The Beatles Got Started in Hamburg. There's a Reason for That.

It was sixty years ago today, on August 17, 1960, that the Beatles got together to play…their first live performance at the Indra Club in Hamburg’s red light district. The Fab Four in utero—Ringo Starr wouldn’t replace Pete Best as drummer until 1962—began what George Harrison would call their “apprenticeship” in a former striptease club on the Reeperbahn.

Historian Julia Sneeringer tours the “sinful” main street of the St. Pauli harbor district via contemporary tour guides and helps to explain what the Beatles were doing so far from the Liverpool of their childhoods.

“The Reeperbahn was (and still is) defined as a zone of pleasure, a place to consume an array of sensations and to ‘let loose’ anonymously without fear of community censure,” she writes. “As such, it became a harbinger of many trends that would hit the nation with such force in the late 1960s, such as more open sexuality or broader tolerance of interracial couples and homosexuality.”

Source: Matthew Wills/daily.jstor.org

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