for a bunch of kids barely out of their teens, this was baptism by fire. If they wanted to entertain the crowds, they were going to need to make something that would leave an impression right out of the gate, and once Klaus Voorman caught them on a night out on the town, he couldn’t believe what he had heard.
While he had been an artist in the German underground scene for years, Voorman was never going to know the first thing about the kind of rock and roll that The Beatles were playing. He was more interested in the visual side of the arts, but one evening, arguing with his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, led to him getting the culture shock of a lifetime the minute he walked into the venue.
According to Harrison, that argument became the catalyst for them befriending Voorman and Kirchherr, saying, “Astrid was the girlfriend of Klaus at first, and they’d had a row one night, so he’d gone off in a huff. He was pissed off with her, and he came down to this very bad area of Hamburg, where he would never have gone otherwise. He was walking around and he heard this noise coming out of a cellar, so he came into the Kaiserkeller [and] saw us.”
While Voorman could have been considered the head of the first major Beatles fan club at this point, he was always going to be more than a good friend. Throughout their career, Voorman would be hanging in the background, whether that was encouraging the group to wear leather in their early days, teaching them about the artistic side of music, or playing on their albums, whether that was providing bass on Plastic Ono Band or sitting in with Harrison at the Concert for Bangladesh.
Although The Beatles still had a long road to go before becoming global superstars, this was the spark of a small fire that would eventually grow into a forest fire. It might not have seemed like much at the time, but what can happen when someone needs to blow off steam is still insane.
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