Beatles

A friend who had the misfortune of being born a bit too early to experience full frontal Beatlemania once said to me, “Ringo wasn’t one of the more important members of the group, was he?” To a rubber-souled, revolver-raving, fanatical Abbey Roadster like myself, this was among the greatest blasphemies ever spoken. If you said that Chico wasn’t important to the Marx Brothers, that Fredo wasn’t important to the Corleones, that Donny wasn’t important to The Big Lebowski, I’d simply overlook your lack of film savvy or question your taste. But to suggest that Ringo was less than essential is the ultimate fallacy. It is, in the jargon of the Brits, a complete load of BULLOCKS!

One night in 1960, German art student Klaus Voormann went out slumming and came home a changed man. He’d just had an argument with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, and set off to walk the Reeperbahn, a boulevard in the St. Pauli red-light district of Hamburg, Germany. He heard some raucous music pouring from the seedy Kaiserkeller Club, walked inside, and discovered a band of five amphetamine-charged, leather-clad English boys shakin’ down the house. This was his first exposure to a rock-n-roll circus, and he was left – in his words – “speechless.” You could reckon that Mr. Voormann, who turns 77 today, had the distinction of being the first international Beatles fan — and a whole lot more.

Even if Bob Dylan hadn’t introduced The Beatles to marijuana at New York’s Delmonico Hotel, the boys would have lit up soon enough. From that August 1964 night onward, “let’s have a laugh” quickly became their code phrase for “let’s have a toke.” And laugh they did. At least until they began getting busted for smoking that wicked weed. It turns out that Paul, not the controversial John, was the most prolific pot puffer of all, leading the band in number of arrests.