Saturday, August 19, 2023

Why The Beatles dumped Peter Best for Ringo

 Peter just didn't get it!


Today in 1960: the first onstage photos of the group called ‘The Beatles' - taken, according to George, on the first night of their first Hamburg stint, at the Indra on Grosse Freiheit.
They would play 48 nights there through October 3. (They were contracted to stay until 16 October, but more about that another time.) And, each paid 30DM (£2.50) per day by the venue's owner Bruno Koschmider, they made a deal with the devil in terms of their performing hours:
8:00-9:30pm, 10:00-11:00pm, 11:30pm-12:30am and 1:00-2:00am during the week; 7:00-8:30pm, 9:00-10:00pm, 10:30-11.30pm, midnight-1:00am and 1:30-3:00am on Saturdays; and 5:00-6:00pm, 6:30-7:30pm, 8:00-9:00pm, 9:30-10:30pm, 11:00-midnight and 12:30-1:30am on Sundays. That's 34.5 weekly hours of singing and playing.
"The city of Hamburg was brilliant," George would recall about his perspective as a 17-year-old. "A big lake and then the dirty part. The Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit were the best thing we'd ever seen, clubs and neon lights everywhere and lots of restaurants and entertainment. It looked really good."
And so it would turn out to be, in more ways than one...


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