Beyond the photos -- which can be seen elsewhere, though not so gorgeously -- what makes "Hamburg Days" uncanny is the way it functions as a collective Kirchherr-Voormann memoir. As they remember growing up under the Nazis, you're reminded how close to the Nazis they and the Beatles all were in 1960, and how close the Nazis remained to them. "We had to say 'Heil Hitler' when we got to school in the morning, and it was the standard greeting when you met someone in the street," Kirchherr says. "When the war was finished and the English came, my mother took me aside and warned me, 'Now you must never say that again,' and I didn't know why. I'd thought it was like saying, 'How do you do?'" She is explicit that her and her friends' attempt to create their own culture, really a kind of secret society, out of Cocteau, the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, Sartre, and Villon -- all combining into something much closer to present-day Goth than '60s existentialism -- was an attempt to negate their identity as people who would have grown up as Nazis if Hitler had won: "So even before we met the Beatles, we were creating our own little innocent revolution." It was the success she saw coming for the Beatles, not the guilt of the past, that would take away whatever innocence that revolution had; once you help change the world, innocence is the last thing you can claim.

On his recent Hamburg-days album, "Run Devil Run" (Capitol), Paul McCartney acts as if he never did change the world. The lack of anguish and authority in his bash-and-split renditions of such old Beatles favorites as Carl Perkins' "Movie Magg" or Larry Williams' "She Said Yeah" is as weird as the 1999 picture inside the box, where he looks more like his own child than himself. The music is alive -- but nothing close to the anarchy of the music the Beatles actually made in Hamburg. You can find it on various official and legally-contested Live-from-the-Star-Club albums; it was never more raw than on a tape bootlegged as "The International Battle of the Century: The Beatles vs. The Third Reich." This was a takeoff on a real album, in which Vee-Jay Records of Chicago recycled the early EMI Beatles recordings to which they briefly held rights: "The International Battle of the Century: The Beatles vs. the Four Seasons." On the back was a checklist, where you could award between 10 and zero points to, say, "Baby It's You" vs. "Big Girls Don't Cry." The "Third Reich" version was far more inspired: the likes of "Matchbox" and "Little Queenie" vs. audience noise titled "Arbeit Mach Frei," "Schweinehund," "Your Papers, Please" and "Vhere Ist Pete Best?" Starting tepidly with "A Taste of Honey" and "Till There Was You," the band, with Paul doing most of the singing and John taunting the crowd, soon goes absolutely elsewhere, into sounds so rough the songs barely retain a shred of recognizability. On "Talkin' 'Bout You" 1977 London punk is discovered, not as style but strictly as form, with a disorientingly atonal one-note guitar solo -- here, as on "Where Have You Been All My Life" and "Roll Over Beethoven," impossible to credit as the work of sober, worried George. A tame Carl Perkins ditty like "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" goes over the edge into a kind of war -- or right into the secret society into which Kirchherr and Voormann had already initiated the Beatles, and vice versa.

10) Ringo Starr TV commercial for Charles Schwab

As drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Ringo often sat in with the Beatles in Hamburg; now he sits up straight in an office delivering investment-counsel gobbledygook to up-and-comers as the menacing piano line of "Money (That's What I Want)" bangs in the background. Of all the Beatles' official recordings, their 1963 cover of Barrett Strong's 1960 original (the first real Motown record; there's a blood-and-guts account of the making of the Detroit template in Raynoma Gordy Singleton's "Berry, Me and Motown," often translated as "Bury Me in Motown") was perhaps the only one to capture the spirit of the Hamburg cauldron -- capture it, and heave it at the world. Whenever I hear the Beatles' version, aiming, it seems for its whole length, at John's scream "I WANT TO BE FREE!" I know that nothing could ever be better. I hope Ringo made a good deal: The commercial is a reminder, or, for those who haven't heard the record, a clue.

Recent Stories