IIn September 1969, John Lennon received a call from bass player and artist Klaus Wurman, who had recently left Manfred Mann. There was nothing unusual about it. Woorman had known the Beatles for nine years and was part of the band’s tight inner circle. It was Wurman’s own band, Paddy, Klaus and Gibson that tried to see Lennon and George Harris come alive the night they famously dosed with LSD at a dinner party. The Ringo star was already on the move and claimed by bandmates changed by his voice that the venue’s elevator had caught fire. A year later, he designed the revolver’s Grammy Award-winning cover.
The point was more that Lennon wanted to do it. Leno agreed to give a live performance at the Rock’R’R revival Festival in Toronto with a two-day notice and was trying to support musicians to play as a plastic no band. Eric Clapton agreed to play the guitar, but Wurman took on more incredible reasons that heading to the festival with the new band who didn’t rehearse didn’t seem like one of Lennon’s more inspired ideas.
“Oh, we’ll rehearse on the plane,” John said. So we were sitting in the last row, next to the jet, and I was playing electric bass without an amplifier, “he says, breaking the phone line from his home in Bavaria.” I couldn’t hear what I was doing. Was more nervous for John. I mean, John – the Beetle – is suddenly going on stage with a band that hasn’t rehearsed. It was incredible. “
In addition, Lane not only played a brief set of festive rock’n’roll covers, featuring Jean Vincent, Little Richard and Bo Didley, but also Yoko Ono for a microphone caddy who made two ear-split improvisations. , One of which lasted more than 12 minutes. “People were just open-mouthed. They’re at a rock’r festival with Chuck Berry, and then all of a sudden this incredible thing is presented, “he says.” I was on stage, Bho, Bho standing behind Yoko, he was screaming and screaming like a dying bird. Was screaming, and I thought ‘this is about the Vietnam War’ – I actually saw the tanks next to me and the bombs falling and the dead people, that was what she was saying. But I thought: ‘My God, John must be mad to do this.’ I mean we lucky people didn’t throw tomatoes on it. “
Still, he says, Yoko’s live performance had the brand’s advantages. “When you really know he’s crazy, you don’t think: ‘Oh, what am I going to do on stage?’ You’re not scared, you just do it, it’s easy. I mean, “He laughs,” You can make all the mistakes you want – it doesn’t matter. It’s punk. “
Woorman should probably be used in unforeseen situations involving the Beatles. He was an art student with a love of jazz, nouvelle wag cinema, and the idea to dress like a young French intellectual, when he first met in 1960. After breaking into a row in the house of his girlfriend Astrid Kircher, he saw himself from the outside, especially the CD Club in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, transfixed by a racket from inside. He had heard Rock’Roll before, although his interests were more towards Miles Davis, but he had never heard of it alive, and certainly not with the Beatles’ excessive. Still, he says, he was outraged about entering the club, which was apparently “dangerous.”
It’s easy to romanticize the Beatles’ years in Hamburg – the birth of a legend, recorded a live album there – but Wurman says the reality was real horror. “It was the filthy part of Hamburg, the hookers and the pirates around. There were knife fights in the clubs. I thought: ‘Oh Christ, I’m not going there.’ But eventually, I pulled myself inside. ”
He later returned with Kirscher and his friend Jજેrgen Woolmer: they were so visible outside the venue that the waiters took pity on them and “took care of us if there was a fight.” After being initially reprimanded by Lennon, they struck a friendship with the band, Kircher invited them to his parents’ house so they could take a bath: the band’s living conditions were so vague that they were forced to wash and shave using water from the club’s urine.
Kircher began a relationship with the band’s bassist Stuart Sucliffe and, most famously, the band adopted the same look as their new friends, leaving their leathers and quizzes to the side of their hair forward: mop-tops. Lennon calls the German “Existence”, short for Existentialists, apparently incorrectly.
“Maybe we looked like those French artists, but we weren’t existentialists,” says Wurman. “We were not political. We took them in pictures so they could see us in these films – Jean Cocteau, Louis Mele – and we went to exhibitions and led them to French art. “
One night at Kaiserkeller, Sutcliffe handed Wurman his bass guitar and asked him to go on stage instead. He was a guitarist, but he had no experience with the instrument. The first time she played the bass she was on stage with the Beatles, which seems deftly unbelievable, even though Woorman says the reality was less thrilling. “Well, you see, that sounds pretty weird,” he says. “But it was a rock’croll band, they were playing during midnight, Stuart wanted to take a break so he could slip with Astrid on the sofa. So I played on a fat domino number.”
He says he always knew the Beatles would get bigger – “I can’t wait for them to become famous” – but had no clear idea of the scale of what’s going to happen. By the time he arrived in England in 1963, Sucliffe had died – he had left the band to live with Kircher in Hamburg before suffering a brain haemorrhage at the age of 21 – and Beatlemania was in full swing. Woorman shared a flat with Harrison and Starr, shocked by the realization of how happy they were to see the old face amidst the ensuing madness.
Later, he slowly saw the band: “It was more than enough for 10 years. Ringo lived with the band, loved it all, but left, there were so many angry, fights: they couldn’t do it anymore because they were all in completely different directions. Abby Road, it’s a beautiful LP, but… from an emotional standpoint it wasn’t worth doing. They had to do it because they have a responsibility to the record company. But they did it really professionally and fantastically, and that’s what makes a good band, you know? “
Indeed, at one point during the band’s split, a sustained – and apparently utterly baseless – rumor suggested that Wurman would join the Beatles, or instead, form a new band called Leder with Lennon, Harrison, and Star Wurman, replacing Paul McCartney. Instead, he played on all three solo albums in the 70s. He has a special fondness for the 1970s John Lennon / Plastico band: “Everything made in two takes on, nothing shakes, so raw and fresh and straightforward… no one told me what to play. What I always play will make me feel in the spirit of the song or lyrics.
“He always did, on all the sessions I did: imagination, walls and bridges, rock‘ n ’roll. But let’s just say that if I ever played the wrong note or shit, he would have told me. Same with revolver cover: If I hadn’t come up with a good idea, I wouldn’t have got the job – ‘Sorry, Klaus …’ “
Woman then became an in-demand session composer – she played the famous bass introduction on Carly Simmons You’re So Wayne and played on Lou Reed’s Perfect Day, a later session that she remembers greatly for the amount of camp bedding she and Reid passed between. Is. Co-producer David Bowie. He returned to Germany in the late 70’s, spending time in Los Angeles.
U.S. Before leaving, he visited Lennon at home in New York, and found him in househound mode, boiling rice to make sushi and now revealing the joy of not having a record deal or the pressure that comes with it. But he was haunted by the strange sense of foreboding.
“I went with my son Otto, who was about the same age as Sean. We went for a walk in Central Park and John had a scene in the backpack. We walked out of the basement, where the garage was, and I thought: ‘Oh Christ, this is scary. These are all really crazy people from New York and there John Lennon just doesn’t move around with no bodyguards or anything! ‘I was scared for him:’ Oh my God, if he does the same thing every day … I don’t know. “
Back in Germany, Wurman worked with all three, the famous post-punk band for the 1982 hit Da Da Da, but eventually left music to focus on writing and art. He designed covers for the Beatles anthology compilation, and in recent years, published books and a graphic novel about his time with the Beatles and worked on packaging his solo debut as You Wear with Lim Gallagher. In ’82, he has contributed to a series of new books about Lennon’s early solo career, and the creation of a John Lennon / Plastic O No Band album – one of which features a chaotic in-flight rehearsal for the Toronto Rock Festival, with musicians in the back of the plane. Were.
These days, he says, he no longer even has a bass guitar. He says: “It’s a little stupid to play the bass yourself,” he says: “Who can he play with?” “I was spoiled,” he says of the cockroaches.
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