This is where the what-ifs begin. What if another band had gotten the gig? What if they had joined Royston Ellis, an early UK rock’n’roll poet, for a sojourn into the avant-garde? What if George hadn’t quit his electrician’s apprenticeship and its promise of career security to stake his future on being in a band?
Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg; 1962 is not a record of what-ifs. The dominoes were already falling, and most of the seemingly magical things that had to happen for the Beatles to become the best and most important band in the world had already happened, not least the addition of Starr to the lineup. His style is described as “lyrical” for a reason. On an absolutely vicious tear through “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You),” he almost adds another layer of meaning on top of the lyrics, just as he would four years later, when he seemed to feel “Rain” even more deeply than the bandmate who wrote it. His genius was as an instrumentalist rather than a songwriter, but that’s not necessarily a lesser kind of genius; the idea that it is may be one of the things that shifted once the Beatles inspired other bands to write their own songs.
Live! is more a record of an era of rock history the Beatles helped destroy, before bands had to write their own songs and when rocking the house was more important than being a genius. All the songs on the U.S. version of the bootleg are covers, and the UK version features two originals: “I Saw Her Standing There,” cheekily augmented by Lennon with a riff on the “Peter Gunn” theme, and the great early song “Ask Me Why.” Three of the Beatles’ first four albums, the exception being the all-Lennon/McCartney A Hard Day’s Night, contain eight originals and six covers. Of course, A Hard Day’s Night is by far the most beloved of the four, but the idea of a great rock album as a singular statement, or even a band having to make a great album to be considered great, is something the Beatles entrenched with Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s. You see how deep this goes.
It was by learning all these songs and playing them for hours and hours, day after day, to fill the freakishly long time slots they had to occupy in Hamburg that the Beatles developed the almost uncannily intuitive mode of popcraft that would eventually inspire an entire generation to write their own music and rewrite rock’n’roll’s values to pride itself on self-containment. The more music you hear and the more songs you learn, the more you internalize those songwriters’ lessons and learn what rules can and can’t be broken. This is just as important in the Beatles’ evolution as the amount they played, and many of the influences that would show up in their work later can be glimpsed here.
