Before the Beatles were the Beatles, they were a cover band.
This is not a controversial statement, but it is one that most people gloss over. The band that would go on to define modern songwriting, that would produce some of the most original music in human history, spent years in Hamburg and Liverpool playing other people’s songs. Chuck Berry. Little Richard. Carl Perkins. Buddy Holly. Night after night, eight hours a night sometimes, performing songs they did not write, learning the structures and rhythms and emotional arcs of rock and roll by inhabiting them from the inside.
They did not start with “Yesterday.” They started with “Twist and Shout.”
I think about the Beatles often when I think about my own creative development as a performer, because the parallel is direct. Before I could write my own scripts, I had to perform other people’s scripts. And not just perform them — inhabit them. Feel how they worked from the inside. Understand why a particular line came at a particular moment. Experience the audience reaction to a structural choice I did not make.
Austin Kleon makes this argument explicitly in Steal Like an Artist: start by copying your heroes. Not to pass their work off as yours, but to learn how they work. Through the act of copying, you discover what you cannot copy — and that gap is where your own voice lives.
The magic community understands this instinctively, even if it does not always articulate it clearly. Every magician begins by learning other people’s routines. You buy a trick, you learn the method, and if there is a suggested script, you perform that script. This is how the art form perpetuates itself. But somewhere along the way, many performers start to feel guilty about it. They feel they should be writing their own material. They feel that performing someone else’s words is a crutch, a sign of creative immaturity.
I want to push back on that guilt, because I believe the adaptation stage is not just acceptable — it is essential. And rushing past it produces worse original work, not better.
What Adaptation Actually Teaches You
When I first started adapting other performers’ scripts for my own use, I thought the process was simple. Change the references to fit Austrian audiences. Replace American humor with something that works in Graz or Salzburg. Adjust the energy level to match my personality.
Those surface changes were necessary, but they were not where the real learning happened. The real learning happened when I tried to change something and the routine fell apart.
Early in my close-up work, I was performing a card routine with a script I had adapted from a tutorial. The original script included a specific moment where the performer asks the spectator a question, waits for the answer, and then uses that answer as a springboard into the next phase. I found the question awkward in my mouth, so I replaced it with a statement — I just told the audience the information instead of asking for it.
The routine died. Not the method. The method worked fine. But the energy in the room dropped noticeably at that moment. The spectator, who had been engaged and leaning forward, sat back slightly. The momentum stalled.
It took me three more performances and a late-night session in a hotel room in Linz, reviewing the original script line by line, before I understood what had happened. The question was not just a question. It was a structural element. It transferred agency to the spectator. It made them a participant rather than an observer. It created a micro-moment of suspense — what will they say? — that gave the routine forward motion.
When I replaced the question with a statement, I removed that structural element. I did not know it was structural because I was thinking about content (what was being said) rather than architecture (why it was being said at that moment).
This is what adaptation teaches you that pure creation cannot: it forces you to understand why existing scripts work, not just what they say. You cannot successfully change something until you understand its function. And you often do not understand the function until you change it and watch the routine collapse.
The Hamburg Sessions
The Beatles’ time in Hamburg is instructive beyond the simple fact that they played covers. The conditions in Hamburg were extreme. They played for hours every night. The audiences were rough, inattentive, sometimes hostile. The clubs were loud and chaotic. The band had to hold attention through sheer force of performance — energy, commitment, responsiveness.
These conditions forced a specific kind of learning. The Beatles could not just play the songs correctly. They had to play them in a way that commanded attention in the worst possible environment. This meant they had to understand what made each song work as a piece of live entertainment, not just as a recording. They had to find the moments that grabbed people and amplify them. They had to cut the dead weight — the sections that lost the room — even in songs they loved.
When they finally started writing their own songs, this Hamburg education was embedded in everything they wrote. Their early originals have an urgency and a structural efficiency that comes directly from having performed hundreds of other people’s songs in front of unforgiving audiences.
My Hamburg was Austrian corporate events. Not as romantic, certainly, and the audiences were drinking wine rather than beer, but the dynamic was similar. At a corporate event, the audience has not paid to see you. They are there for the conference, the product launch, the team dinner. You are an addition. If you lose them, they have plenty of other things to pay attention to.
Performing adapted scripts at these events taught me what worked and what did not — fast. A joke that landed at a magic convention died in front of a room of insurance executives. A story that built beautifully over three minutes lost the table before the second minute. A moment of spectator interaction that seemed small in the original script turned out to be the thing that saved the entire routine.
These discoveries were only possible because I was working with existing scripts. I did not have to worry about creating the material and testing it simultaneously. The material existed. My job was to adapt it, perform it, observe what worked, and understand why.
The Guilt Problem
Despite all of this, I still felt guilty about adaptation for longer than I should have. There is something in the magic community — and in creative culture generally — that lionizes originality and subtly shames imitation. The message, whether spoken or implied, is that real artists create from scratch. Adapters are derivative. Copiers are hacks.
This attitude is both historically wrong and creatively destructive.
It is historically wrong because virtually every art form in human history has been transmitted through imitation and adaptation. Painters copied masters for centuries before developing their own styles. Jazz musicians learned by transcribing solos. Chefs apprenticed by replicating their mentors’ dishes. The idea that you should skip this process and jump straight to originality is a modern invention, and not a particularly well-supported one.
It is creatively destructive because guilt about adaptation leads performers to abandon scripts prematurely. They stop performing adapted material before they have fully absorbed its lessons. They start writing original material before they have the structural vocabulary that adaptation provides. The result is original material that is less effective than the adapted material it replaced — which reinforces the false belief that scripting itself does not work, when the real problem is that the creator skipped a developmental stage.
How to Adapt Well
After years of adaptation, I have developed a process that I believe extracts maximum learning from the experience. It has five steps.
First, perform the original script as written. Do not change anything initially. Perform it multiple times, in front of different audiences, and observe what works. This gives you a baseline — a map of the script’s strengths and weaknesses as performed by you, in your context, with your audiences.
Second, identify the structural elements. Not the surface content — the structure. Where are the questions? Where are the pauses? Where does the energy shift? Where does the audience lean forward? Where do they lean back? Map the architecture before you touch the wallpaper.
Third, change one thing at a time. Replace a single line, a single question, a single transition. Then perform the routine again and observe what happens. If the change improved the routine, keep it. If it damaged the routine, put the original back and figure out why.
Fourth, track the cumulative changes. After enough individual adaptations, the script will reach a tipping point where more than half of it is yours. At that point, you are no longer performing an adapted script. You are performing your own script that was built on the skeleton of someone else’s.
Fifth, credit the original. Not in performance — audiences do not care about your creative process. But in your own mind and in conversation with other performers. Acknowledge where the structure came from. This is not weakness; it is honesty and respect.
The Bridge to Originality
The thing nobody tells you about adaptation is that it naturally transitions into original creation if you let it. You do not have to decide one day that you are done adapting and start creating. The boundary blurs on its own.
As you adapt more scripts, you start to recognize patterns across scripts. You notice that the scripts you enjoy adapting most all share certain structural features. You develop preferences — not just for content, but for architecture. You find yourself saying, “I like routines that start with a question and end with a callback” or “I prefer routines that give the spectator two choices rather than one.”
These preferences are the beginning of your own creative voice. They are structural opinions that emerged from the deep study of other people’s structures. And when you sit down to write something from scratch, those preferences guide you. You are not starting from zero. You are starting from everything you learned during the adaptation stage.
The Beatles did not stop being influenced by Chuck Berry and Little Richard when they started writing “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me.” Those influences were embedded in their musical DNA. They had been absorbed so thoroughly that they were no longer imitation — they were foundation.
The scripts I write today are original. The words are mine. The stories are mine. The specific structural choices are mine. But the vocabulary of structure — the understanding of why a question works better than a statement at a particular moment, why a callback creates satisfying closure, why a pause before a reveal creates anticipation — that vocabulary was learned through years of adaptation. It was learned the way the Beatles learned songwriting: by playing other people’s songs until the structures became second nature.
If you are in the adaptation stage right now, do not rush out of it. Do not feel guilty about it. Do not pretend to be further along than you are. Inhabit it fully. Change things and see what happens. Break things and understand why they broke. Build your structural vocabulary one adaptation at a time.
The original work will come. It always does. But it comes faster, and it comes stronger, when it is built on a foundation of deep structural understanding — the kind of understanding that only adaptation provides.
The Beatles played covers in Hamburg. Then they wrote “A Day in the Life.” The second thing does not happen without the first.