The stark monochrome sleeve and shit-tier recording quality of the Beatles’ most famous bootleg stands in for a whole era of the band’s history—their un-housebroken Hamburg years, when they wore jeans and leather jackets; when they ate, drank, smoked and swore onstage; when they were a band rather than a fact. George Harrison swears the band was never better than between 1960 and 1962, during the so-called “Hamburg crucible” that forged them into a force ready to take over the world. Yet he fought tooth and nail against the release of Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962, eventually released in 1977.

The recordings were made by Star-Club stage manager Adrian Barber at the behest of Ted “Kingsize” Taylor, a fellow Liverpool musician who’d played a run of shows with the Beatles with his band the Dominoes in late 1962. The Beatles had a foot out the door at this point and were only contracted to play the Star-Club based on a deal made much earlier by their manager, Brian Epstein, who’d molded the boys into pros by the time they played the shows we hear here. They’d already put out “Love Me Do” in October of that year, so it’s not like this is a recording of a band you can’t find anywhere in better fidelity.

It’s exciting to hear them tear through a Dexedrine-tempo “Twist and Shout,” already in its final form, just waiting for a young John Hughes to have his mind blown by it. It’s a hoot to hear Star-Club co-owner Horst Fascher and his brother Fred as temporary Beatles, belting “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” and “Be-Bop-A-Lula” with the band in the boozy and low-key environment of a small club. As consistently good as their musicianship is, the performances may have been shakier than usual because the band was basically coasting at that point and ready to get back to England. The Star-Club is a container that cannot hold, and Live! plays like a rehearsal for the future, or a kiss-off to the past.

But the great lacuna of the Beatles catalog is the music they made before this show: the lineups with Tommy Moore, Norman Chapman, Stuart Sutcliffe, and the other youths who passed through the Beatles in their pre-Fab days; the alleged hour-long versions of “What’d I Say” they’d improvise to pass the time; a piss-drunk John Lennon imitating Hitler with a comb as a mustache and haranguing the “Krauts” in the audience.

The punk Beatles, in other words. It’s too delicious to imagine a group synonymous with rock as high art as a foul-mouthed young bar band toiling in obscurity on the naughtiest strip in Germany while living out of a dilapidated cinema in a storage room next to the toilet. The legends are manifold: the burning condom, the band chewing on inhaler wicks for a buzz, Harrison losing his virginity with the entire band present. If your favorite live albums are the Stooges’ Metallic KO and Lou Reed’s Take No Prisoners, if the misanthropic onstage behavior of GG Allin and Hanatarash seem heroic to you, this might be your favorite era of the band’s career, even if its only recorded legacy is this relatively tame and half-hearted show.

No wonder this is their most mythologized period. Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was legendary in Europe even before the Beatles became its most famous residents: a red-light district populated by colorful characters of all types, including drag queens, sex workers, petty criminals, and belligerent British and American servicemen with an insatiable appetite for live rock’n’roll. This seedy milieu didn’t die when the Beatles left, either. A year and a half later, the ornery and exiled Jerry Lee Lewis would record one of the best live rock’n’roll albums of all time at the same club, his creativity inflamed by both the skeeviness of his surroundings and the echoes of the many Lewis songs the Beatles played there on their way to stardom.

Myth tends to paint pre-Beatles Britain as a dreary little world where skiffle and trad jazz were the hottest things in town and all the rock’n’roll bands had some kind of gimmick like Johnny Kidd’s eye patch. A look at the Liverpool scene in those days paints a different picture. As a major port city, Liverpool was primed to receive records and gear from America, and the large Afro-Caribbean community in the Toxteth district meant it was easy to hear live jazz and calypso. Bob Wooler, who DJ’d at the integral Cavern Club, estimated the city had 350 working bands in 1960. With the encouragement of a young Brian Epstein, a former art student named Bill Harry launched a paper called Mersey Beat that gave its name to the rising tide of guitar music in Liverpool.

The Beatles went to Hamburg at the behest of booker Allan Williams, who’d had great success in that city with a Liverpool band called Derry and the Seniors. The Beatles weren’t even Williams’ first choice. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who would eventually contribute their sad-eyed drummer Ringo Starr to the band, deferred due to a commitment at a Butlin’s holiday camp. When the Beatles got the gig, they were mediocre enough that Derry and the Seniors’ sax player actually wrote to Williams to protest.

This is where the what-ifs begin. What if another band had gotten the gig? What if they had joined Royston Ellis, an early UK rock’n’roll poet, for a sojourn into the avant-garde? What if George hadn’t quit his electrician’s apprenticeship and its promise of career security to stake his future on being in a band?

Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg; 1962 is not a record of what-ifs. The dominoes were already falling, and most of the seemingly magical things that had to happen for the Beatles to become the best and most important band in the world had already happened, not least the addition of Starr to the lineup. His style is described as “lyrical” for a reason. On an absolutely vicious tear through “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You),” he almost adds another layer of meaning on top of the lyrics, just as he would four years later, when he seemed to feel “Rain” even more deeply than the bandmate who wrote it. His genius was as an instrumentalist rather than a songwriter, but that’s not necessarily a lesser kind of genius; the idea that it is may be one of the things that shifted once the Beatles inspired other bands to write their own songs.

Live! is more a record of an era of rock history the Beatles helped destroy, before bands had to write their own songs and when rocking the house was more important than being a genius. All the songs on the U.S. version of the bootleg are covers, and the UK version features two originals: “I Saw Her Standing There,” cheekily augmented by Lennon with a riff on the “Peter Gunn” theme, and the great early song “Ask Me Why.” Three of the Beatles’ first four albums, the exception being the all-Lennon/McCartney A Hard Day’s Night, contain eight originals and six covers. Of course, A Hard Day’s Night is by far the most beloved of the four, but the idea of a great rock album as a singular statement, or even a band having to make a great album to be considered great, is something the Beatles entrenched with Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s. You see how deep this goes.

It was by learning all these songs and playing them for hours and hours, day after day, to fill the freakishly long time slots they had to occupy in Hamburg that the Beatles developed the almost uncannily intuitive mode of popcraft that would eventually inspire an entire generation to write their own music and rewrite rock’n’roll’s values to pride itself on self-containment. The more music you hear and the more songs you learn, the more you internalize those songwriters’ lessons and learn what rules can and can’t be broken. This is just as important in the Beatles’ evolution as the amount they played, and many of the influences that would show up in their work later can be glimpsed here.

Most of the songs the band had to learn in those days are likely lost from the memory of even the two surviving band members, but the setlist on Live! includes not just chestnuts they’d make their own on subsequent recordings (“Twist and Shout,” “A Taste of Honey”) but also maudlin standards their parents might have liked. A jaunty version of “Red Sails in the Sunset” can’t hide the song’s corniness, and even this deep in the band’s Hamburg run, they still seem a bit confused about how to approach the bolero standard “Bésame Mucho.” (The answer: Go speed-punk on the chorus.) But hearing them so close to ripshit takes on “Nothin’ Shakin’” and “Kansas City” is reminiscent of the way Paul’s “granny songs” like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” would bump up so close to Lennon freakouts like “I Want You”––and the subsequent years of arguing among fans, for many of whom the McCartney penchant for schmaltz is a sore point.

It’s no coincidence that the Beatles turned to demoing old songs from these days while spinning their wheels during the sessions for their final record, 1970’s Let It Be. The legendary rooftop show, the inclusion of the Liverpudlian folk yarn “Maggie Mae” and early Lennon-McCartney co-write “One After 909,” the riffing on old songs by Lewis and the like during the sessions, that record’s loose and bawdy tone in comparison to the chiseled Everest of Abbey Road: All feel on some level like ways to get back to the effortless unity they shared at the peak of their Hamburg run, before fame tore them apart. Lennon could’ve just as easily ended this show with “I hope we passed the audition,” but even as it was clear that the Beatles were big fish in a small pond, how could he know that Ted “Kingsize” Taylor’s recordings would amount to such a big deal?

Rock’s cult of bootlegging had not picked up steam when these recordings were made, and it’s no surprise Epstein found them unmarketable when Taylor presented them: Their grottiness conflicted with the presentation of the Beatles as clean-cut pros Epstein worked hard to cultivate. The sound quality is consistently awful, and the version edited together from Taylor’s tapes on the 1977 release varies wildly in audibility and apparent proximity to the stage, with abrupt fade-outs and few traces of banter (or the histrionic intro to “Mr. Moonlight”). Some songs even sound like they were chopped up piecemeal from two or more recordings, likely because they were.

This in itself is key to the bootleg’s charm. Here’s an unofficial album by the Fab Four at full throttle that sounds like any number of trashy garage-punk demos. It is because of the ubiquity of the Beatles’ canonical music that people seek out something like this, a perspective on their work from a different angle, a version of the band that hasn’t been beaten into overfamiliarity through radio play and cultural saturation. The Hamburg bootlegs offer the promise that for just over an hour, we can hear a beloved rock institution that’s about to be the subject of a four-part biopic series as a strung-out, misbehaving bar band. In that context, it’s almost disappointing how good they sound.

There’s a good chance they’ll sound even better in the near future. In 2021, filmmaker Peter Jackson commissioned a machine-learning software to clean up tapes from the Let It Be sessions and incorporated the results into his 2023 documentary, Get Back. Coinciding with the release of the documentary came a “new” Beatles song, “Now and Then,” created with a Lennon vocal take isolated from a demo using the same software. Cleaned-up recordings of old shows have already surfaced, most impressively Rockin’ Roxburgh, a record of a 1963 show at a school auditorium that’s as good an option as this bootleg if you really want to close your eyes and pretend the Beatles recorded a shitgaze album.

Jackson has expressed interest in cleaning up the Hamburg tapes with the same software. Even if that software developed to the extent that they could make these tapes sound as good as the rooftop recordings on Let It Be, would the music have the same allure? The Beatles eventually won a protracted legal battle against Taylor for the rights to the tapes in 1998, but the illegality and inscrutability of Live! personifies the band’s most enduring myth, reassuring us that there’s one era of the most documented, most written about, most scrutinized group in history that remains eternally out of reach.