“He Got Pretty Wired”: How The Beatles' Little Secret Led to the “Only Violence Ever Had

With all the machismo that often surrounds the rock ‘n’ roll world and its inhabitants, it’s no wonder that so many rock bands have become aggressive toward one another at some point in their careers. Even without the massive egos and on-stage pressure, working with someone in close quarters can be difficult. The Eagles, Aerosmith, and, more recently, Jane’s Addiction, are all no exceptions. And neither were The Beatles.

The Beatles’ most ubiquitous conflict is certainly the months-long breakup that bookended their time together as the Fab Four. But they had their fair share of rows while they were cutting their teeth, too. According to John Lennon and George Harrison, the worst of this aggression came out in the hours-long gigs they would play in Hamburg, boosted by dangerous mixes of booze and uppers.
How The Beatles Killed Time During Their Lengthy Nightclub Sets

Even the most seasoned musician is bound to feel at least a little weary after playing at performance-level for four hours straight, and The Beatles were doing it while they were just starting out. With the help of upper pills handed out by the Hamburg nightclub waitstaff, the musicians managed to play their rock music for hours on end—some of which were spent getting rather, er, creative with the stage production.

“The things we used to do!” John Lennon later recalled in Anthology. “We used to break the stage down. That was long before The Who came out and broke things. We used to leave guitars playing on stage with no people there. We’d be so drunk, we used to smash the machinery. And this was all through frustration, not an intellectual thought. ‘We will break the stage, we will wear a toilet seat round our neck, we will go on naked.’ We just did it through being drunk.”

Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com

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