Three Memoirs, Three Reviews
More leftover from my Brückenau days: book reviews. One of the books in question I’d browsed through before but hadn’t read it properly, the other two were new to me. What the three have in common is, aren’t you surprised, a Beatles connection; otherwise they’re widely different, though each struggling with the opening sentence ofDavid Copperfield in their way: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight
What I found immediately striking about the autobiography by the former Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Clapton is that the Beatles connection is actually the least interesting thing in it. Pattie (whose name, btw, is constantly misspelled in Beatles related biographies and memoirs as Patti, Patty and anything in between) brings a lot of people to written life, but the three other Beatles aren’t among them; Brian Epstein comes across more vividly than John, Paul and Ringo. The George characterization is an issue for itself and threefold, which I’ll get to in a moment, but first let me say that the lack of Fab Four (with the exception of George) isn’t a detriment of the book; it works really well as its own story, which is a very 60s and 70s tale of fairy tale turned feminist horror story turned gradual individuation and liberation.
The other thing that’s immediately striking is that Pattie comes from a very different social background than most people in the Beatles saga; with British officers for fathers and stepfathers, a childhood in Kenya and an early career as a model, she’s , as far as this foreigner can judge, several levels removed in the English class system - upper class or upper middle class. It shows, not always in ways our narrator is aware of. For example, while she raves about the new class barriers removing equality of Swinging London and emphasizes how it didn’t occur to her that she and George were from different parts in the class hierarchy until she met his family, you get this paragraph on the wives and girlfriends of the other Beatles (who btw come across more vividly than their husbands, which is justice, I suppose):
I liked Cynthia, but of all the Beatles wives and girlfriends I found her the most difficult to make friends with. She and I came from such different backgrounds; she had no career, she was a young mother, and we had no point of reference apart from our attachment to a Beatle. She wasn’t like my friends, who enjoyed a giggle and some fun: she was rather serious, and often, I thought, behaved more like John’s mother than his wife. I tended to leave her to her own devices but invited her to join me for shopping. I think she felt a bit out of her depth in the smart, sophisticated circles in which the Beatles were now moving in London. (…) Ringo’s girlfriend, Maureen Cox (…) was seventeen, had just left school and was learning to be a hairdresser. Then, one day, it happened for her. Again, she and I had little in common but she was jolly and friendly, more relaxed than Cynthia. We got on but I felt there was definitely a north-south divide among the wives and girlfriends. (…) Jane Asher was the girlfriend with whom I felt most at home, but because we both had heavy work commitments she was also the one I saw least. She came from a professional family, had grown up in London and, like me, had been privately educated.
It’s hard to read this not as somewhat snobbish and translated into “Cyn was a boring provincial, and Maureen was a fun provincial, but neither was exactly our sort, as opposed to Jane”, not least because the corresponding paragraph in Cynthia’s memoirs about Pattie sounds so very different. (”Pattie and I were becoming close friends. I admired her gorgeous figure and perfect fashion sense, and I think she enjoyed the company of someone who’d been with the Beatles from the beginning and new the ropes.” Poor Cyn, imagining she’s mentoring Pattie while Pattie considers her a bit of a bore.) This being said, my other theory is that Pattie might downplay her friendship with Cynthia because that way she doesn’t have to given an explanation for obeying John’s Henry VIII. Style command that nobody was to have contact with Cyn anymore after he separated from her.
Another distinctive feature of Pattie’s book is that she’s far more self aware (in retrospect, not at the time) than Cynthia of the trap of the feminine role she was playing, and how this contributed to her decisions and lack of same and thus how her life ended up. She points out, re: being a model:
You have to look really good to get the jobs, so you put yourself into a situation that feeds your insecurities. If you don’t get a job, you think it’s because you’re not pretty enough. It allows you - in fact, it forces you - to concentrate on your flaws, and that’s destructive. A girl who doesn’t have to rely on her looks for her living is far more confident, and confidence is attractive - her looks are not integral to her self-esteem. Ours were. A good photographer made the world of difference. I didn’t get on with Patrick Lichfield because he couldn’t communicate with his models in the way that others did. It was so frustrating: he would say, ‘Do something - go,’ which is impossible. (…) (David) Bailey was a sexy photographer, and it was easy to appear sexy with him because we reacted to what was coming from him. There might be other people in the studio but modeling is a one-on-one relationship, between you and the photographer, and you need to feel that he and the camera are one.
Pattie met George via her brief acting job in A Hard Day’s Night, and it’s there we encounter the first of the three Georges who show up in this volume. George No.1 is ”the best-looking man I’ve ever seen”, and a perfect Prince Charming, sensitive, witty, vivacious, and once he meets Pattie’s somewhat dysfunctional family kind and attentive to her mother, younger brothers and sisters. Due to her mother’s marital disasters she had wanted to wait with marriage, but George sweeps her of her feet when she’s all of twenty and he’s all of twenty one, the only Beatle to marry without getting his girlfriend pregnant first: the culmination of a 60s dream. And then, you guessed it, after a delay of about two years of wedded bliss, the 60s and 70s nightmare sets in.
George No.2 makes his appearance post-India (Pattie later dates the Beatles’ stint in India as the last time she and George were perfectly relaxed and happy together). He’s the Hyde to George No.1’s Jekyll. First of all, he may have cheated on her before but if so she never knew about it. Now he does so openly, with a spectacularly lame justification: ”In India George had become fascinated by the god Krishna, who was always surrounded by young maidens, and came back wanting to be some kind of Krishna figure, a spiritual being with lots of concubines. He actually said so. And no woman was out of bounds.” Secondly, he disapproves of her modeling and makes her virtually stop. The other ability she’s proud of is being an excellent cook, but he goes and hires an Indian one, thus destroying her two sources of self esteem. He gets so obsessive about meditation that he hardly talks to her anymore at all, doesn’t talk to her about his difficulties (i.e. the Beatles break-up) and refuses to hear anything about hers, doesn’t allow radio in the house anymore after the My Sweet Lord plagiarism suit and behaves like a medieval king. (”He was surrounded by yes-men. When I challenged him about it he said, ‘Well, I’d hate to be surrounded by no-men.”) And then he adds the ultimate insult of having an affair with her friend and virtual sister-in-law, Ringo’s wife Maureen. (“(O)ne day George, Chris O’Dell and I went to Ringo’s house, where George, in front of everyone, proceeded to tell Ringo he was in love with his wife. Ringo worked himself up to into a terrible state and went about saying, ‘Nothing is real, nothing is real.’ I was furious. I went straight out and dyed my hair read.”) (I do feel for Pattie, but the thing with the hair makes the soap opera that was her life into a black comedy.)
You may guess where this is going. Unfortunately not to Pattie leaving him and trying life on her own, no; following the 60s/70s nightmare (and indeed the life pattern of her own mother), she seeks self-confirmation via another relationship. Enter Eric Clapton. (Or rather, he’s been there for a while, but that’s when she starts to respond.)
George No.3 shows up as soon as Pattie leaves him for Eric. He’s the best ex husband ever, the prince of exes, starting by generously promising he’ll be there for her if the thing with Eric doesn’t work out, then being available on the telephone when she needs him the way he wasn’t as her husband, being without blame and kind and friendly whenever they meet, and many years later, long after she split up with Eric as well and the three of them find themselves at the same party, telling Eric off for being an ass towards her. Which leaves our heroine to conclude that George was the best and she should have fought harder to keep him, at which point in the book I shook my head and wondered “what was there to keep?” Because George ending his jerkish behavior and starting to be nice, kind and attentive again seems to have been entirely depending on stopping being Pattie’s husband, which leaves me to conclude he either subsconsciously or consciously didn’t want to be married anymore and ended it in passive-aggressive ways which, you know, fits the role models he had. *eyes John and Paul and their early romantic relationships disapprovingly*
Anyway. The Eric Clapton chapters are the most harrowing but also the most clear-sighted. As opposed to George, Eric doesn’t have a Prince Charming phase; when he first starts obsessing about Pattie in the late 60s, he tries to blackmail her by declaring if she won’t love him back he’ll take heroin (she didn’t, and he did), and starts an affair with one of her younger sisters, which sets said sister, Paula, on a lifetime of addiction and self-destructive behavior. (Much later, long after they’re both rid of Clapton, you get a long passage of Pattie trying to get Paula clean (Paula has two children by then and it’s about as messy as you can imagine), with only intermittent success before there is more addiction.) So it’s not like she didn’t know what she was getting, and whom. On the other hand, passion and romantic adoration are as powerful a drug as anything else (plus, you know, Eric Clapton: actually as good a musician as his reputation; the two most famous songs he wrote about Pattie, Layla and Wonderful Tonight bear witness to that). We get a probably inadvertent bit of foreshadowing when Eric fancies George’s car (well, one of them), gets it and promptly wrecks it. Which is the Eric and Pattie relationship summed up in miniature. After he’s done with heroin, he’s a full time alcoholic, and when he’s finally done with that, the marriage is over and any independent sense of self Pattie had is all but vanished: ”My identity, my sense of self, was dependent on him, and because he made me think he valued it so little, my self-esteem could not have been lower.” At which point there is thankfully light at the end of the tunnel, because instead of trying to fix this via a new relationship Pattie rebuilds herself, gets a job (photography - she moves on the other side of the lenses), and is done with being a muse. (Though not with musicians; as I said, George in his capacity as perfect ex husband is still around, and in fact it’s Pattie who takes the last photo of George, Ringo and Paul together at Ringo’s birthday party before George’s death.) It feels almost Hollywood formulaic, but: good for her.
Trivia points:
- if someone ever writes the Martha-the-sheepdog-as-superhero tale; Pattie provides a perfect nemesis for Martha, Yogi the police dog of Detective Sergeant Pilcher of Scotland Yard, he who busted both the Rolling Stones, John & Yoko and, on the day of Paul and Linda’s wedding, Pattie and George.
- Pattie names the dentist who dosed John, George and their wives with LSD the first time, John Riley, and makes him sound rather sinister, since he also used to put the Beatles and their wives on intravenous valium when they went to him in his professional capacity, and, as she says, ”he could have been doing anything to us while we were out”
- There is a hilarious anecdote from Pattie’s and George’s wedding day about her two kid brothers and Paul (who was best man): ”When Paul realized that David and Boo were bored, he took them outside in search of fun. In a disused loo, with hundreds of fan letters waiting for Mrs. Harrison’s attention, they found George’s bow and arrows. Paul showed the boys how to use it. David pulled back the string, and Paul watched the arrow score a direct hit on the bonnet of his gleaming Rolls-Royce.”
The other two books are in German and were written by two Beatles’ friends from the Hamburg days, Horst Fascher and Klaus Voormann. They make for a fascinating compare and contrast, not least because these two come from completely different corners of German society, take a completely different approach in telling their stories, and come to widely different conclusions (and some similar ones.) Horst Fascher starts out the son of a cleaning woman and a POW (his father was one of the long term POW in Russia who didn’t return to Germany until many years after the war), started a career as a boxer, which rapidly ended when he killed someone in a (non-professional, private) fight with a punch, became a bouncer in various clubs in Hamburg’s red light district, the Reeperbahn, at which point he meets not just the young Beatles but practically every rock musician of the era other than Elvis and the Stones, after some delayed stints in prison goes to the very place most people of the era couldn’t wait to get away from, Vietnam, as Tony Sheridan’s manager via Tony entertaining the troops, and spends the next decades promoting and managing anything from musicians to football stars; he’s what is often referred to as “a colourful character”.
Meanwhile, Klaus Voormann, son of a rich dentist and a banker’s daughter from Berlin, hails from what we call in German Großbürgertum (I think the English equivalent is upper class), studies art in Hamburg, discovers certain musicians in a night club after a quarrel with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, becomes a musician himself in addition to being a graphic artist (as a bassist, he played most famously with Manfred Mann and the Plastic Ono Band, among many others, and the cover he drew for Revolver won him a Grammy, the first to go to a German artist) and after twenty years abroad returns to Germany at some point during the 80s. Not to kill the suspense, but his book is my favourite of the lot, not least because the combination of self-drawn illustrations (and he’s really, really good at that) and the ability to narrate his and other stories very well makes for a compelling whole. Something he and Horst Fascher do have in common, though? Don’t look to either of them for accurate chronology, date or record wise. Horst puts Billy Preston into the White Album when Billy actually plays on Let it Be, while Klaus thinks Magic Alex didn’t become a hanger-on with the Beatles until after India, instead of half a year before). But that’s okay; neither of them claims to be a biographer. They tell their own memories.
Horst Fascher: Let the good times roll
Rarely for his generation of Germans, Horst Fascher does not have Daddy issues. Or rather: if he does, he has them in reverse. His father is a loveable nice guy who refuses to join the party (the NSDAP, that is, that’s the Nazi party for you English speaking people), is denounced by his brother -in-law, ends up at the Eastern front as a result, and even after years as a POW in Russia comes home to tell his son it’s his greatest pride not to have killed anyone during the war. Horst writes in adoration and respect about him and once his time in prison comes along the thing that hurts him most is what it’ll do to his father who already had enough crap in his life.
He’s also very honest about his reaction after accidentally killing someone: how the “my life as a boxer is over” self pity was there first until the ashamed realization of what the family of the young man who lost his one and only real life must feel came, and that weird emptiness he felt once it settled in he had killed someone. Of course, what made this book most famous is the ample use of what people call four letter words in English (they usually have far more than four letters in German) and the sexual explicitness. But you know, for all the openness about his own sex life, Horst Fascher is actually quite discreet in his indiscretions, if you pay attention. Which is to say: while he makes a general statement about how the Beatles when in Hamburg had their wild time, the only one he gives actual details for regarding this is the (at the time the book was written) dead one, who couldn’t be hurt anymore by revelations: John. No dirt dished on George, Paul or Ringo.
Well, there is that story with Ringo and Little Richard, but that one actually is only indiscreet when it comes to Little Richard, because Ringo escapes from it virtue intact. Incidentally, that story is also a good example of the Chinese whispers principle of being signficantly changed when retold, because the way I read it first in someone else’s summary had Horst basically offering himself to spare Ringo being harassed by the Beatles’ erstwhile idol, which sounded phony to me and actually isn’t the way Horst tells it at all. The Ringo and Little Richard story ends with Ringo running from Little Richard; several pages later in the Little Richard chapter, Little Richard comes on to Horst who tells himself a) he loves the guy’s music, and b) a blow job is a blow job, so why the hell not? And proceeds to go for it, concluding that Little Richard is better than many a Hamburg whore at the art but that he feels bad for the guy’s steady boyfriend, one Billy Preston (remember him?), because young Billy came into the wardrobe just when Horst was leaving. (You can feel bad for Billy P., too, for another reason: Little Richard simply left him in Germany without a ticket home because he had fallen for yet another boy, and Horst & Co. had to provide the air plane fare so poor Billy wouldn’t be stuck in Hamburg.)
The John tales are mostly familiar if you’ve read Lennon biographies already (Horst Fascher was one of Norman’s, Coleman’s etc. sources) of John running wild on the Reeperbahn and pulling all types of crazy stunts in between sex with prostitutes and one transvestite, which let Horst Fascher conclude he was bisexual though with hang-ups about it. For those of us who are counting, when it comes to the “did they or didn’t they?” question re: did John have sex with Brian Epstein?, where John told some of his nearest and dearest he had (primarily Pete Shotton) and some he hadn’t (primarily Yoko), Horst Fascher is among those being told he had. His overall portrait of John goes in the “entertaining jerk” direction (which makes for a compare and contrast with Klaus Voormann’s, who goes for the “sensitive soul with tough façade “ interpretation, sometimes using the same events), with the thing about John that did annoy Horst Fascher being neither about John’s sex life or drinking habits but John’s habit to mouth off at the audience and sometimes run off the stage to start arguments, then run back on stage again so that when the enraged audience member set off in pursuit, Horst was the one who had to sweep in and stop the guy in question from laying a finger on John. Aside from being a symptom of John’s habit to expect other people to clean up his messes, Horst thought it was cowardly.
Musically, Horst Fascher seems to have been a rock’n-roll purist, who when Paul tentatively played one of his and John’s songs for him confesses to have told Paul not to waste his time and stick to real rock instead; he didn’t like the exis introducing the Beatles to longer hair and androgynous looks instead of the classic 50s rocker hairstyle, either, and was bemused that women seemed to fancy them even more afterwards. It’s not surprising that in the 60s he and Tony Sheridan ended up with each other for a while, playing 50s style rock in Saigon; the changing music of the 60s passed them by and they took years to adjust, and ironically the Beatles had a great deal to do with that.
Perhaps the most touching parts of the book come near the end, the fates of two of Horst’s children. First his son Rory (named after Rory Storm) dies in a gruesome accident in Liverpool, and then his little daughter Marie-Sophie is born with a heart defect. At that point, Horst had been unemployed for four years and definitely without the cash to finance the kind of surgeon capable of performing heart surgery for babies, but he did still have old friends. Paul paid for an American specialist and his team flown in from the states and everything else. Sadly, the little girl still died thirteen days later, but, says Horst: “This is true friendship.”
All in all: the kind of book you read once, feel entertained by and occasionally shake your head at (point in case: when Horst comes up with the old fairy tale of the prostitutes in Saigon hiding blades in their vaginas to hurt American G.I.s), but once is enough: one does not feel the need to re-read.
Klaus Voormann: Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John?
The title, dear non-Germans, means: Why don’t you play Imagine on the white piano, John? The book, as mentioned before, is my favourite of the three. It’s the kind of book you wish your friends would write, remembering your good sides, full of endearing anecdotes, tenderness and humour, not dwelling on your mistakes. Mind you, this also means this is hardly an objective portrait of anyone, but then, Klaus Voormann doesn’t claim it is. Also, did I say Horst Fascher is discreet in his indiscretions? Klaus Voormann is so discreet that May Pang is the only person mentioned any of the Beatles has a relationship with without being married to her. Considering his three advantages: a) friends with all four and present during a lot of crucial events, b) visual artist, which means he can describe everything in an intensity and quality “normal” biographers can only yearn for, from the Kaiserkeller to the Ad Lib club in London to the Dakota in New York, c) musician, which means his descriptions of performances and recordings are from an insider pov, one does not miss statements about anyone’s sex life at all.
Mind you, occasionally Klaus Voorman’s ability to paint anything in friendly, blameless colours (with two exceptions - he is none too keen on Manfred Mann, and he’s genuinenly pissed off at some backstage intrigues re: Concert for George, more about that later) can also be frustrating and produce a “yes, but…” reaction; this happened to me two times in particular, though oddly enough the second time it was counteracted not by the text itself but by an image. The first time was right at the start, when he goes through some old friends in “where are they now?” manner and professes utter disbelief at the idea that dear old Phil Spector (ranting and raving his way through everyone else’s memoirs, but an island of calmness and competence in Klaus Voorman’s) could have killed a woman. Considering that years before that Spector was famous for being insanely jealous re: his wife Ronnie, to the point of locking her up in his house, and already appears as an utter creep in accounts like May Pang’s 1983 memoir about her time with John (i.e. a book written two decades before Spector became a case for the law), and given that Tony Bramwell who worked for him and liked the guy had no doubt he did it, I find it hard to believe Klaus Voorman was the sole person to somehow miss the signs that Phil Spector was, shall we say, somewhat unstable.
The other instance which however was counteracted by the book itself was Klaus Voorman’s way of summing up the John and Cynthia marriage. (Translation of the passage into English my own.) “I knew that after this difficult time a new John would rise like a phoenix from the ashes. And his wife Cynthia would have no place next to John Phoenix Lennon. She was a part of the old John from Liverpool. This very endearing girl with a big warm heart. Maternal, a bit conservative and not an intellectual, which John would have needed her to be. Cynthia was never a woman who could talk for hours, days and nights about existence, about God and his antagonist, man. Love & Peace happenings in Dutch hotel rooms would have been impossible with her. But John needed a challenge.”
In other words, no one is to blame, Cynthia was simply a (boring) stage John had to leave behind. Which may be one aspect of the truth but leaves out a major reason why Cynthia was no intellectual challenge; because John hadn’t wanted her to be. He didn’t want her to have a job, and when she tried to get back to painting in the mid-60s, he destroyed the results when drunk. And while I was still thinking this, I noticed that on the other side of the page there was one of the few photos (instead of a drawing, painting or a sketch) of the book, of John and Cynthia in Weybridge, John sitting next to the pond in Kenwood and staring at his image, Cynthia sitting on the wall of the stairs, and under it Klaus had written “John playing Narcissus in Weybridge, Cynthia looking on”. My God, thought I, this is brilliant. Because if you know the myth of Narcissus and Echo, they are a truly devastating description of the John and Cynthia marriage, as sharp and biting as Voormann’s text is kind and forgiving. Replacing Narcissus’ self love with John’s self-loathing but also self-fascination. But otherwise it completely fits, especially Echo’s fate. And it’s not just John-as-Narcissus; Cynthia-as-Echo is far more cutting a description of her than Pattie’s snobbing dismissal. Now maybe Klaus didn’t think things through and did this subconsciously, but there it is.
On to the main text, though. Like everyone else, Klaus had his favourite Beatle. His was George. Then John, but George definitely first. The book is dedicated to George, the prologue is about him - and at the same time a hilarious and knowingly witty demonstration about the unreliability of memory - and while in other Beatles-related books John’s death is the big devastating event, here it’s George. (John’s death gets two sentences, George’s gets many a page of shock and heartbrokenness. Also media dislike because they tried to ensure Klaus would be available for post-mortem interviews before George was even dead.) George is “little George”, “my dear George” and often “Georgie”, and his chocolate brown eyes and “boyish, crooked smile” are raved about with fannish intensity. (Incidentally, Klaus says next to nothing about Stuart which is sort of funny if you’re familiar with the biographies where Stuart is the person they keep asking him about. The one thing he says is no, he didn’t mind Astrid becoming Stu’s girlfriend because his own romance with Astrid was about to break up anyway; they made and still make far better friends than lovers, a conclusion he would have arrived with and without Stu.) This choice focus makes often for refreshing changes; for example, instead of adding yet another speculation as to whatever happened between John and Brian in Barcelona Klaus is singularly uninterested (it gets one sentence, “John preferred to go with Brian to Barcelona”) and instead gives us many a page on something that the biographies usually only mention in one sentence, to wit, what the other three Beatles did during this time: vacationing with Klaus and Astrid on Tenerife. “Their last time of innocence” Klaus describes it because it was just before Beatlemania exploded. In the start of April 1963, Klaus got this letter from Paul: Dear Klaus , Hello - I wrote to Astrid for your address and she sent me the envelope - I think she’s angry with us, but then again she may not be. We thought that - as we’re going for a holiday on the 28th April we would all come and see dear old Klaus in Tenerife, because we need the sun. (…) We’re doing fine here in England, our record is doing great (no.3!!!) and we just recorded an L.P. We’ll bring it when we come.”
By the time they came to Tenerife to join up with Astrid and Klaus, Please Please Me the single was at No.1 and Please Please Me the album was just released, but on the island nobody knew them, something that would never ever happen again. Klaus describes how fascinated they were by the Southern sun and the island scenery (“this looks like an Elvis film”, said Ringo, who like the rest of them only knew various English cities plus Hamburg and and John’s and Paul’s case Paris), which also meant they underestimated how quickly it would turn them to lobsters (tm Paul) with their fair skin. Fame was yet so new and not yet there that George, the Beatle who later would hate it most, tried to get girls through it (in vain, because Please Please Me had not yet been released in Spain) with the immortal come-on: “Mio, Georgio. I’m one of the Beatles. Los Beatles, that’s me.” Car freak which he was, he also laid claim to Klaus’ sports car the entire time and never allowed anyone else to drive.
More than any of the other Beatles-related memoirs I’ve read, this one is aware of mortality and the subjectivity of memory. The tenderness is that of an old man looking back on his youth and friends, “some are dead and some are living”, to quote Klaus quoting John. The prologue I mentioned starts both themes - death, obviously, with George being claimed by it, but also memory doing what it wants, with Klaus’ description of showing George a painting he’d done of him from an incident at the end of the Beatles’ first time in Hamburg, “poor little Georgie, arrested and lonely in prison” as Klaus put it, only to be told by George who was shaking with laughter that it had been Paul who’d arrested and who spent the night at the Davidswache. (George, after someone had tipped off the police that he was still underage at 17, had been sent out of Germany the day before, sans prison interlude.) Leaving Klaus to conclude ruefully that he had misremembered (and pitied George) for forty years now and that this alone showed how unreliable memory is. The other time he highlights this comes much later in the book, when he was commissioned to provide some illustrations for the famous (and famously awkward) one and only encounter between Elvis and the Beatles. This he hadn’t witnessed so did some research, only to find that of the surviving Beatles, George, Paul and Ringo all remembered nearly every detail differently (for example, Paul remembers Priscilla having her hair done in a beehive toupe; Ringo remembers her wearing it open; George insisted she wasn’t there at all; Priscilla Presley remembers being produced to meet the Beatles but can’t remember her hairstyle though her dress, which she remembers differently from Paul and Ringo and so forth), and in general the awkwardness and lack of communication dominated every description of the (non-)interaction with Elvis. (It was the typical “never meet your idols” tale. Naturally, being rock’n-roll obsessed teenagers in the 50s all four Beatles had worshipped Elvis. While Elvis in the 60s saw them as ursurpers of his throne and didn’t understand why this had happened and what anyone saw in these English upstarts. It didn’t help that they had been so nervous that they had all smoked pot in advance, either.)
Like Horst Fascher, Klaus has a few tales of John running wild on the Reeperbahn, only his end with soulful revelations of John’s loneliness underneath in the early hours of the morning. His maximum narrative discretion comes into play during his descriptions of the Plastic Ono Band recordings and the Toronto concert, though, because all of this happens during the toxic time of the big Beatles break-up, and yet Klaus manages not to say a negative word about anyone. His account of the concert in Toronto is very funny, with the new formed band (i.e. John, Eric Clapton, Alan on drums, Klaus as a bassist and Yoko) practicing together on the air plane for the first time… except for Yoko. John was being deliberately evasive and vague as to what she would actually sing, saying “you’ll see”, which left Klaus and Eric Clapton looking at each other somewhat baffled and bemused but telling themselves John was a professional, he’d know what he was doing. So then inevitably this happens (again, translation by yours truly):
”We were in the middle of Yer Blues when the sack suddenly opened, Yoko crawled out, and then this deafening scream exploded. Oh my god, I thought, she must have stepped on a nail or something like that. But then I realized this was Yoko’s musical contribution. Immediately, I understood why John had been so coy on board the plane. He’d been right, too: this could not be called singing. At every scream, my hair rose higher. (…) Our dear John looked proudly at Yoko. Now I knew why he hadn’t let her practice with us en route. He probably had been afraid that the pilot would have tried an emergency landing in the conviction someone was trying to kill a woman or one of the passengers was giving birth. But the longer we were exposed to her idea of singing, the more my understanding for her message grew. After a certain point, I became fascinated. I never met somebody who could throw feelings at you with such an intensity and power. She wanted to get people to understand, to comprehend: ‘John, let’s hope for peace, John, let’s hope for peace… peace… peace… peace.’ And while I was standing behind her and watched this little figure roaring desperately into the microphone, I was touched.”
When it comes to the recording of Plastic Ono Band and Imagine (Klaus still on bass), he’s again the master of diplomacy in his descriptions. Phil Spector, as mentioned before, is all calm competence and “one of the few who really understood how much John really needed his Yoko, for it was not to everyone’s taste to get orders from her, even regarding matters in which she was not very experienced”. We get accounts of Imagine the song , Gimme some truth and Jealous Guy being recorded, but not a word on How do you sleep? (or how Klaus felt about playing bass on an anti-Paul song so vehement that Ringo told John that this was too much and walked out on him).
Klaus also played bass for George on various songs (including “Give me love”, “Wah-Wah”, “All Things Must Pass” and “My Sweet Lord”) and records and during the Concert for Banglasdesh , the organization of which he describes in detail and with much praise. The Concert for George after George’s death, on the other hand, is one of the few occasions for bitterness in the entire book. When he arrived for rehearsal, he was told a certain young bassist from Eric Clapton’s band named Dave would play the pass part of all songs. In the end, he shared the bass part on “Wah-Wah” with Dave, and because Paul fought for him (“I was very touched”) he was the only bassist on “All Things Must Pass” (which Paul sang), but he had to leave the stage for the songs in between, including “Give me love” because Jeff Lynne had changed the arrangement so a bass would not be necessary anymore. Cue one disappointed Klaus, except for All Things Must Pass, which he declares together with meeting several old friends again made the whole experience worth it.
”This wonderful moment, standing behind Paul and share this indescribable feeling once more was worth coming to London alone. I don’t know whether anyone can understand what artists - musicians and singers - feel directly before they go on stage. It’s a very specific transformation which we all go through, everyone who decided to step in front of an audience to present something. (…) Something happens that is hard to explain with words. (…) You get this adrenaline kick which makes an artist go above and beyond. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you’re sick with 39° Centigrade fever, whether you’ve broken your ribs on the way to the stage or whether your thumb is out of joint. You’re off this world and in another one, and you’re playing with the sole goal to drive your audience mad with ecstasy. Yes, it’s sexual, and for many also connected with exhibitionism and the need to produce yourself. And some develop on stage an aura that works like a magnetic field. I noticed yet again when I watched Paul prepare for his performance minutes before he started. We were all standing behind the scenes and listened to the last notes before his cue. I could see how Paul in his mind went through his performance. Paul is one of the most professional artists I’ve ever known. And yet he can do spontaneous entertainment like few others. He was standing with us behind the scenes and at the same time was far away, completely focused. With every second, this aura around him grew, this powerful charisma that can enthrall people alone or en masse. Then Eric’s announcement came. Paul jumped on stage, the audience went wild, and this incredible wave of enthusiasm crashed right behind the stage and made me feel like I was on a helter skelter. Paul! (…) When he had asked me during the rehearsals to play bass for him, I was very touched. So I went on stage, plugged my bass guitar into the amplifier. In three meters distance from me, Paul was standing in front of the microphone. I’ll never forget this image. The legs, like always a bit o-shaped, and I was thrown back to the Kaiserkeller time. I was standing there and was seeing little young Pauli in his grey flannel trousers and Elvis style hair in the Kaiserkeller. Nothing has changed, forty years have passed, and nothing has changed. Paul was standing in front of me, and it was this same incredible amazing feeling as it had been then. I had wanted to be on stage one more time, playing for my friend George. One more time making the floor vibrate with friends. My happiness was so overwhelming that at first I didn’t notice anything else and couldn’t hear myself play bass. I just played and grooved. This moment was fountain of youth.
If John in Klaus’ version is a sensitive soul hiding behind a tough, sarcastic façade who uses his role as “the bitch of rock’n roll” (that’s the expression Klaus uses, in English amid the German) to protest against hypocrisy everywhere and George is both adorable little George and a very wise philosopher (except when yelling at his tv about Michael Schumacher during car races - George couldn’t stand Schumacher) , Paul is too damn charming. Quoth Klaus when talking about ye early days in Hamburg, when Paul (following a life long pattern of attaching himself to mother figures) befriends Rosa the toilet woman, called Muttchen which is the Northern German endearment for mother - in the south we’d say Mutti or Mami : She was sitting there benevolent and smiling between snogging lovers and pissing drunks. Paul was her favourite, there was no doubt. When he stopped by, she was always happy. There was always a kind word in addition to the speed pills. She petted his arm while he beamed at her as if she was Brigitte Bardot: “Alles klar, Muttchen?” What a question. When her Paul was with her, Muttchen was always fine. She even let him stay at her houseboat for a few weeks when his girl friend was visiting. This was a particular honour. Paul simply was that charming, even then. He had this cheerful boyish approach down pat. (I wish I knew a better translation for “lausbubenhaft”, because it’s a great description, and my English doesn’t quite capture it.) And when he smiled, nearly everyone got weak in the knees, except for John, who was immune. “Look at him. There he goes again!” he muttered.
The end of the book consists of four funny stories with a “food and the Beatle” theme (Ringo at last tries vegetarianism, John during his househusband years introduces Klaus to the macrobiotic diet, Paul is supposed to talk about the cover for Run Devil Run but spends 20 minutes on the telephone talking with Klaus’ wife about recipes and olive oil, George lovingly cares for his gardens), but before that, the theme of mortality is massive as Klaus talks about his keen awareness that every time he meets old friends now, it could be the last, how you if you hug each other you feel also everyone who is gone, with him and Paul becoming closer in their age because of mutual survivorness. “Every time one of us goes, he leaves those left behind a piece of himself, which every single one of us carries around with himself. And so I sense in Paul George and Ringo as well, and even a great deal of John.”
The last time (as of him writing this book) he met Paul was first at a soundcheck (and later talk) and then at a concert in Munich, with Paul playing “Don’t let the sun catch you crying” the moment Klaus entered the rehearsal. I’ve always been fascinated by Paul’s memory. That was the song I used to request in the early morning hours from the young Beatles in the Kaiserkeller. And now, forty-three years later, Paul played it again for me, probably for the last time.” During the concert itself, the moment came when Paul played Here Today, and this concludes Klaus’ book, food anecdotes in the afterword aside: ”He told the audience how much he regretted that he wasn’t able to tell John everything he had wanted to tell him. And then he suddenly stopped and added: ‘And I want to dedicate this song as well to my good old friend Klaus Voormann, who spent a lot of time with John and who is here tonight. Here is to you, Klaus!’ I hadn’t expected this. I was deeply touched. When Paul started to sing, some tears made their way down to my white-grey beard, and I thought: There were so many things I wanted to tell you, too, Paul, there were so many things I wanted to ask you. When will I see you again? Will I see you again?”
Trivia:
- something you probably only get if you’re German or Austrian: Klaus Voorman going from describing Jesse Ed Davis - who was Native American - to Karl May, Winnetou and the tragedy of the Native Americans in general
- Rita Coolidge with whom he had an affair also awakens reflections on the attractiveness of Native Americans, which leaves me to conclude that Klaus, like many of us through several German generations but probably not after mine anymore, had a crush on Winnetou
- on the other hand, he also praises Trio during the Neue Deutsche Welle. Since I hated Trio (bad school memories, don’t ask), this made me stare in disbelief. Ah well.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/694562.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight
What I found immediately striking about the autobiography by the former Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Clapton is that the Beatles connection is actually the least interesting thing in it. Pattie (whose name, btw, is constantly misspelled in Beatles related biographies and memoirs as Patti, Patty and anything in between) brings a lot of people to written life, but the three other Beatles aren’t among them; Brian Epstein comes across more vividly than John, Paul and Ringo. The George characterization is an issue for itself and threefold, which I’ll get to in a moment, but first let me say that the lack of Fab Four (with the exception of George) isn’t a detriment of the book; it works really well as its own story, which is a very 60s and 70s tale of fairy tale turned feminist horror story turned gradual individuation and liberation.
The other thing that’s immediately striking is that Pattie comes from a very different social background than most people in the Beatles saga; with British officers for fathers and stepfathers, a childhood in Kenya and an early career as a model, she’s , as far as this foreigner can judge, several levels removed in the English class system - upper class or upper middle class. It shows, not always in ways our narrator is aware of. For example, while she raves about the new class barriers removing equality of Swinging London and emphasizes how it didn’t occur to her that she and George were from different parts in the class hierarchy until she met his family, you get this paragraph on the wives and girlfriends of the other Beatles (who btw come across more vividly than their husbands, which is justice, I suppose):
I liked Cynthia, but of all the Beatles wives and girlfriends I found her the most difficult to make friends with. She and I came from such different backgrounds; she had no career, she was a young mother, and we had no point of reference apart from our attachment to a Beatle. She wasn’t like my friends, who enjoyed a giggle and some fun: she was rather serious, and often, I thought, behaved more like John’s mother than his wife. I tended to leave her to her own devices but invited her to join me for shopping. I think she felt a bit out of her depth in the smart, sophisticated circles in which the Beatles were now moving in London. (…) Ringo’s girlfriend, Maureen Cox (…) was seventeen, had just left school and was learning to be a hairdresser. Then, one day, it happened for her. Again, she and I had little in common but she was jolly and friendly, more relaxed than Cynthia. We got on but I felt there was definitely a north-south divide among the wives and girlfriends. (…) Jane Asher was the girlfriend with whom I felt most at home, but because we both had heavy work commitments she was also the one I saw least. She came from a professional family, had grown up in London and, like me, had been privately educated.
It’s hard to read this not as somewhat snobbish and translated into “Cyn was a boring provincial, and Maureen was a fun provincial, but neither was exactly our sort, as opposed to Jane”, not least because the corresponding paragraph in Cynthia’s memoirs about Pattie sounds so very different. (”Pattie and I were becoming close friends. I admired her gorgeous figure and perfect fashion sense, and I think she enjoyed the company of someone who’d been with the Beatles from the beginning and new the ropes.” Poor Cyn, imagining she’s mentoring Pattie while Pattie considers her a bit of a bore.) This being said, my other theory is that Pattie might downplay her friendship with Cynthia because that way she doesn’t have to given an explanation for obeying John’s Henry VIII. Style command that nobody was to have contact with Cyn anymore after he separated from her.
Another distinctive feature of Pattie’s book is that she’s far more self aware (in retrospect, not at the time) than Cynthia of the trap of the feminine role she was playing, and how this contributed to her decisions and lack of same and thus how her life ended up. She points out, re: being a model:
You have to look really good to get the jobs, so you put yourself into a situation that feeds your insecurities. If you don’t get a job, you think it’s because you’re not pretty enough. It allows you - in fact, it forces you - to concentrate on your flaws, and that’s destructive. A girl who doesn’t have to rely on her looks for her living is far more confident, and confidence is attractive - her looks are not integral to her self-esteem. Ours were. A good photographer made the world of difference. I didn’t get on with Patrick Lichfield because he couldn’t communicate with his models in the way that others did. It was so frustrating: he would say, ‘Do something - go,’ which is impossible. (…) (David) Bailey was a sexy photographer, and it was easy to appear sexy with him because we reacted to what was coming from him. There might be other people in the studio but modeling is a one-on-one relationship, between you and the photographer, and you need to feel that he and the camera are one.
Pattie met George via her brief acting job in A Hard Day’s Night, and it’s there we encounter the first of the three Georges who show up in this volume. George No.1 is ”the best-looking man I’ve ever seen”, and a perfect Prince Charming, sensitive, witty, vivacious, and once he meets Pattie’s somewhat dysfunctional family kind and attentive to her mother, younger brothers and sisters. Due to her mother’s marital disasters she had wanted to wait with marriage, but George sweeps her of her feet when she’s all of twenty and he’s all of twenty one, the only Beatle to marry without getting his girlfriend pregnant first: the culmination of a 60s dream. And then, you guessed it, after a delay of about two years of wedded bliss, the 60s and 70s nightmare sets in.
George No.2 makes his appearance post-India (Pattie later dates the Beatles’ stint in India as the last time she and George were perfectly relaxed and happy together). He’s the Hyde to George No.1’s Jekyll. First of all, he may have cheated on her before but if so she never knew about it. Now he does so openly, with a spectacularly lame justification: ”In India George had become fascinated by the god Krishna, who was always surrounded by young maidens, and came back wanting to be some kind of Krishna figure, a spiritual being with lots of concubines. He actually said so. And no woman was out of bounds.” Secondly, he disapproves of her modeling and makes her virtually stop. The other ability she’s proud of is being an excellent cook, but he goes and hires an Indian one, thus destroying her two sources of self esteem. He gets so obsessive about meditation that he hardly talks to her anymore at all, doesn’t talk to her about his difficulties (i.e. the Beatles break-up) and refuses to hear anything about hers, doesn’t allow radio in the house anymore after the My Sweet Lord plagiarism suit and behaves like a medieval king. (”He was surrounded by yes-men. When I challenged him about it he said, ‘Well, I’d hate to be surrounded by no-men.”) And then he adds the ultimate insult of having an affair with her friend and virtual sister-in-law, Ringo’s wife Maureen. (“(O)ne day George, Chris O’Dell and I went to Ringo’s house, where George, in front of everyone, proceeded to tell Ringo he was in love with his wife. Ringo worked himself up to into a terrible state and went about saying, ‘Nothing is real, nothing is real.’ I was furious. I went straight out and dyed my hair read.”) (I do feel for Pattie, but the thing with the hair makes the soap opera that was her life into a black comedy.)
You may guess where this is going. Unfortunately not to Pattie leaving him and trying life on her own, no; following the 60s/70s nightmare (and indeed the life pattern of her own mother), she seeks self-confirmation via another relationship. Enter Eric Clapton. (Or rather, he’s been there for a while, but that’s when she starts to respond.)
George No.3 shows up as soon as Pattie leaves him for Eric. He’s the best ex husband ever, the prince of exes, starting by generously promising he’ll be there for her if the thing with Eric doesn’t work out, then being available on the telephone when she needs him the way he wasn’t as her husband, being without blame and kind and friendly whenever they meet, and many years later, long after she split up with Eric as well and the three of them find themselves at the same party, telling Eric off for being an ass towards her. Which leaves our heroine to conclude that George was the best and she should have fought harder to keep him, at which point in the book I shook my head and wondered “what was there to keep?” Because George ending his jerkish behavior and starting to be nice, kind and attentive again seems to have been entirely depending on stopping being Pattie’s husband, which leaves me to conclude he either subsconsciously or consciously didn’t want to be married anymore and ended it in passive-aggressive ways which, you know, fits the role models he had. *eyes John and Paul and their early romantic relationships disapprovingly*
Anyway. The Eric Clapton chapters are the most harrowing but also the most clear-sighted. As opposed to George, Eric doesn’t have a Prince Charming phase; when he first starts obsessing about Pattie in the late 60s, he tries to blackmail her by declaring if she won’t love him back he’ll take heroin (she didn’t, and he did), and starts an affair with one of her younger sisters, which sets said sister, Paula, on a lifetime of addiction and self-destructive behavior. (Much later, long after they’re both rid of Clapton, you get a long passage of Pattie trying to get Paula clean (Paula has two children by then and it’s about as messy as you can imagine), with only intermittent success before there is more addiction.) So it’s not like she didn’t know what she was getting, and whom. On the other hand, passion and romantic adoration are as powerful a drug as anything else (plus, you know, Eric Clapton: actually as good a musician as his reputation; the two most famous songs he wrote about Pattie, Layla and Wonderful Tonight bear witness to that). We get a probably inadvertent bit of foreshadowing when Eric fancies George’s car (well, one of them), gets it and promptly wrecks it. Which is the Eric and Pattie relationship summed up in miniature. After he’s done with heroin, he’s a full time alcoholic, and when he’s finally done with that, the marriage is over and any independent sense of self Pattie had is all but vanished: ”My identity, my sense of self, was dependent on him, and because he made me think he valued it so little, my self-esteem could not have been lower.” At which point there is thankfully light at the end of the tunnel, because instead of trying to fix this via a new relationship Pattie rebuilds herself, gets a job (photography - she moves on the other side of the lenses), and is done with being a muse. (Though not with musicians; as I said, George in his capacity as perfect ex husband is still around, and in fact it’s Pattie who takes the last photo of George, Ringo and Paul together at Ringo’s birthday party before George’s death.) It feels almost Hollywood formulaic, but: good for her.
Trivia points:
- if someone ever writes the Martha-the-sheepdog-as-superhero tale; Pattie provides a perfect nemesis for Martha, Yogi the police dog of Detective Sergeant Pilcher of Scotland Yard, he who busted both the Rolling Stones, John & Yoko and, on the day of Paul and Linda’s wedding, Pattie and George.
- Pattie names the dentist who dosed John, George and their wives with LSD the first time, John Riley, and makes him sound rather sinister, since he also used to put the Beatles and their wives on intravenous valium when they went to him in his professional capacity, and, as she says, ”he could have been doing anything to us while we were out”
- There is a hilarious anecdote from Pattie’s and George’s wedding day about her two kid brothers and Paul (who was best man): ”When Paul realized that David and Boo were bored, he took them outside in search of fun. In a disused loo, with hundreds of fan letters waiting for Mrs. Harrison’s attention, they found George’s bow and arrows. Paul showed the boys how to use it. David pulled back the string, and Paul watched the arrow score a direct hit on the bonnet of his gleaming Rolls-Royce.”
The other two books are in German and were written by two Beatles’ friends from the Hamburg days, Horst Fascher and Klaus Voormann. They make for a fascinating compare and contrast, not least because these two come from completely different corners of German society, take a completely different approach in telling their stories, and come to widely different conclusions (and some similar ones.) Horst Fascher starts out the son of a cleaning woman and a POW (his father was one of the long term POW in Russia who didn’t return to Germany until many years after the war), started a career as a boxer, which rapidly ended when he killed someone in a (non-professional, private) fight with a punch, became a bouncer in various clubs in Hamburg’s red light district, the Reeperbahn, at which point he meets not just the young Beatles but practically every rock musician of the era other than Elvis and the Stones, after some delayed stints in prison goes to the very place most people of the era couldn’t wait to get away from, Vietnam, as Tony Sheridan’s manager via Tony entertaining the troops, and spends the next decades promoting and managing anything from musicians to football stars; he’s what is often referred to as “a colourful character”.
Meanwhile, Klaus Voormann, son of a rich dentist and a banker’s daughter from Berlin, hails from what we call in German Großbürgertum (I think the English equivalent is upper class), studies art in Hamburg, discovers certain musicians in a night club after a quarrel with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, becomes a musician himself in addition to being a graphic artist (as a bassist, he played most famously with Manfred Mann and the Plastic Ono Band, among many others, and the cover he drew for Revolver won him a Grammy, the first to go to a German artist) and after twenty years abroad returns to Germany at some point during the 80s. Not to kill the suspense, but his book is my favourite of the lot, not least because the combination of self-drawn illustrations (and he’s really, really good at that) and the ability to narrate his and other stories very well makes for a compelling whole. Something he and Horst Fascher do have in common, though? Don’t look to either of them for accurate chronology, date or record wise. Horst puts Billy Preston into the White Album when Billy actually plays on Let it Be, while Klaus thinks Magic Alex didn’t become a hanger-on with the Beatles until after India, instead of half a year before). But that’s okay; neither of them claims to be a biographer. They tell their own memories.
Horst Fascher: Let the good times roll
Rarely for his generation of Germans, Horst Fascher does not have Daddy issues. Or rather: if he does, he has them in reverse. His father is a loveable nice guy who refuses to join the party (the NSDAP, that is, that’s the Nazi party for you English speaking people), is denounced by his brother -in-law, ends up at the Eastern front as a result, and even after years as a POW in Russia comes home to tell his son it’s his greatest pride not to have killed anyone during the war. Horst writes in adoration and respect about him and once his time in prison comes along the thing that hurts him most is what it’ll do to his father who already had enough crap in his life.
He’s also very honest about his reaction after accidentally killing someone: how the “my life as a boxer is over” self pity was there first until the ashamed realization of what the family of the young man who lost his one and only real life must feel came, and that weird emptiness he felt once it settled in he had killed someone. Of course, what made this book most famous is the ample use of what people call four letter words in English (they usually have far more than four letters in German) and the sexual explicitness. But you know, for all the openness about his own sex life, Horst Fascher is actually quite discreet in his indiscretions, if you pay attention. Which is to say: while he makes a general statement about how the Beatles when in Hamburg had their wild time, the only one he gives actual details for regarding this is the (at the time the book was written) dead one, who couldn’t be hurt anymore by revelations: John. No dirt dished on George, Paul or Ringo.
Well, there is that story with Ringo and Little Richard, but that one actually is only indiscreet when it comes to Little Richard, because Ringo escapes from it virtue intact. Incidentally, that story is also a good example of the Chinese whispers principle of being signficantly changed when retold, because the way I read it first in someone else’s summary had Horst basically offering himself to spare Ringo being harassed by the Beatles’ erstwhile idol, which sounded phony to me and actually isn’t the way Horst tells it at all. The Ringo and Little Richard story ends with Ringo running from Little Richard; several pages later in the Little Richard chapter, Little Richard comes on to Horst who tells himself a) he loves the guy’s music, and b) a blow job is a blow job, so why the hell not? And proceeds to go for it, concluding that Little Richard is better than many a Hamburg whore at the art but that he feels bad for the guy’s steady boyfriend, one Billy Preston (remember him?), because young Billy came into the wardrobe just when Horst was leaving. (You can feel bad for Billy P., too, for another reason: Little Richard simply left him in Germany without a ticket home because he had fallen for yet another boy, and Horst & Co. had to provide the air plane fare so poor Billy wouldn’t be stuck in Hamburg.)
The John tales are mostly familiar if you’ve read Lennon biographies already (Horst Fascher was one of Norman’s, Coleman’s etc. sources) of John running wild on the Reeperbahn and pulling all types of crazy stunts in between sex with prostitutes and one transvestite, which let Horst Fascher conclude he was bisexual though with hang-ups about it. For those of us who are counting, when it comes to the “did they or didn’t they?” question re: did John have sex with Brian Epstein?, where John told some of his nearest and dearest he had (primarily Pete Shotton) and some he hadn’t (primarily Yoko), Horst Fascher is among those being told he had. His overall portrait of John goes in the “entertaining jerk” direction (which makes for a compare and contrast with Klaus Voormann’s, who goes for the “sensitive soul with tough façade “ interpretation, sometimes using the same events), with the thing about John that did annoy Horst Fascher being neither about John’s sex life or drinking habits but John’s habit to mouth off at the audience and sometimes run off the stage to start arguments, then run back on stage again so that when the enraged audience member set off in pursuit, Horst was the one who had to sweep in and stop the guy in question from laying a finger on John. Aside from being a symptom of John’s habit to expect other people to clean up his messes, Horst thought it was cowardly.
Musically, Horst Fascher seems to have been a rock’n-roll purist, who when Paul tentatively played one of his and John’s songs for him confesses to have told Paul not to waste his time and stick to real rock instead; he didn’t like the exis introducing the Beatles to longer hair and androgynous looks instead of the classic 50s rocker hairstyle, either, and was bemused that women seemed to fancy them even more afterwards. It’s not surprising that in the 60s he and Tony Sheridan ended up with each other for a while, playing 50s style rock in Saigon; the changing music of the 60s passed them by and they took years to adjust, and ironically the Beatles had a great deal to do with that.
Perhaps the most touching parts of the book come near the end, the fates of two of Horst’s children. First his son Rory (named after Rory Storm) dies in a gruesome accident in Liverpool, and then his little daughter Marie-Sophie is born with a heart defect. At that point, Horst had been unemployed for four years and definitely without the cash to finance the kind of surgeon capable of performing heart surgery for babies, but he did still have old friends. Paul paid for an American specialist and his team flown in from the states and everything else. Sadly, the little girl still died thirteen days later, but, says Horst: “This is true friendship.”
All in all: the kind of book you read once, feel entertained by and occasionally shake your head at (point in case: when Horst comes up with the old fairy tale of the prostitutes in Saigon hiding blades in their vaginas to hurt American G.I.s), but once is enough: one does not feel the need to re-read.
Klaus Voormann: Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John?
The title, dear non-Germans, means: Why don’t you play Imagine on the white piano, John? The book, as mentioned before, is my favourite of the three. It’s the kind of book you wish your friends would write, remembering your good sides, full of endearing anecdotes, tenderness and humour, not dwelling on your mistakes. Mind you, this also means this is hardly an objective portrait of anyone, but then, Klaus Voormann doesn’t claim it is. Also, did I say Horst Fascher is discreet in his indiscretions? Klaus Voormann is so discreet that May Pang is the only person mentioned any of the Beatles has a relationship with without being married to her. Considering his three advantages: a) friends with all four and present during a lot of crucial events, b) visual artist, which means he can describe everything in an intensity and quality “normal” biographers can only yearn for, from the Kaiserkeller to the Ad Lib club in London to the Dakota in New York, c) musician, which means his descriptions of performances and recordings are from an insider pov, one does not miss statements about anyone’s sex life at all.
Mind you, occasionally Klaus Voorman’s ability to paint anything in friendly, blameless colours (with two exceptions - he is none too keen on Manfred Mann, and he’s genuinenly pissed off at some backstage intrigues re: Concert for George, more about that later) can also be frustrating and produce a “yes, but…” reaction; this happened to me two times in particular, though oddly enough the second time it was counteracted not by the text itself but by an image. The first time was right at the start, when he goes through some old friends in “where are they now?” manner and professes utter disbelief at the idea that dear old Phil Spector (ranting and raving his way through everyone else’s memoirs, but an island of calmness and competence in Klaus Voorman’s) could have killed a woman. Considering that years before that Spector was famous for being insanely jealous re: his wife Ronnie, to the point of locking her up in his house, and already appears as an utter creep in accounts like May Pang’s 1983 memoir about her time with John (i.e. a book written two decades before Spector became a case for the law), and given that Tony Bramwell who worked for him and liked the guy had no doubt he did it, I find it hard to believe Klaus Voorman was the sole person to somehow miss the signs that Phil Spector was, shall we say, somewhat unstable.
The other instance which however was counteracted by the book itself was Klaus Voorman’s way of summing up the John and Cynthia marriage. (Translation of the passage into English my own.) “I knew that after this difficult time a new John would rise like a phoenix from the ashes. And his wife Cynthia would have no place next to John Phoenix Lennon. She was a part of the old John from Liverpool. This very endearing girl with a big warm heart. Maternal, a bit conservative and not an intellectual, which John would have needed her to be. Cynthia was never a woman who could talk for hours, days and nights about existence, about God and his antagonist, man. Love & Peace happenings in Dutch hotel rooms would have been impossible with her. But John needed a challenge.”
In other words, no one is to blame, Cynthia was simply a (boring) stage John had to leave behind. Which may be one aspect of the truth but leaves out a major reason why Cynthia was no intellectual challenge; because John hadn’t wanted her to be. He didn’t want her to have a job, and when she tried to get back to painting in the mid-60s, he destroyed the results when drunk. And while I was still thinking this, I noticed that on the other side of the page there was one of the few photos (instead of a drawing, painting or a sketch) of the book, of John and Cynthia in Weybridge, John sitting next to the pond in Kenwood and staring at his image, Cynthia sitting on the wall of the stairs, and under it Klaus had written “John playing Narcissus in Weybridge, Cynthia looking on”. My God, thought I, this is brilliant. Because if you know the myth of Narcissus and Echo, they are a truly devastating description of the John and Cynthia marriage, as sharp and biting as Voormann’s text is kind and forgiving. Replacing Narcissus’ self love with John’s self-loathing but also self-fascination. But otherwise it completely fits, especially Echo’s fate. And it’s not just John-as-Narcissus; Cynthia-as-Echo is far more cutting a description of her than Pattie’s snobbing dismissal. Now maybe Klaus didn’t think things through and did this subconsciously, but there it is.
On to the main text, though. Like everyone else, Klaus had his favourite Beatle. His was George. Then John, but George definitely first. The book is dedicated to George, the prologue is about him - and at the same time a hilarious and knowingly witty demonstration about the unreliability of memory - and while in other Beatles-related books John’s death is the big devastating event, here it’s George. (John’s death gets two sentences, George’s gets many a page of shock and heartbrokenness. Also media dislike because they tried to ensure Klaus would be available for post-mortem interviews before George was even dead.) George is “little George”, “my dear George” and often “Georgie”, and his chocolate brown eyes and “boyish, crooked smile” are raved about with fannish intensity. (Incidentally, Klaus says next to nothing about Stuart which is sort of funny if you’re familiar with the biographies where Stuart is the person they keep asking him about. The one thing he says is no, he didn’t mind Astrid becoming Stu’s girlfriend because his own romance with Astrid was about to break up anyway; they made and still make far better friends than lovers, a conclusion he would have arrived with and without Stu.) This choice focus makes often for refreshing changes; for example, instead of adding yet another speculation as to whatever happened between John and Brian in Barcelona Klaus is singularly uninterested (it gets one sentence, “John preferred to go with Brian to Barcelona”) and instead gives us many a page on something that the biographies usually only mention in one sentence, to wit, what the other three Beatles did during this time: vacationing with Klaus and Astrid on Tenerife. “Their last time of innocence” Klaus describes it because it was just before Beatlemania exploded. In the start of April 1963, Klaus got this letter from Paul: Dear Klaus , Hello - I wrote to Astrid for your address and she sent me the envelope - I think she’s angry with us, but then again she may not be. We thought that - as we’re going for a holiday on the 28th April we would all come and see dear old Klaus in Tenerife, because we need the sun. (…) We’re doing fine here in England, our record is doing great (no.3!!!) and we just recorded an L.P. We’ll bring it when we come.”
By the time they came to Tenerife to join up with Astrid and Klaus, Please Please Me the single was at No.1 and Please Please Me the album was just released, but on the island nobody knew them, something that would never ever happen again. Klaus describes how fascinated they were by the Southern sun and the island scenery (“this looks like an Elvis film”, said Ringo, who like the rest of them only knew various English cities plus Hamburg and and John’s and Paul’s case Paris), which also meant they underestimated how quickly it would turn them to lobsters (tm Paul) with their fair skin. Fame was yet so new and not yet there that George, the Beatle who later would hate it most, tried to get girls through it (in vain, because Please Please Me had not yet been released in Spain) with the immortal come-on: “Mio, Georgio. I’m one of the Beatles. Los Beatles, that’s me.” Car freak which he was, he also laid claim to Klaus’ sports car the entire time and never allowed anyone else to drive.
More than any of the other Beatles-related memoirs I’ve read, this one is aware of mortality and the subjectivity of memory. The tenderness is that of an old man looking back on his youth and friends, “some are dead and some are living”, to quote Klaus quoting John. The prologue I mentioned starts both themes - death, obviously, with George being claimed by it, but also memory doing what it wants, with Klaus’ description of showing George a painting he’d done of him from an incident at the end of the Beatles’ first time in Hamburg, “poor little Georgie, arrested and lonely in prison” as Klaus put it, only to be told by George who was shaking with laughter that it had been Paul who’d arrested and who spent the night at the Davidswache. (George, after someone had tipped off the police that he was still underage at 17, had been sent out of Germany the day before, sans prison interlude.) Leaving Klaus to conclude ruefully that he had misremembered (and pitied George) for forty years now and that this alone showed how unreliable memory is. The other time he highlights this comes much later in the book, when he was commissioned to provide some illustrations for the famous (and famously awkward) one and only encounter between Elvis and the Beatles. This he hadn’t witnessed so did some research, only to find that of the surviving Beatles, George, Paul and Ringo all remembered nearly every detail differently (for example, Paul remembers Priscilla having her hair done in a beehive toupe; Ringo remembers her wearing it open; George insisted she wasn’t there at all; Priscilla Presley remembers being produced to meet the Beatles but can’t remember her hairstyle though her dress, which she remembers differently from Paul and Ringo and so forth), and in general the awkwardness and lack of communication dominated every description of the (non-)interaction with Elvis. (It was the typical “never meet your idols” tale. Naturally, being rock’n-roll obsessed teenagers in the 50s all four Beatles had worshipped Elvis. While Elvis in the 60s saw them as ursurpers of his throne and didn’t understand why this had happened and what anyone saw in these English upstarts. It didn’t help that they had been so nervous that they had all smoked pot in advance, either.)
Like Horst Fascher, Klaus has a few tales of John running wild on the Reeperbahn, only his end with soulful revelations of John’s loneliness underneath in the early hours of the morning. His maximum narrative discretion comes into play during his descriptions of the Plastic Ono Band recordings and the Toronto concert, though, because all of this happens during the toxic time of the big Beatles break-up, and yet Klaus manages not to say a negative word about anyone. His account of the concert in Toronto is very funny, with the new formed band (i.e. John, Eric Clapton, Alan on drums, Klaus as a bassist and Yoko) practicing together on the air plane for the first time… except for Yoko. John was being deliberately evasive and vague as to what she would actually sing, saying “you’ll see”, which left Klaus and Eric Clapton looking at each other somewhat baffled and bemused but telling themselves John was a professional, he’d know what he was doing. So then inevitably this happens (again, translation by yours truly):
”We were in the middle of Yer Blues when the sack suddenly opened, Yoko crawled out, and then this deafening scream exploded. Oh my god, I thought, she must have stepped on a nail or something like that. But then I realized this was Yoko’s musical contribution. Immediately, I understood why John had been so coy on board the plane. He’d been right, too: this could not be called singing. At every scream, my hair rose higher. (…) Our dear John looked proudly at Yoko. Now I knew why he hadn’t let her practice with us en route. He probably had been afraid that the pilot would have tried an emergency landing in the conviction someone was trying to kill a woman or one of the passengers was giving birth. But the longer we were exposed to her idea of singing, the more my understanding for her message grew. After a certain point, I became fascinated. I never met somebody who could throw feelings at you with such an intensity and power. She wanted to get people to understand, to comprehend: ‘John, let’s hope for peace, John, let’s hope for peace… peace… peace… peace.’ And while I was standing behind her and watched this little figure roaring desperately into the microphone, I was touched.”
When it comes to the recording of Plastic Ono Band and Imagine (Klaus still on bass), he’s again the master of diplomacy in his descriptions. Phil Spector, as mentioned before, is all calm competence and “one of the few who really understood how much John really needed his Yoko, for it was not to everyone’s taste to get orders from her, even regarding matters in which she was not very experienced”. We get accounts of Imagine the song , Gimme some truth and Jealous Guy being recorded, but not a word on How do you sleep? (or how Klaus felt about playing bass on an anti-Paul song so vehement that Ringo told John that this was too much and walked out on him).
Klaus also played bass for George on various songs (including “Give me love”, “Wah-Wah”, “All Things Must Pass” and “My Sweet Lord”) and records and during the Concert for Banglasdesh , the organization of which he describes in detail and with much praise. The Concert for George after George’s death, on the other hand, is one of the few occasions for bitterness in the entire book. When he arrived for rehearsal, he was told a certain young bassist from Eric Clapton’s band named Dave would play the pass part of all songs. In the end, he shared the bass part on “Wah-Wah” with Dave, and because Paul fought for him (“I was very touched”) he was the only bassist on “All Things Must Pass” (which Paul sang), but he had to leave the stage for the songs in between, including “Give me love” because Jeff Lynne had changed the arrangement so a bass would not be necessary anymore. Cue one disappointed Klaus, except for All Things Must Pass, which he declares together with meeting several old friends again made the whole experience worth it.
”This wonderful moment, standing behind Paul and share this indescribable feeling once more was worth coming to London alone. I don’t know whether anyone can understand what artists - musicians and singers - feel directly before they go on stage. It’s a very specific transformation which we all go through, everyone who decided to step in front of an audience to present something. (…) Something happens that is hard to explain with words. (…) You get this adrenaline kick which makes an artist go above and beyond. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you’re sick with 39° Centigrade fever, whether you’ve broken your ribs on the way to the stage or whether your thumb is out of joint. You’re off this world and in another one, and you’re playing with the sole goal to drive your audience mad with ecstasy. Yes, it’s sexual, and for many also connected with exhibitionism and the need to produce yourself. And some develop on stage an aura that works like a magnetic field. I noticed yet again when I watched Paul prepare for his performance minutes before he started. We were all standing behind the scenes and listened to the last notes before his cue. I could see how Paul in his mind went through his performance. Paul is one of the most professional artists I’ve ever known. And yet he can do spontaneous entertainment like few others. He was standing with us behind the scenes and at the same time was far away, completely focused. With every second, this aura around him grew, this powerful charisma that can enthrall people alone or en masse. Then Eric’s announcement came. Paul jumped on stage, the audience went wild, and this incredible wave of enthusiasm crashed right behind the stage and made me feel like I was on a helter skelter. Paul! (…) When he had asked me during the rehearsals to play bass for him, I was very touched. So I went on stage, plugged my bass guitar into the amplifier. In three meters distance from me, Paul was standing in front of the microphone. I’ll never forget this image. The legs, like always a bit o-shaped, and I was thrown back to the Kaiserkeller time. I was standing there and was seeing little young Pauli in his grey flannel trousers and Elvis style hair in the Kaiserkeller. Nothing has changed, forty years have passed, and nothing has changed. Paul was standing in front of me, and it was this same incredible amazing feeling as it had been then. I had wanted to be on stage one more time, playing for my friend George. One more time making the floor vibrate with friends. My happiness was so overwhelming that at first I didn’t notice anything else and couldn’t hear myself play bass. I just played and grooved. This moment was fountain of youth.
If John in Klaus’ version is a sensitive soul hiding behind a tough, sarcastic façade who uses his role as “the bitch of rock’n roll” (that’s the expression Klaus uses, in English amid the German) to protest against hypocrisy everywhere and George is both adorable little George and a very wise philosopher (except when yelling at his tv about Michael Schumacher during car races - George couldn’t stand Schumacher) , Paul is too damn charming. Quoth Klaus when talking about ye early days in Hamburg, when Paul (following a life long pattern of attaching himself to mother figures) befriends Rosa the toilet woman, called Muttchen which is the Northern German endearment for mother - in the south we’d say Mutti or Mami : She was sitting there benevolent and smiling between snogging lovers and pissing drunks. Paul was her favourite, there was no doubt. When he stopped by, she was always happy. There was always a kind word in addition to the speed pills. She petted his arm while he beamed at her as if she was Brigitte Bardot: “Alles klar, Muttchen?” What a question. When her Paul was with her, Muttchen was always fine. She even let him stay at her houseboat for a few weeks when his girl friend was visiting. This was a particular honour. Paul simply was that charming, even then. He had this cheerful boyish approach down pat. (I wish I knew a better translation for “lausbubenhaft”, because it’s a great description, and my English doesn’t quite capture it.) And when he smiled, nearly everyone got weak in the knees, except for John, who was immune. “Look at him. There he goes again!” he muttered.
The end of the book consists of four funny stories with a “food and the Beatle” theme (Ringo at last tries vegetarianism, John during his househusband years introduces Klaus to the macrobiotic diet, Paul is supposed to talk about the cover for Run Devil Run but spends 20 minutes on the telephone talking with Klaus’ wife about recipes and olive oil, George lovingly cares for his gardens), but before that, the theme of mortality is massive as Klaus talks about his keen awareness that every time he meets old friends now, it could be the last, how you if you hug each other you feel also everyone who is gone, with him and Paul becoming closer in their age because of mutual survivorness. “Every time one of us goes, he leaves those left behind a piece of himself, which every single one of us carries around with himself. And so I sense in Paul George and Ringo as well, and even a great deal of John.”
The last time (as of him writing this book) he met Paul was first at a soundcheck (and later talk) and then at a concert in Munich, with Paul playing “Don’t let the sun catch you crying” the moment Klaus entered the rehearsal. I’ve always been fascinated by Paul’s memory. That was the song I used to request in the early morning hours from the young Beatles in the Kaiserkeller. And now, forty-three years later, Paul played it again for me, probably for the last time.” During the concert itself, the moment came when Paul played Here Today, and this concludes Klaus’ book, food anecdotes in the afterword aside: ”He told the audience how much he regretted that he wasn’t able to tell John everything he had wanted to tell him. And then he suddenly stopped and added: ‘And I want to dedicate this song as well to my good old friend Klaus Voormann, who spent a lot of time with John and who is here tonight. Here is to you, Klaus!’ I hadn’t expected this. I was deeply touched. When Paul started to sing, some tears made their way down to my white-grey beard, and I thought: There were so many things I wanted to tell you, too, Paul, there were so many things I wanted to ask you. When will I see you again? Will I see you again?”
Trivia:
- something you probably only get if you’re German or Austrian: Klaus Voorman going from describing Jesse Ed Davis - who was Native American - to Karl May, Winnetou and the tragedy of the Native Americans in general
- Rita Coolidge with whom he had an affair also awakens reflections on the attractiveness of Native Americans, which leaves me to conclude that Klaus, like many of us through several German generations but probably not after mine anymore, had a crush on Winnetou
- on the other hand, he also praises Trio during the Neue Deutsche Welle. Since I hated Trio (bad school memories, don’t ask), this made me stare in disbelief. Ah well.
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