There is no reasoning with German bouncers. This is generally true, regardless of nationality, but a velvet rope is especially imposing when combined with a language barrier and a side of Hamburg beef. But, for the most anticipated show of 2009’s Reeperbahn Festival—on the legendarily debauched strip near the Hamburg waterfront—there wasn’t getting anywhere near the bouncers, anyway, even with a press pass, let alone inside the cavernous Haspa Bühne to see Deichkind, who—from what I can tell—are something like Hamburg’s biggest homegrown rap-metal post-GWAR superstars.

I can only assume that what I missed was the biggest mindblow of the three-night festival, which opened on September 24th. Guido, our guide, told us Deichkind are hard to photograph because they wrap themselves in plastic (or maybe tinfoil) and crowd-surf on giant inflatable rafts and throw things at people holding cameras. Awesome.

Outside, the entirely pedestrian Große Freiheit seethed with shut-out fans. Two teenaged boys looked aggressively heartbroken that they wouldn’t be seeing their post-GWAR rap-metal heroes that night, and—after asking to consult my festival schedule—shrugged off through the only marginally-less-seething crowds spilling from the block’s dozen strip clubs.

There was plenty of other music on the festival docket, mostly from a European indie rock culture entirely unknown in the United States. A few blocks away, in Prinzenbar, a turn-of-the-century cinema that felt like an ornate church eave, Mattias Hellberg and the White Moose—a Swedish jamband that sounded like an Allmans-influenced groove combo from Wetlands circa 1993—sang about getting funky. (The German boys were leaving as I arrived.) In Annie’s Nightclub, on the main drag, the French trio Revolver dealt in pleasant chamber pop. Only a small handful of American acts were to be found, the largest being the recently reunited Dinosaur Jr., who turned in a masterful set at the D-Club on the festival’s opening night, and Times New Viking, the noise-pop darlings from Columbus, Ohio, played a blistering set in the Kaiserkeller, one of the Beatles’ homebases. And this, according to festival organizers, is entirely by design. It is a European festival for European music, despite the fact that many—from Hellberg to Emiliana Torrini, who headlined the middle night—sing in English.

For that matter, though, now in its fourth year, the Reeperbahn Festival has had no problem selling tickets, taking an astonishing 17,000 through the virtual turnstiles for shows scattered between a dozen-and-a-half clubs, and taking over the neighborhood’s main boulevard with a pair of LED-bedecked stages that looked airlifted from a U2 gig, plus Flatstock (an exhibition of poster art), a “campus” featuring panels with titles like “Panel: Brands & Music: Is the best yet to come?,” and the usual array of festival vendors.

Stumbling between venues in a town where open street drinking is de rigueur, bracelets admitted attendees into nooks like the Hasenschaukel (where members of the Irish Grand Pocket Orchestra tucked into booths to play their instruments) and cavernous halls like Uebel & Gefährlich (where Orka, from the—!!!—Faroe Islands, unleashed massive post-Bjork downtempo sweeps), a dance floor inside a World War II-era anti-artillery fortress (read: Nazi bunker) next to the circus grounds and football field. The Reeperbahn Festival is something like South by Southwest held on Bourbon Street, with a dash of the old Times Square.

While Hamburg’s waterfront is a progressive, mixed-use quarter—a genuine shipping port mingles with a bar-and-restaurant-spangled promenade—the Reeperbahn remains of a single function: pleasure. It does this so efficiently that the corner of Davidstr and Spielbudenplatz sports both the nation’s busiest police station, as well as its busiest bank. (Indeed, the lines for the cash machine on Friday and Saturday nights extended down the block.) There are sex shops and strip clubs, of course. Prostitution remains legal. Like Amsterdam’s own red light district, the hookers hang out on a special block—men only, above 18—and sit in windows where Johanns might find them. But they hang elsewhere, too, aggressively grabbing those who might look in need of a shag or a lightening of Euros in their wallets. Mostly, though, thanks to the booze and sex, the place is filled with the German equivalent of drunk frat boys, bachelorette parties, and 24 hour partei people. There is still a block where genuine transvestites hang out. Not even New York has that anymore. (It is called, incidentally, Schmuckstraße. After the German word for “jeweler,” though, not the more appropriate Yiddish meaning, though the latter certainly evolved from the former.)

The next day, a black man in a sailor hat and a well-tailored suit hit up our gaggle of visiting journalists for money. “I need to get higher,” he explained. “Like to the Arctic, to the North Pole.”

Guido was not particularly amused. As a representative of Hamburg Marketing GmbH, Guido’s job was to present a more modern, evolved Hamburg. He hurried us into the lobby of the Busiest Bank in Germany, where Estuar—a local band—were playing. They made demure indie folk, all politely dramatic acoustic strums and breathy English lyrics. The tellers stood by their cubicles, arms crossed, bemused. An old woman nodded at me. “Haspa is mighty bank,” she said.

“They are the wonderment of the festival,” Guido assured us, smiling at Estuar. To the extent that anybody is responsible for the benevolence that allowed a gaggle of journalists to be harassed by a genuine Reeperbahn freak, it is Guido. After the city lost its bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics, they turned to new strategies for growth, spurred by the work of Rise of the Creative Class author Richard Florida. One group they are trying to court are fresh, young entrepreneurs — video game designers, graphic artists, and the like. Hence an old-fashioned press junket to a music festival, including representatives of several noted American hippie publications and a pleasantly goon-like squad of drunk Brits, to communicate the fresh, young hipness of the 1,200-year old city. Market research, Guido told me, indicated that people often associate Hamburg with music. And they, in turn, associated that with the Reeperbahn. This more than probably has a lot to do with the Beatles.

It was in August 1960 that the then-quintet loaded their van onto a Liverpool ship and, the next day, began a stretch of several hundred performances over three residencies that would refine and define their sound. They gobbled speed while playing six sets a night seven nights a week, slept in bunk beds in the back of second-run movie theaters, got deported, came back, got their moptops, posed for iconic photographs by Astrid Kirchherr, and played their last shows there, in December 1962, just 11 days before the release of “Please Please Me,” their first #1 single. The existence of Beatlemania!, a museum dedicated to the Fabs, is natural. And, to the extent that it displays a small, rare collection of paintings and love notes by Stuart Sutcliffe—the first Fifth Beatle, who died in Hamburg in 1962 of a still unexplained brain trauma—it’s a pretty heavy place. But with precious few other original artifacts besides a quartet of Yellow Submarine film cels, the museum merely feels like a good-natured shrine. More effective is Stefanie Hampel’s charming tour of Beatle-sites throughout the neighborhood.

It is wise to remember, though, why the Beatles were in Hamburg to begin with: sex. Not precisely that, but not particularly anything else, either. The Reeperbahn, just up the hill from the port, developed as it did because sailors needed a place to get loaded while their cargo did the opposite, and—through the ’50s and ’60s—bar owners needed live music to entertain visiting American and British servicemen. And so, after usurping a job meant for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (who needed to finish out a summer gig at a British holiday camp), the Beatles were invited to Germany.

The Reeperbahn, in that way, has not changed an iota since the halcyon Beatle-days. “Peace and Love Tour” read a massive bus that drove by one night, trumpeting DIE FLATRATE EROTIK IM INTERNET. (Ah, yes. I see.) As such, even besides the Reeperbahn Festival, music veritably bursts from the Reeperbahn. In Hamborger Veermaster, a sprawling bar next door to the Nevada Rodeo Bar (Bullriding For All! Nicest Girls in Town! Junggesell(inn)enabschied!), genuine Germans sang genuine German drinking songs, swaying arm in arm. In an alcove next to a gas station, a DJ spun technofied accordion music while, in a corner lot across the street, a semi-permanent hip-hop/trance party rolled onwards with no outward sign of a particular organizer. (Like dance parties everywhere: too many schwanz on the dancefloor.) In one sex shop, the Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun” burbled while customers perused dildos and DVDs, walking on slotted floorboards that looked like they’d been there since Beatle-times. Karaoke bars abound. In one, a large man in leather pants sat in a wheelchair at the back of the room, reading lyrics from a distant monitor and mouthing along with Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” In another—a Thai joint in one of the four buildings on the site of the Star-Club, the Beatles’ main Hamburg home—a posse of smashed Germans crooned along to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

It is, in other words, unmitigated sonic chaos, stinking with sex and awe-inspiring stupidity, but also a potentially seething cauldron for something. Just like Southern hip-hop producers sometimes put strippers’ poles in their studios to test the booty-factor of their beats, the clubs of the Reeperbahn seem ripe to plop forth some global dance sensation (maybe one that M.I.A. could jam on her next album). And though Guido downplays the seedier elements of the Reeperbahn, one gets the sense that if a sleazy-ass music scene or progressive sex-work industry took hold there, or some new trend that was equally valid and fascinating, Guido and the city would probably embrace it, figure out how to make it work for them. Which is perhaps even more encouraging.

After being denied entrance to the Deichkind gig, I wandered around the side of the venue, where a group of kids hung excitedly by the stage doors, listening through the bass bombs for the music beyond. Occasionally, the door would open and a blast of hot air would roll from the venue. An ambulance with an open door parked on the street, treating a girl who’d cut herself in the melee. Around the corner, though, and I was back on Schmuckstraße, a group of trannies hanging on the corner, perhaps bitching cattily in German. In the distance, I could see a crowd on the main drag, the festival subsumed into the mass.

I flipped through the festival guide, looking for a destination, half-wondering if there were unpolished superstars tucked in some tiny Reeperbahn venue, obscured behind the unappealingly translated descriptions. (“Heart-felt Pop and poignant Power-ballads”? Pass.) It occurred to me that I was looking for the same thing that nearly everybody is looking for at a music festival filled with unfamiliar bands: I was looking for the next Beatles, some heretofore unknown band that would make me feel like I was hearing music for the first time. I didn’t find them, but I didn’t really expect to.

It occurred to me, too, that Guido was also looking for the next Beatles, albeit with a very different definition of what that means, what it might ultimately entail, and the possibility that it could actually occur. After all, who knows what form They’ll take, and how they might arrive in Hamburg? It probably won’t be by ship, and it might not be because of the sex. But, like club owner Bruno Koschmider sending a telegram calling for a Liverpool quintet, Guido’s just putting those vibrations out there. Maybe somebody’ll turn up. Maybe with a guitar, but probably not.