DISGRACELAND - Stu Sutcliffe: Reeperbahn Debauchery, Gangs, and the Birth of the Beatles

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Stu Sutcliffe was rock 'n roll's original Sid Vicious. Just like Sid, Stu was a bass player. But also like Sid, Stu could hardly play. What he did have in spades was style and attitude. He was by far the coolest looking member of the Beatles, back when the Fab Four were still a fab five (minus Ringo). These were the days of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany, a violent landscape of gangsters, thugs, prostitutes, and vindictive club owners who ran their depraved joints with an iron fist. It was here that the Beatles played marathon sets at some of Hamburg’s rowdiest bars. It was where they first popped pills, were arrested for the first time – but also where they learned how to be great, and how to be effortlessly cool. That last one thanks to their bass player Stu Sutcliffe, whose days on this earth were finite, but whose impact would live forever.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history,

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.

The stories about Stu Sutcliffe are insane. He was an original member of the Beatles back when they played the violent and depraved nightclubs of Hamburg, Germany. He was arrested when the group double-crossed a notorious club owner in the Reaver Bond. He attacked Paul McCartney on stage in the middle of a set. He was beaten up by a gang of thugs. That beating may have contributed to what many have suspected was a brain aneurysm, which took Stu's life at just 21 years old. And despite his shortcomings as a musician, his influence on the Beatles' style and intellect was massive.

An influence that gave them the confidence to make great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my Melotron called Let's Hear It for Dennis O Bell, MK1. I played you that clip because I can't afford the rights from its now or never by Elvis Presley. And why would I play you that specific slice of Mario-Lanza parroting cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on August 17, 1960. And that was the day the Beatles pulled into the notorious Reaper Bond for a residency at a rowdy nightclub, an engagement that would forever change them,

and forever alter popular music and really the entire world. On this episode, violence and depravity, thugs, a double cross, the Reaper Bonn, and the Beatles' Stew Sutcliffe. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. As far as the eye could see, St. Pauley, the Reaper Bonn, Hamburg's mile of decadence and depravity stretched out ahead, lit by neon, lined with prostitutes, pimps, and thieves. More red light back alley than Yellowbrick Road.

Either way, the Beatles were definitely not in Liverpool anymore. They weren't in Scotland either, where they just toured with Johnny Gentle. Contrary to that pop singer's surname, Scotland was anything but gentle. At least the locals weren't. Rough and tumble teddy boys looking to smash the face of any musician making eyes at their girls from the stage. But musicians could be rough and tumble too. It came with the territory. War may have been over, but rock and roll groups routinely found themselves in the shit, in the spotlight.

The afterglow of performance suddenly a combat zone where jealous, drunken boyfriends turned hostile at the first whiff of out-of-towners. The Beatles could handle the Teddy Boys. They had each other's backs. Because the Beatles weren't just a band. They were a gang. Which is what a band truly is at its core. All for one and one for all. Closer to each other than they were to their own girlfriends.

And today, they were physically close, too. Stuffed inside their manager's cream and green-colored minibus, their amplifiers and instruments strapped to the top, pulling into Hamburg, Germany, after the longest rise, of their young lives, prepared to embark on their most formidable tour of duty to date, a residency at the infamous Kaiser Keller Club. Hold up. This is not the Beatles you're thinking of. This is August 17, 1960. Back when the band's repertoire consisted almost entirely of covers of American R&B and rock and roll, back when 18-year-old

Pete Best was still on the drums, when Paul McCartney, also 18, was still playing guitar. Stu Sutcliffe, at 20 years old, the oldest Beatle, was the bass player. His good art school buddy, John Lennon, 19, also on guitar. And young George Harrison, the third guitarist, just 17 years old. Young enough that simply by being there, he was breaking the law, and the one place in Europe were breaking the law was very hard to do. Hamburg made vice readily available. Sex with women.

Sex with men. Sex with men who dressed like women. Pills Das Beer. The place was wild, especially for five impressionable repressed English boys. Hamburg was a circus, run by the likes of Bruno Kashmiter, himself a former circus clown, now a gruff character who walked with a limp and who carried around a knotted hardwood chairleg. Why? Because Bruno's nightclub, the Kaiser Keller was a den of iniquity, a place of sin, and sinners must be punished.

That is, when they sinned against our guy Bruno here. Drunken sailors, stupid tourists, and petty criminals. Try to screw Bruno over, have more pints than you could afford, at his place. That was a one-way ticket to the dirty floor, where Bruno's waiters, big men, capable men. Men Bruno hired away from the Hamburg Boxing Academy, held you still. Maybe you didn't hear. Bruno wasn't a circus clown no more. Oh yeah?

You did hear? Why the fuck are you treating them like a clown? Bruno reached in the back of his pants and pulled out the knotted chair leg. Tonight's deadbeat, splayed out on the floor, proceeded to get his head cracked open. One whack for stealing. Another for thinking he could actually get away with it. One more, well, just for kicks. The guy's face opened up.

Blood painted the floor of Bruno's office while his goons kicked the poor bastard for good measure. The goons proceeded to pick up the offending patron, opened the back door with his bloody head, and dump as barely. breathing body in the alley, where the neon lights of the strip joints and sex shops and every other depraved outlet in the St. Polly District lit up his pummeled face like Christmas. Best to get on Bruno's good side and get on it early. The Beatles understood this. Bruno was their benefactor, their lifeline. John, Paul, George, Stu, and Pete, they were all nobody's, an amateur band if there ever was one. But like all amateur band,

The Beatles had dreams of making it big. Making it big meant no more looking for a real job and no more school. Not that school would take them back. Paul was such a poor student that his teacher stopped trying, and George failed every one of his high school exams. Pete renounced education for the siren call of music, and John, board of art school, released himself from higher ed on his own recognizance.

They needed a guy like Bruno to like them. Well, like was maybe too strong a word. The Beatles weren't Jerry and the pacemakers, and they certainly weren't Rory Storm in the hurricanes, the group with that Wonderbar drummer, the one with all the rings on his fingers. The Beatles were, on a good day, Liverpool's third best rock and roll band.

But demand for live music in Hamburg, especially for English rock and roll, far exceeded the supply. So when Bruno needed to book a band to entertain the rock, clientele patronizing his place of business, he took what he could get, and he got the Beatles. He needed the Beatles. Just like John needed somebody. Not just anybody.

Not Paul. Stu. Stu Sutcliffe had it all. The Chelsea boots, the leather jacket, the dark shades and the cool attitude. He read the beats and studied the impressionists. He was handsome and beautiful at the same time. John wanted to get girls like Stu got girls to have a brain like Stu, to be talented like Stu.

And Stu Suckcliffe did have crazy talent, just not necessarily when it came to music. He was a painter, so unique and impressive that his teachers didn't even try to teach him. He taught them. He taught John, too, how to approach a canvas, how to be an intellectual. And he taught the Beatles, how to look, how to dress.

How any rock and roll band worth their salt was first and foremost a gang. A gang with a unified front and a unified look. A look that cut like a switchblade. A look that was cool as... Stu Suckcliffe was the template. Not just for the Beatles, but for the Ramones, and for the strokes. For the new band you're going to fall in love with ten years from now. It didn't matter that Stu didn't know how to play.

He was Sid Vicious years before Sid Vicious was a thing. And just like Sid, Stu knew, Image was everything. Which is why in any given photo, he looked so badass holding his big Archtoff-Hoffner president bass, an instrument he didn't want in the first place. No one wanted to play bass, not even Paul. Bass players were a hermetic breed, shoved in a corner of the stage where the guitar players peacocked out front and got all the girls. But John was persistent, always putting the bug in Stu's ear,

especially after he sold one of his paintings for 65 pounds. Know what used to do with that muddy stew? Buy that Hoffner and join her a gang. John needed Stu as inspiration, as a friend, as a beetle. While Stu needed a gang. Needed the Beatles. But not here, not at the Kaiser Keller, which was even bigger and better than advertised,

with a killer sound system in a stage like a pirate ship. No. Bruno had booked them for his other club in Hamburg, the Indra, a Reaper Bond shithole with a waning pulse and drab curtains. It was at the Indra that the Beatles were to perform four and a half hours every night, six hours on weekends, a far cry from the one-hour shows on the Johnny Gentle Tour or the 20-minute sets that were used to playing back home.

But this wasn't Liverpool, this was battle, a test of the gang's strength. We young artists are like young sailors, Stu Succliffe wrote in his notebook around this time. Unless we encounter rough seas and are buffeted by the winds, we'll not become real sailors. So Stu and the Beatles steadied themselves in anticipation of the oncoming waves. Waves of adversity and temptation that were about to crash into their unified front. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.

And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care.

So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do. Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been sleepwalking.

David O'Yellow. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Durbin. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over?

Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena, Monsu. Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place

and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the criterion?

closet. Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film, grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was.

Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over. from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. With his Hoffner slung over his shoulder, Stu Sutcliffe turned his back to the audience. He knew he wasn't any good at his instrument. He wasn't thinking about the bass or about music. He was thinking about painting.

He missed it. Oils and a brush didn't make him feel like. like this. Insecure, forced to turn his back, not because it was Miles Davis-level cool, which it most certainly was, but because he was embarrassed. Not unlike George was embarrassed when he lost his virginity to that German bombshell while Paul, John, and Pete watched. Their accommodations here in Hamburg were atrocious, tiny rooms that had to share with each other in the back of a movie theater. Filthy cubicles with no windows, no heat, no privacy, not even for for a shag.

But at the Indra, it was hot and loud. The Beatles grinding through Ray Charles is what I say. An R&D single originally divided into two parts, five minutes total, but they were now stretching into an hour. They were at Bruno's club to do one thing. Play. For hours. Whatever it took.

Machao! Bruno screamed, like some Wild West outlaw telling a fellow to dance before filling his boots full of lead. Machiaw as in make show. In other words, loosen the hell up and entertain us. The Beatles took the challenge to heart. Proper English manners tossed to the wayside. Paul, dressed in nothing but a bed sheet.

John goose-stepping, cursing out the German audience in English. Go on, you fucking crowds, you fucking eager and German bastards. The audience didn't know what they were hearing or what they were seeing, but they loved it. John Lennon. the original troll. The Beatles were feral animals. Word around the Reaper Bond was that they were verooked, absolute nutjobs. But the Beatles didn't just get crazy.

They got better. We have improved a thousandfold since our arrival, Stu wrote to his sister nearly two months into their residency. Stu himself wasn't improving as fast as the others. He continued to struggle to turn his back on stage and let his pal John get all the attention. This irritated Paul to no end. Not just because Stu's remedial skills were holding the band back, but because John was going to defend his art school friend to the bitter end. John didn't want to hear Paul's criticism of Stu. The Beatles were a gang, all for one and one for all.

Besides, who was going to play bass, if not Stu? Paul? Ha, that'll be the day. It was like George said, Better to have a bass guitarist who couldn't play than not have a bass guitarist at all. Stu was a beetle. Stu was playing. And for hours, days, months on end, the Beatles played. Little Richard, Larry Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, upbeat, uptemple, so fast, so furious, so physically demanding, that the suits they wore literally fell apart. They replaced their lilac-colored sport coats with black leather bomber jackets,

pointy-toed shoes with cowboy boots, and then they replaced the Indra with the Kaiser Keller. By October 3rd, the Beatles had performed 48 sets at Bruno's small club. Hundreds of hours, hours of noise had generated one too many complaints. So Bruno moved the Beatles over to the Kaiser Keller, the place they wanted to play in the first place, where they began opening for Rory Storm in the Hurricanes. That band with the drummer with the awesome beard and the Zephyr Zodiac,

What a badass. But I digress. The Kaiser Keller had a bigger stage, a bigger crowd, a crowd that consisted not just to thieves and prostitutes and drunken GIs, but gangsters. Gangsters with money to burn. Gangsters who said jump and all of Hamburg said how high. When members of the city's organized crime family sent trays of schnapps to the band,

the band was expected to stop what they were doing and to drink them. Soon it was more than schnapps. Soon the wise guys were sending up Prellies by the handful. Prellies, predulent, over-the-counter uppers, real rocket fuel. The Beatles did as they were told. They gobbled them up like candy and washed them down with pints of German beer. Prellies gave them energy, stamina. Prellies made them feel invincible.

Five lads turned into Superman. They took so many that they were frothing at the mouth, foaming, complete and utter lunatics making a horny, sweaty, perverted racket. It was unadulterated, liberating. 100% root. The air was thick with derangement. Cat calls from the audience. Tables overturned.

Fights breaking out. Waiters with their truncheons wailing on the unruly. The knotted wood of Bruner Koshmiter's chairleg delivering yet another punishment. Blood, sex, music, sin. A stoic face. A German face, a face full of mystery and wonder. She was beautiful.

Of all the gin joints and all the towns in the world, Stu was smitten, head over heels. Not in the way Pete had it for his St. Polly Stripper girlfriend, the one whose actual boyfriend was doing time in prison. This was different. Astrid Kircher was different, and so were her friends. All of them dressed in suede jackets, wool sweaters, jeans, existentialists, aka exes, intellectuals, visionaries, artists,

stew's kind of people, yes, but also the Beatles' first serious fans. And Astrid was the Beatles' first serious photographer. The shots she took of the group hanging around a municipal park near the Reaper Bond weren't just one-offs. They came to define how rock bands would be photographed for years to come. No mugging for the camera, just attitude and unfazed cool. faces of mystery and wonder, just like the face of the woman behind the lens. Stu with his dark sunglasses, slick back hair, black turtleneck, one part of the formidable Beatles gang,

a gang that felt stronger together. Enboldened by their new German fans, Stu emboldened by the love he was now feeling for Astrid and that she felt for him. So emboldened, when a new club opened in Hamburg, they came together as a group, as a gang. and made the collective decision to burn a bridge in order to reach greener pastures. The Top Ten Club was where it was at. It was larger than the Kaiser Keller. It had a new stage, a state-of-the-art sound system with echo and reverb.

The working conditions were better and so was the pay. But it was a crazy idea. To go behind the back of a guy as crazy as Bruno Koshmiter, to accept a gig at the top ten, a decision that was a violation of their existing contract. a contract which included a clause forbidding them from performing at another club within a five-kilometer radius. Bruno was beyond pissed. Who did they think they were?

The fucking Beatles? Didn't they know that the Germans pronounced their name as peedles? Local slang for little willies? They were a dick joke. But Bruno wasn't laughing. He was clinging to his knotted old wooden chairleg and thinking about the ways in which it could rearrange Stu Suckelis' face. or maybe Paul's, send that pretty boy straight to hell. But then he thought of something better.

A sweeter revenge. Hamburg got to George first. Busted for being underage. Given 24 hours to leave the country or go to prison. Next were Paul and Pete arrested for attempted arson. Some childish prank in which they nailed a condom to a wall lit it on fire. That wall being in the building where they lived in Hamburg, in those cramped rooms behind the movie theater.

a building that Bruno owned. Paul and Pete were taken to the airport in handcuffs and deported immediately. Stu wasn't aware of any of this when he showed up at the top ten with Astrid, ready to play that night. Hadn't he heard? George, Paul, Pete, they're all on their way back to Liverpool, and the cops were looking for John and Stu at this very moment. Why? Because someone had let slip that they've been working in Hamburg this whole time without the proper permits. Stu just turned himself in. even though he hadn't done anything wrong.

Not really. He wasn't sure what he was being charged with, marched into a holding cell where he sat on a bench alone for six hours. He signed a confession written entirely in German that said he was not aware of any burning rubbers. At least he hoped that's what it said. And then the cops let him go. The next day, John flew home to Liverpool.

He was broke and depressed. And so were the rest of them. George went looking for a real job. Paul found work at a factory winding. electrical coil, just absolute drudgery. None of them were speaking to each other, and none of them were happy. Back in Hamburg, Stu fared better. He was falling deeper in love with Astrid.

She inspired him. She gave him purpose. She made him want to dream. Not about rock and roll, and not about gangs, but about art, about painting. It was November, 1960. The Beatles, as a band, as a gang. For all intents and purposes, we're over. We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary.

I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance like he's about to attack me. You're like, making karate noises. And here's the entire the Kardashian family over there. Everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction

or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things.

Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien.

And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the criterion closet? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells,

running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over it. From hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get your podcasts.

The Beatles, of course, were not over. Not for another decade, give or take. They recognized this pretty quickly, mostly in terms of how they compared with other bands back home. When they first left Liverpool in August, they were mediocre at best. Now, three months later, they returned completely changed.

Five raucous, wild lunatics, all that playing, hours upon hours, the reps, the prelis, the trial by fire, under a constant threat of violence. It made them stronger than even they realized. And when they further realized that they were not cut out to be working stiffs,

that they were, verruped, to their core, true children of the Reaper Bond, they gave the band, their gang, one more shot. Liverpool was not prepared. The audience that assembled at the Litherland Town Hall on December 27, 1960, went into a full-blown riot. The Beatles, the way they looked, the way they sound, Dripping with sex and sweat. A true manifestation of the red-led pleasures of Hamburg was overwhelming, disorienting.

The crowd shrieked. They shed tears of joy. They went crazy. Beetlemania was born. Stu Sutcliffe wasn't there the day his band suddenly blew up in their hometown. He showed up a few weeks later, in January of 61, with Astrid Kircher, now his fiancé. For Stu, Liverpool was no place to get back. born. Liverpool was a brass coffin, so he wrote in the letters he sent home from Hamburg,

the city where he now envisioned spending the rest of his life. He could say the same about the Beatles. Rock and roll wasn't his thing. Making music didn't make him artistically fulfilled, but the band needed him. John needed him, at least for now. And Stu needed them. The Beatles, his gang. Liverpool, though, not so much. In Liverpool, Stu didn't turn his back like he had on a Hamburg stage. He was forward-facing, on high alert, slowly backed into a corner by a group of pissed-off Teddy Boys. They hated him. Or maybe they hated that they loved him.

It didn't matter. Teddy boys didn't need a reason. Not in Scotland on the Johnny Gentle Tour, not here. The one place on earth was Stu didn't want to be. He was outnumbered. One Ted threw the first punch. Stu put his hands up, but the fist connected anyways. then another and another, and all the now beating on him.

Stu on the ground, dirt in his mouth, a foot straight to his head. His vision went a little blurry. He couldn't be sure if what he was seeing was actually happening. But it was. John and Pete materializing before his very eyes, throwing themselves into the scrum, peeling the teddy boys off Stu's bloody and battered body. His boys, his gang, there when he needed them.

Back in Hamburg, It wasn't Stu or the other Beatles who were taking the beating. Once again, it was the unruly patrons. Now it was April, 1961. Thanks to a polite apology and also to procuring actual work permits this time, the Beatles were once again standing on a Reaper Bond stage, the top ten to be exact. The club they'd previously tried to play before Bruno went all vindictive and pulled the rug out.

Better hours, better room, better money. Better connections, too. Like Tony Sheridan, a fellow English expat rock and roller who could get them some studio time. But the violence, the punishment, it grew in direct proportion with the opportunity. Jacked waiters patrolled the place with tear gas guns and knuckle dusters, just dying for some dumb motherfucker to do something stupid. And when they did, those meatheads sprang into action like it was their job, which it was. And as the Beatles ripped through Dizzy Miss Lizzie, top ten's muscles,

dragged another drunk victim outside with the trash, that rank smell of urine ripening on a slimy alley wall, and proceeded to beat the living shit out of them with a fistful of brass. But it wasn't the calenders, aka the waiters, that the Beatles had to worry about. It was each other, a gang that had once been so close that had spent hours together, not just on a stage, but in small vans and cramped living quarters.

Guys that had been there for each other when they needed it the most. Those close-knit bonds were now becoming as worn as the outfits they wore on Hamburg stages. Just as quickly as they had rebounded, the Beatles were falling apart. John's love for Stu was beginning to curdle. His hero worship turned to jealousy, no longer thinking like Stu and looking like Stu and wanting the girls that Stu got. The simple fact that Stu had all those qualities and all those things that John lacked ate away at John. It made him angry, resentful,

nasty, he pushed Stu away. Paul was angry, too. Not just because Stu continued to be a less than stellar bass player, because Stu was hogging all of John's attention, attention that Paul desperately wanted. When Stu showed up with a brand new haircut, no grease, just this combed forward mushroom head. Pilsenkov, the Germans called it.

The boys gave him an endless amount of shit. But within days, the rest of the group began to wear their hair the same. same way. Like everything else about the Beatles style, the group's soon-to-be iconic mop-tops started with Stu Sutcliffe. Stu, however, didn't think of himself as a trend-setter. He was an artist. But his pursuit of art, of real art, was taking a backseat to all of this, to whatever this bizarre love triangle was with John and Paul, to the bass, an instrument he would never master. to the insults, so many from John and Paul both now, no matter how playful they were intended to be.

The insult on stage at the top ten, though, that wasn't meant to be playful. That was Paul being a sad, pathetic little dick, as the Germans put it, a peopal. To take out his anger about Stu's playing and Stu's role in that way, to make a derogatory comment about Astrid, Stewart had enough. He dropped his Hoffner bass in the middle of the song.

It landed on the stage with a thud. And then he ran at Paul, sitting there at the piano like he was fucking Mozart. More like Celieri, that smug fuck. Stu wasn't a violent man. At least he didn't think so, but it just came out of him. Came from somewhere deep down inside. Don't you dare talk about her like that? And Stu hit Paul so hard that Paul fell off the piano stool.

Paul hit him back. And they rolled around on the stage, all while John George. Pete, they kept playing. Machiao, Machiao. Paul and Stu were still throwing punches when the rest of the band pried them apart. It was the end. Everyone could see that.

Not just the end of the song, or the fight. It was the end of Stu Sutcliffe's time as a beetle. Stu Sutcliffe quit the Beatles about a third of the way through their run at the top ten in Hamburg. He handed his base to Paul because Paul, despite his growing position

as the group's primary motivating force, drew the short straw. John just bought a brand new Rickenbocker, and George could play raunchy like nobody's business. Paul had no excuse. Seeing as how he was left-handed, Paul flipped Stu's base upside down and accepted his fate.

Like Paul, Stu's own fate was rewritten. Free to pursue his two loves, art and Astrid. And because he was no longer a beetle, his relationships with Paul and John actually began to improve once again. His creativity was unbounded. He painted like a man possessed, like an artist who was no longer crippled by his own insecurities. He was Miles Davis-level cool, whether he had a base or a paintbrush in his hand, and he knew it. Everyone knew it.

But before long, Stu's newly rewritten fate was flipped upside down just like that Hoffner president of his. Migraines, convulsions, seizures, flashes of paint. pain that came out of nowhere. Pain, not unlike that experienced by Kaiser Keller Deadbeats who found themselves on the wrong side of Bruno Koshmiter's wooden chair leg. Stu's pain wasn't punishment for his sins. Stu's pain was a question that one of the German exes would ask. Why was he losing weight?

Why was he falling over when he walked? Why were his mood so volatile? Why? Astrid's family doctor ran blood tests and x-rays. increase in skull pressure, so said the diagnosis. He was given cranial hydrotherapy and massage. But the pain got worse, and the pressure built. He could feel his brain crowding his cranium.

It was like a bomb going off in his head, slowly. That's how Astrid described it to John and Paul on April 11, 1962. One year after Stu left the group, a year in which the Beatles gained steam at a furious rate. now managed by Brian Epstein, auditioning for George Martin, soon to sack Pete Best and replace him with that bearded force of nature from Rory Storm's band. They were making a triumphant return back in the city that made them, the city of sin, the city run by the unforgiving hands of men like Bruno Koshmiter, back for round three.

This time, with an engagement at a place called the Star Club, this time, traveling not by bus, but by plane, at the Hamburg airport they were greeted by Astrid. But this seemed odd. She was alone. Where was Stu? Astrid didn't answer at first. John could sense something was wrong. He knew what Astor was going to say before she said it.

Stewart died. He's gone. Just one day earlier, the day before the Beatles returned to Hamburg, Stu slipped into a coma. He died in Astrid's arms. the way to the hospital. Cerebral paralysis due to bleeding into the right ventricle of the brain was the first official cause of death, like a bomb going off in his head. Perhaps a brain aneurysm as many suspected, though it was never known for sure. Perhaps from getting kicked in the head by that

gang of Teddy Boys in Liverpool the year prior. Or perhaps, as Stu's sister shockingly claimed, from an unprovoked attack by a jealous John Lennon in a fit of rage. That claim would be made years later. Back in 1962, in Hamburg for the first time without his friend Stu, John indeed had rage inside him. He grieved with equal parts rage and absurdity. At the Star Club, he no longer goose-stepped. Now he dressed as a cleaning woman, knocking over all the mic stands like a lunatic.

Paul, too, grieved in his own private way, racked with guilt for how he treated Stu. The things he would say if only his friend wasn't gone. But though he was physically gone, Stu Suckcliffe never actually left the Beatles. How they looked, how they dressed, how they remained above all else, a gang. That was all Stu's doing, their patron scene. He gazed down on them from above,

not from the heavens, but from the top left corner of the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band album cover, where a black and white cut out of Stu. sandwiched in between a Hindu guru and a wax model of Sunny Liston watches over his old band as their unprecedented rise to the topermost is about to go supersonic. Turn off your minds, you can imagine, Stu saying, relax, float downstream, surrender to the void. This is not the end. This is simply the end of the beginning.

I'm Jake Brennan. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month.

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