The Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—came to the United States in February of 1964, starting the so-called British Invasion of the American music scene and putting out a string of hit records that transformed the face of popular music.
Lennon and McCartney first started playing together in 1957, seven years prior to landing in America and it took 10 years since their founding to make their arguably greatest artistic achievements—Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club BandandThe Beatles[White Album]—is ten years.)
In 1960, while they were still just a struggling high school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.
“Hamburg in those days did not have rock-and-roll music clubs. It had strip clubs,” says Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles biographyShout! “There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and the other lot lurching out. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet an entrepreneur from Liverpool in Soho who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That’s how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno but with other club owners as well. They kept going back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.”
And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. It didn’t. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They weren’t. Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. They were anything but. It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play.
Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra:
"We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”
At first they played almost nonstop till twelve-thirty, when it closed, but as they got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.
The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs, in November and December of 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half.
By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times.
Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers.
TheHamburg crucibleis one of the things that set the Beatles apart.
“They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman went on. “They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers—cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”
So what do you think was the reason of their success?
- Their talent?
- The bond of group?
- Chance to meet Bruno and other clubs?
- The fact that there were no pop music clubs in Hamburg?
- Benefit of being one of the few band to play pop in US?
None of the above. Because many more bands had same equivalent or more benefits.
What made them successful was the amount of time they got on stage and how sincerely they took it without much money or in expectations of fame in return. They played, they practiced, they performed continuously, repeatedly, sincerely for hours. Yes, it was luck that they got opportunity of Hamburg but it was practice and efforts they put to become THE BEATLES.
In fact, according to research to reach a true expertise in something you need minimum ten thousand hours.
Don’t be amazed Mr. Tendulkar put it, so does A.R. Rahman, and so does Warren Buffet. They don’t practice after becoming something they practice to become something. When they get better they don’t reduce their practice hours they increase it. They put 10000 hours at very young age.
So the next time you hope to become good at something, be prepared to put your heart. And even before you think to become an expert in something you put those 10000 hours.
Source: Outliers
Image Source: Google
