It was almost 50 years ago. . .

The Beatles at The Casbah Club, Mo Best's basement coffee bar, in 1961. You can just make out John Lennon's Rickenbacker 325 guitar in front of Paul McCartney (still on guitar), Stu Sutcliffe (still on bass) to his left, and finally Pete Best at the far right of the photo.

Lots to mention in this post everyone! I've stumbled onto a German blog, which lists lots of tunes (new to me) that the very early Beatles played in their early days in Hamburg and Liverpool. I really must be a huge geek, because I find this kind of thing terribly exciting. Look for some of these tunes right here and maybe a few Youtube links, so you can hear the original artists performing these songs. Hmmm, maybe I should have been an archeologist? It's kind of like that with all this digging around to figure out early Beatle setlists. You know, kind of like Heinrich Schliemann looking for the city of Troy in the mid-19th Century. But I digress!

Second, there is a band out of New York City, called Bambi Kino, that performs many of these very same songs. Even more interesting, the band is booked into The Indra Club in Hamburg for three or four nights in mid-August, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' arrival and first residency in Hamburg. And of course that was at The Indra until they moved to the larger Kaiserkeller in October of 1960, following noise complaints and closure of the former by the dreaded polizei!

In any case, you can learn more about Bambi Kino by clicking on their name. You can also see them performing the old Larry Williams tune Slow Down recently at the Bowery Electric in NYC as well as Arthur Alexander's Anna . These guys really nail that early Beatles Hamburg sound, as heard on the Star Club recordings, and I can't get enough of it. Neither could the audience at the Bowery Electric from the sound of things! Hopefully, an album, er, um, a CD might be forthcoming from Bambi Kino soon. But you've gotta make sure to check out these guys in the meantime!