By 1959, the three remaining members of The Quarrymen, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison were gelling as a live band, but their three-guitar lineup needed some extra drive to enable them to sound like the US rock n roll bands they aspired to emulate. Unable to find a permanent drummer, they settled for the next best thing; a bass player. (Excerpt from Bassmusiciansmagazine, to read the full article click here.)
In January 1960, Lennon persuaded Stuart Sutcliffe to use the £65 he’d raised to buy a Hofner President bass at Hessey’s music shop in Liverpool and the band expanded to become a quartet.
In late August 1960, through Williams, the band had been hired by Bruno Koschmider to play a residency at his club in Hamburg, Germany.
They hurriedly recruited drummer Pete Best from another Liverpool group, The Blackjacks, to complete the band.
On their long drive to Hamburg they decided to drop the ‘Silver’ from their name and simply be known as ‘The Beatles’. John Lennon recalled that “We had to play for hours and hours on end. Every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. That’s what improved playing.”
For their next show, at Litherland Town Hall on the 5th of January 1961, McCartney played his first gig as The Beatles’ bass player.
He turned his Rosetti Solid 7 electric guitar into a bass, using three piano strings, and he played it like this on at least twenty shows.After a few weeks in Germany, McCartney’s Rosetti guitar broke irreparably, and he found himself relegated to the piano. Sutcliffe soon began spending more time with Astrid.
“Bass was the thing that the fat boys got lumbered with and were asked to stand at the back and play…So I definitely didn’t want to do it, but Stuart left, and I got lumbered with it. Later I was quite happy”. He initially borrowed Sutcliffe’s bass, but as McCartney was left-handed (and Sutcliffe had asked him not to change the strings around) he had to play it upside down until he had saved enough money to buy his own instrument.
“I remember going along there, and there was this bass which was quite cheap. I couldn’t afford a Fender. Fenders even then seemed to be about £100. All I could really afford was about £30 . . . so for about £30 I found this Hofner (500/1) violin bass. And to me it seemed like, because I was left-handed, it looked less daft because it was symmetrical. Didn’t look as bad as a cutaway which was the wrong way.”
