When The Beatles left Hamburg, Paul McCartney said his father hardly recognized him. The experience had completely worn him out.
Though Hamburg was a valuable learning experience for The Beatles, it was also an exhausting one. They slept in cramped, uncomfortable quarters and played onstage for hours each night. John Lennon admitted he used to get so tired he would fall asleep onstage.
“My voice began to hurt with the pain of singing. But we learnt from the Germans that you could stay awake by eating slimming pills so we did that,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “I used to be so pissed I’d be lying on the floor behind the piano, drunk, while the rest of the group was playing. I’d be on stage, fast asleep. And we always ate on stage, too, because we never had time to eat. So it was a real scene … It would be a far-out show now: eating and smoking and swearing and going to sleep on stage when you were tired.”
The experience ran them so ragged that it was visible to McCartney’s father when he got home.
“Hamburg totally wrecked us. I remember getting home to England and my dad thought I was half-dead,” he said, adding, “I looked like a skeleton. I hadn’t noticed the change; I’d been having such a ball.”
Though McCartney looked worn out when he returned from Hamburg, he was in a stronger place as a musician. After a brief break, The Beatles began performing together again. McCartney said that having performed in Hamburg helped their image.
“We all wore black that we had picked up in Hamburg,” he said. “All the Liverpool girls were saying, ‘Are you from Germany?’ or, ‘I saw in the paper you are from Hamburg.'”
Lennon said it helped that they began to believe they were talented musicians after Hamburg.
“It was that evening that we really came out of our shell and let go,” he said. “We stood there being cheered for the first time. This was when we began to think that we were good. Up to Hamburg we’d thought we were OK, but not good enough. It was only back in Liverpool that we realized the difference and saw what had happened to us while everyone else was playing Cliff Richards s***.”
“Paul was really the one keeping them together,” Liverpool guitarist Brian Griffiths said, per the book Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. “John in those days wasn’t such a good singer, George [Harrison] was very shy, Stu [Sutcliffe] was still a learner on the bass, and Pete Best had only just come into the band. He knew all about minor and diminished seventh chords, whereas John was still hanging round guitarists in other bands, saying, ‘Go on, show us a lick.'”
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