Browsing Tag Hamburg

High Times: Hamburg – Part 2 ‘Journey into the 70’s’

Continued from ‘The Star Club and the Swing Kids’ (http://www.newuntouchables.com/nutsmag/?p=789)

… Anyway by the early 1960’s it wasn’t all about the Star-Club, of course. The Hamburg scene revolved around the Kaiserkeller, Indra and Top Ten way before the Star-Club opened its doors. Then came the Beer-Shop, Mambo, Holle, Wagabond and the Pacific Hotel, as well as the less popular clubs like Grannies, the Ice Cream Shop, Chugs, and Sacha’s. The Beatles also played at the Kaiserkeller and Top Ten Club. 60’s legends, the Monks, a band of G.I.s who were originally stationed near Frankfurt, were the ‘house band’ at the Top Ten Club all through 1965 and ‘66 and recorded a complete album plus three 45s before disbanding in the late 60’s and going back to the States. They were quite successful in the north of Germany but the south would have liked to hang them up on their nooses that were used as neckties in their black monk uniforms. But also in Hamburg they sure weren’t everybody’s darling. Tony Sheridan hated the Monks and never got tired of telling everyone the Monks were completely free of any talent. Luckily that didn’t stop them from gaining cult status. Sadly the band never became successful during their existence and were forced to play other songs by their record company, Polydor. The album was a total flop, the 45s sold poorly too and the band were made to play much more mainstream songs by their record company Polydor.

Of course there were plenty of local groups to be heard as well. The Rattles were probably the best known group from Hamburg at that time and there was constant rivalry between them and Berlin’s the Lords. The Rattles had a charismatic front man in Achim Reichel – a blonde guy that on stage looked like momma’s darling gone wild on amphetamines. After he left the band to serve in the army the Rattles lost their popularity and never really recovered. They continued to play and record songs but only had one last hit with ‘the Witch’ that was also covered by bands from the UK and USA. Achim Reichel and other members of the group had numerous side and solo projects like Wonderland, Herbet & Birgit or A.R. & Machines and drifted more and more into psychedelia and progressive rock.

Other great groups from the Hamburg area were the Blizzards who came from a small place called Stade just across the river Elbe. They formed in 1961 and during their career recorded some of the best Beat songs to come out of Germany. Their version of the Het cover “Hab keine Lust heut aufzustehn” is a classic and they also recorded great versions of Yardbirds songs in german along with brilliant self-penned tracks. Then there were the German Bonds who released the german mod anthem “We Are Out of Sight!” or the Bats of “Got a Girl” fame. The sheer number of bands that emerged around Hamburg in the 60s is well worth their own article that might follow in the future.

The year 1967 saw Hamburg’s first ‘official’ love-in with hippies handing out flowers to everyone in the middle of St. Pauli. By that time flower power had taken over quietly just like in London or New York and San Francisco. The Ones recorded their legendary psychedelic single “Lady Greengrass” for the Star-Club label and the Monks released their last piece of evidence on Polydor. John’s Children with Marc Bolan played at the Star Club on a stage that was decorated to its maximum with flowers of every kind. It was their self declared ‘Love & Peace’ gig that ended in a fist fight between some band members.

Jimi Hendrix played in Hamburg in 1968 and after his gig, everything changed. The Beat Boom was over. Psychedelia, Heavy and Progressive Rock were the new sounds of the day. People got tired of ‘old’ Rock’n'Roll like Elvis or Little Richard. Now the Stones, Beatles, Cream and Hendrix were ‘where it’s at’. Also the drugs changed from Coca Cola and sometimes Schnapps to pills, pot and acid. As Kuno Dreysse of the Star-Club band the Rivetts once said in an interview, “It all changed when the VIP’s arrived. Their Sound was different to all the others – more heavy and black. The singer Mike Harrison sounded more grounded than Ray Charles. But also their lifestyle was another. When you came to their room in the Pacific, there was always a big glass for candy in the shelf that was filled with Mandrax, Preludine, Purple Hearts, Romela, Cappies and so on. They took it to function during the daytime but also ‘tripped’ alot. They were the first to put me in contact with Pot or Acid.”

The trends were the same almost all over the globe and the music changed with it. The music became more ‘mind oriented’ and less dance friendly. People used to smoke joints during the concerts and sit down to relax and enjoy the music. Also the sales of drinks in the clubs were going down because everyone was already high or turned on some way or the other and when people got thirsty they simply drank water from the washing basins in the rest rooms. On the other hand the cost to have a band playing was going up more and more. The equipment got bigger, heavier and took more and more space. As a result the club owners had to calculate higher prices for the shows and therefore less people were coming.

So, one day our hero Klaus found himself in front of his favourite ‘Beatschuppen’ just to discover that his Club would have to close its doors forever on new year’s eve 1969/70. He took a long deep breath, fished a cigarette out of his pocket and let a few memories of the last years stream by. Then he walked up the Grosse Freiheit to the corner of Simon-Von-Utrecht Straße and went inside the building Grosse Freiheit 58. The Gruenspan had opened here in 68 and immedeately turned into the new ‘Hot Spot’. The outside of the house was decorated with great Pop-Art paintings by Hamburg based artists  Dieter Glasmacher and Werner Nöfer. Inside it was hippie heaven – brilliant sound system, Go-Go Girls in cages hung from the ceiling, a state of the art lightshow with effects, oil slides and stroboscope and everything else a psychedelic space ship needs for a life long trip through inner space and into the 1970s!

Part 1:  ‘The Star Club and the Swing Kids’

Klaus was on his way home when he saw something that would change his life forever, as it would so many other teenagers and young folk in 1960’s Germany – if not Europe or even the whole world. He saw a poster that someone had put on a wall near his work place in Hamburg, Germany – a bright orange advertisement with black letters that read: “Die Not hat ein Ende! Die Zeit der Dorfmusik ist vorbei!” (Misery has ended! The times of village music are over!). It was an invitation to the opening of what would become the world famous Star Club in Hamburg, St. Pauli. The event was scheduled for Friday, 13 April 1962 and the line up of bands included the young Beatles.

For many this night marked the beginning – Hamburg as the birthplace – of the so called “Beat Boom” that shook the European continent throughout the early and mid-to-late sixties. For good reason, others see the beginnings in the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Maybe the ‘boom’ was born from both clubs, though it’s hard to say which one would be father and which would be mother. Fact is that many of the later famous bands from Liverpool or London were going through a hard school in Hamburg before making it big anywhere else. In Hamburg they had to play in the night clubs for hours on end, resulting in development of their technical skills as well as their experience of playing to fairly big and sometimes very rude audiences.

The Beatles had already played their first gigs in Hamburg about two years earlier, in 1960 at the still existing Indra Club, which is located just a few meters up the street from where the Star Club had been. Gerry & the Pacemakers and King Size Taylor were among the first bands to play at the Star Club. The Remo Four, the Hi-Fi’s, Ian & the Zodiacs, the Spencer Davis Group and many more followed suit, and some even stayed for years. Tony Sheridan was already stranded in Hamburg at that time. Graham Sclater (organist of the Manchester Playboys) stayed till the late 70’s and worked with a lot of German musicians. Another Group that first came to Hamburg in ’65 and stayed there for longer were the VIP’s who evolved into Spooky Tooth two years later. The Pretty Things released almost all of their early singles in Germany on the Star Club label. The list could go on till New Years Eve!

But the Star Club wasn’t the only or first “beatschuppen” (beat shack) in town. Hamburg always had a thriving music scene, especially in and around St. Pauli and the harbour. There sailors and immigrants used to bring with them the ‘latest’ sounds of their native homelands and played them in the pubs, varietés and strip theaters. Hans Albers glorifies St. Pauli with a few songs in the movie “Große Freiheit Nr. 7″ in 1943. The movie was censored by the Nazi regime and wasn’t screened in Germany until after 1945. Before and during World War II Hamburg had a huge ‘swing & jive scene’ whose parallel was only to be found in Berlin and operated, of course, completely underground. In those days hearing or (even worse) organising dances with ‘negermusik” (black music) meant to risk imprisonment or even deportation to concentration camps and therefore your life! But kids of the “swing jugend” (swing youth) even dared to dress in the style of the hipsters and had their own slang. The latter not only because they tried to imitate their idols from the USA but to be used as coded language that the Gestapo and Nazis couldn’t understand. One surviving member of the original ‘swing kids’ is still DJ-ing for todays cool cats and older folk once or twice a year with his massive collection of original swing and jazz 78′s.

In the 50’s and early 60’s, Palette, in the still destroyed center of Hamburg, was the essential hangout for ‘Exis’ or ‘Existentialists’, who were more or less a mix between Beatniks and Mods (Picture: Hamburg 1962 / Fotografie Heute 1962). The Palette was more like a pub, but maybe with the first jukebox in Hamburg playing records by Elvis or Cool Jazz and French Chansons. The crowd was a bizarre mix of art students, gangsters, dropouts, bohemians and sometimes the motorcycle rockers from another Pub next door. The first ‘happenings’ were held here, with young authors and poets like Hubert Fichte who used to read or improvise lyrics to Jazz music just like the Beats in San Francisco. One of his readings exists on a rare LP but ironically the reading and recording took place at the Star Club. The Star Club became so famous that the owners Horst Fascher and Manfred Weissleder were able to start their own record label (Star Club Records), their own magazine (Star-Club News) and also a franchise of other Star Clubs in other German cities.

To be continued on the next issue of NUTs Mag…