John Lennon: The Life

The sense of forging into new territory each day, and infallibly conquering it, gave a high that no drug ever could.

So he had to make a decision between me and his dad, and in the end he chose me.”

The very first blast had a stunning effect on their audience, girls and boys alike abandoning the normal dance-hall pursuits of jiving, chatting each other up, or looking for trouble, and almost stampeding to the stage front—the first-ever recorded outbreak of Beatlemania

As for Paul, his homecoming to 20 Forthlin Road almost unrecognizably emaciated had stirred even the normally placid Jim McCartney to real anger about the educational opportunities that had been sacrificed by following “that Lennon

was always a sort of poet or painter and I thought ‘Is this it? Nightclubs and seedy scenes, being deported and weird people in clubs?’ You see, part of me is a monk and part of me is a performing flea.”

For someone too myopic to read most English signs, let alone foreign ones, it was a nightmare ordeal, struggling from country to country and platform to platform with his suitcase and guitar case, his amplifier strapped to his back. His great fear was that the amp might be stolen before he’d even paid for it

John found himself in the novel position of being the only one not in trouble

Crossing such a powerful, well-connected St. Pauli figure was still not something to be done with impunity. By the strangest coincidence, just after this showdown with Koschmider, the Reeperbahn’s Ausweiskontrolle, or youth-protection squad, received a tip-off that George Harrison was under eighteen and so had been violating its nightly 10:00 p.m. curfew for the past three months. George was immediately deported, traveling home to Liverpool by train

Many nights afterward did John anxiously scan the Kaiserkeller’s promenaders, certain that the victim would return to take revenge supported by his whole ship’s company. Amazingly, he never did. But retribution of a different kind was just around the corner.

In late November 1960, the Kaiserkeller

Klaus himself bore Stu no resentment for displacing him; his relationship with Astrid had been cooling off anyway, and he felt more than compensated by his new friendship with the Beatles, especially with John