The Beatles Are Here! (2 page)

The U.S. population itself was so different! Gay men and women were near invisible, at least to many. Female professionals were scarce. The Roman Catholic population, never quite in the mainstream, had been energized by the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, one of their own, to the White House. So many ethnic groups that are now such a vibrant part of American life—Latinos, Middle Easterners, Indians and others from the subcontinent—hadn’t yet arrived in significant numbers.

One strong evocation of the era is provided by Gay Talese, these days a gray eminence, a man of letters, but then a fledgling journalist for the
New York Times
. Recalling the experience of reporting on the Beatles for that paper, Talese re-creates the New York they found on their arrival, with its riots over the draft and civil rights, its burgeoning working class, and its very own (these days, almost paltry seeming) one percent.

Talese’s Beatles story, which accompanied that photo of us screaming girls, is reproduced in these pages. It yields some surprises. For one thing its language is surprisingly fresh, as if it had been written just yesterday, and it’s replete with the wry observations and witty turns of phrase that would make Talese—along with other writers such as Nora Ephron and Tom Wolfe who, as young newspaper reporters, also covered the Beatles’ arrival in New York—famous as a practitioner of what came to be known as the New Journalism.

A glance at some of the other articles in the same issue of the
Times
demonstrates how radical Talese’s approach was for the period. On a smaller, yet telling, note, it’s disconcerting to see how many errors the piece contains, probably ones inserted in the course of editing the piece or setting it in type. (“Hot type,” as it was then.) Yet these glitches, too, have a point to make, emphasizing the exercise in time travel that is at the heart of
The Beatles Are Here!
For each typo reminds us that not so long ago—and well after four young men from Britain came along to upend our lives—we had no spell checks, or indeed computers, at all.

I listen to the band’s songs as I write these words, wondering why they mattered so much then—and do to this day. I start with the first songs, the ones to which I, and so many, first awakened, then move on chronologically. Today, on the far side of the Beatles phenomenon, I’m struck by the purity of their musical offerings, the seductive simplicity of the stories they tell.

In “Something,” there’s a woman who moves. Little else intrudes beyond the emotion that that movement, and person, inspires. In “Till There Was You,” there are birds, singing, and a female who makes the singer (Paul) hear them as if for the first time. The Lennon-McCartney songbook is full of those who want to hold us tight, be our man, whisper words of love. And they want to do so “Eight Days a Week”!

These lyrics can be unabashedly romantic. Yet the Beatles themselves, even then, were somewhat different, as we would later learn. “They weren’t innocent at all,” remarks Anne Brown, one of a core group of die-hard Beatlemaniacs interviewed for this volume. As she wryly points out, “They did
not
want to hold your hand.”

Oh, well. At least at first, they pretended they did. Later their music darkened, becoming metallic, out of control by comparison. And psychedelia, which the Beatles would soon take up—or is it the other way around?—seemed to lead straight to the apocalypse. It deconstructed the mind, each individual, all the world, and it presaged the violence to come.

But most of the music that acts as a subliminal soundtrack to
The Beatles Are Here!
—the songs evoked over and over by writers and fans in these pages—was written before rock music darken and metallic, out of control . . .

In 1964, when the Beatles first landed on our shores, America was reeling, in mourning, divided against itself. Some of us, growing up, felt we needed to run—away from our homes and families, toward something new. No wonder the band meant as much to us as it did! We needed its simple, hand-holding message. We needed its love.

And there it is, in the Beatles’ gentle early songs: “Please Please Me,” “All My Loving,” you name it. Each is a distinct universe, shiny and pristine, each one a haven. You can walk right in, and be safe.

Which I think partly explains why these musicians mattered so much then—and still dominate half a century on. Their music seduced us all those years ago. It won us over. Then it changed just as radically as its audience did, moving through violence, protest, drugs, spiritual awakening, and more. It brought us to the next phase, long before some of us even suspected that change was in the air.

It’s amazing, yet entirely right, that this band is still on top.
The Beatles Are Here!
indeed. In many ways, they never left. Today, they’re as vivid, appealing, and powerful as the very first song of theirs that some of us ever heard:

“She Loves You.”

We loved them.

We were there.

*
When asked in a 1971
Rolling Stone
interview where he and Yoko Ono would like to be when they were sixty-four, Lennon said, “I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland, or something like that, looking at our
scrapbook of madness
.”

Tools of Satan, Liverpool Division

by Joe Queenan

MY FATHER WOULD
not let me and my three sisters watch the Beatles when they appeared on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
in February 1964. His official reason for imposing this interdiction was because the Catholic Church had identified the Beatles as tools of Satan. This was strange because even at that very early juncture, the Beatles, with the possible exception of John, seemed quite harmless and even cuddly. I cannot recall in what capacity, or through what specific channel, the Church had singled out the Beatles as minions of Lucifer; their proscription may very well have obtained only at the Tri-State level, with reports of their villainy appearing in a popular Philadelphia publication, the
Catholic Standard & Times,
which kept tabs on satanic activity in the Delaware Valley
.

Whatever his reasoning, my father, a devout though not especially satisfactory Catholic, told us in advance that he would be commandeering our tiny black-and-white television on each of the three consecutive Sunday nights in question, preventing us from participating in one of the most famous events in the history of the medium, if not the planet. He was devout, he was doctrinaire, and he was breathtakingly mean.

My older sister says that I circumvented this edict by sneaking over to our uncle Jerry’s house and watching the Beatles on his television set on that first Sunday evening. I seem to recall that my three sisters, fourteen, nine, and six at the time, got left out in the cold, an injustice that may have scarred them for life. They have no clear memory of seeing that first show. But I have never actually raised the question with them. My uncle was no more a fan of pop music than my father—he was the only Republican in our family and positively worshipped the duplicitous, vindictive Richard Nixon—but he was not an out-and-out jerk. He recognized that these broadcasts were important to us, and he treated them with commensurate gravity. He understood that things are serious to those who take them seriously, even if they seem frivolous or ridiculous to you personally.

Moreover, as a hotshot salesman for Philadelphia Gas & Electric, he knew a hot product when he saw one. He could see what was coming—a tidal wave—and he understood that it was time to get out of the way. The Fifties were over, the age of the silver-throated crooner had passed, and the Big Bands were not coming back. I seem to recall my uncle snickering at the Beatles’ silly hair and cutie-pie laminated suits during their legendary
Ed Sullivan
appearances. But in no other way did he interfere with our viewing pleasure.

Today I remember no specifics about the other two broadcasts, other than that I enjoyed every second of them. My mother may have arranged it so that my father was not at home those second two Sunday evenings. But I do recall that the thought of not seeing those programs was inconceivable at the time. I was thirteen years old when the Beatles came to the United States and to this day I believe that my life as a sentient human being, and not merely as my parents’ chattel, began at that moment. This would not have happened had Herman’s Hermits or the Dave Clark Five been the first to arrive on these shores. Whatever the Beatles had, no one else in my lifetime had it, with the single notable exception of Michael Jackson, who possessed a similar ability to mesmerize an entire planet. (Born in 1950, I was too young to remember Elvis’s first big splash.)

To my best knowledge, only Jackson, Presley, and the boyish Frank Sinatra ever exerted this kind of hypnotic sway over an entire society. Madonna, though ubiquitous, was never beloved. And no one ever lined up to see her movies. My daughter went through her childhood desperately waiting for her generation’s equivalent of the Beatles to show up. They never showed up. The Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync showed up instead. The closest she ever got to the Beatles was Jimmy Eat World. And the Vines. And Matchbox Twenty. And so on.

The arrival of the Beatles was the first time I felt that the world might belong to me. Until I heard “She Loves You” on my sister’s transistor radio in December 1963, I had no interest in music, period. Until that moment I viewed music as an annoyance at best, and at worst as a punitive child-rearing device. I had grown up in a house dominated by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Perry Como, and Mel Tormé, along with more explicitly sinister figures such as Doris Day, Jerry Vale, and Vic Damone. On Saturday nights, as part of his sadistic pop cultural brainwashing program, my father would force us to gather in the living room and watch
The Lawrence Welk Show.
Welk, an uberschmaltzy accordionist and bandleader from Strasburg, North Dakota, with a pronounced German accent, was as corny as the day was long, performing treacly versions of wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful standards with his Champagne Music Makers, milking them to the very depths of their ghastly insipidity. To this day, rebroadcasts of the shows are among the most popular programs on public television, suggesting that the dream of public television has not yet been fulfilled.

My sisters and I grew up despising Welk and all those of his ilk, so when the Beatles showed up, we felt the way the French must have felt when the GIs swarmed into Paris in August 1944. The Beatles liberated young people from Victor Borge, Robert Goulet, Steve and Eydie, and the demented sing-along-with-the-bouncing-dots schlock immortalized by Mitch Miller. The Beatles liberated young people from bland show tunes, ethnic hooey like “Volare” and “Danke Schoen,” and stultifying novelty tunes like “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” and “Mr. Custer.”

The Beatles held out hope that life might actually be worth living, that popular culture need not be gray, predictable, sappy, lethal. To this day, what I feel toward the Beatles is not so much affection or reverence. It is gratitude.

People like my father hated the Beatles because they had long hair and silly suits and came from a foreign country and were young. But mostly they hated them for the same reason the hair bands of the 1980s hated Nirvana: Because they could see the handwriting on the wall. They could see that the Beatles were a cultural writ of execution for a society that idolized songs like “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” and “Blame It on the Bossa Nova.”

The Beatles swept away Pat Boone, the Kingston Trio, doo-wop, and all that other twaddle in about thirty-six hours. Or, let’s say, they marginalized it. To this day, my English wife, who saw the Beatles in concert at age thirteen, cannot listen to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Andy Williams, or to songs like “The Girl from Ipanema,” without wincing, because in her view, the whole point of the Beatles was to bury that stuff forever.

Some adults understood this. My mother once told me that she knew that the world no longer belonged to her when Elvis first appeared on the scene. People of my age have the same feeling about hip-hop; the world stopped belonging to us when our kids started listening to N.W.A. But for my father Elvis was merely the first shot across the bow. Elvis and Chuck Berry and Motown and Bob Dylan, all predating the Beatles, were no more than flesh wounds; the Beatles were an arrow right through the heart. At some level he must have understood that the world would never be the same after the Beatles, that while Sammy Davis Jr. and Lawrence Welk might live on in some vestigial capacity, they would no longer rule the roost.

He dreaded the Fab Four; they were emissaries of doom. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, he did not mind us watching the Rolling Stones when they appeared on shows like
Shindig!
and
The Hollywood Palace
and
Ed Sullivan
. This may have been because by the time the Stones and the Animals and the Kinks showed up, the Beatles had already taken Normandy. The Stones and the Animals and the Kinks were like the Greeks who came streaming through the streets of Troy after the warriors concealed inside the Trojan Horse had thrown open the city gates. The bands that followed the Beatles were darker and raunchier and scarier than John, Paul, George and Ringo, who were really quite wholesome. Be that as it may, it was the Beatles who lay concealed inside the Trojan Horse, not the Stones, the Kinks or the Animals. It was the Beatles who burnt the topless towers of Ilium.