Hair styles for men ranged the gamut between military and
cartoonish. Either you adopted a flat-top; that being both sides head skinned
and seared like a lamb chop courtesy a poorly conceived electric razor, then
leveled on top; or a 180 degree head skinning leaving a patch of greased
tumbleweeds sprouting above. I never gave it much thought until the day of the
last great invasion.
Our nation was still mourning the death of John F. Kennedy,
awaiting the verdict from the Warren Commission. Kennedy’s assassination
stirred vigorous debate due largely to the Abraham Zapruder silent home movie
of the assassination. Some clung to the lone gunman theory; others claim the
Zapruder film shows a projectile coming from a grassy knoll within range of
Kennedy motorcade.
America was in a foul mood; then something unexpected
happened – the British Invasion; the Beatles arrive. John, George, Paul and
Ringo. Even more so; an optimistic, jubilant single called, “I Want to Hold
Your Hand,” finds its way into the pulsating hearts of America’s
pre-teens.
In all honesty I was a Rolling Stones fan. I penciled their
name all over my school notebooks. To me, the Beatles where mildly entertaining
compared to the roadhouse blues and coarse guitar work of Keith Richards and
Brian Jones. Besides, how could you get past a band who named themselves after
a Muddy Waters song? What the hell was a Beatle?
We were still under the influence of Memphis soul and firmly
in the grip of rock & roll. Elvis reigned supreme while Jerry Lee Lewis raised
hell around the perimeter. Chuck Berry still had a hold on the naughty girls
but that was about to break after a fling with an underage child.
Suddenly, one small 6’’ 45 RPM recorded single, was about to
transform AM radio.
Few recognized the
coming upheaval. At first it seemed almost comical – four young men from
Liverpool, England – a place, so not on the world map – sporting longish hair
and bangs and wearing custom made suits with pointed boots, could throw a
wrench in the depressed world clock and jar us out of a spiritually imposed
coma seemed improbable.
On December 10, 1963 - CBC Evening News ran a five minute
special on the Beatles. Within moments request lines lit up all across America.
In less than three weeks, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” sold nearly a million and
a half copies. America was blitzed with a Beatles papering – five million
posters of the supposed young lads who spoke with funny, endearing accents,
covered the landscape. Most didn’t realize there was nearly a decade in age
separating the Liverpool quartet and their young admirers. Then the screaming
began – Oh, those shrieks and rapturous tears!
It was a challenge being around a group of teenage girls. Something
peculiar was taking hold of them – much like attending an old fashioned revival
as the holy-spirit grabs believers around the ankles tossing them about like a
stuffed doll. They were possessed. Boys? Suspicious!
To that point, Elvis owned most female affection and was
holding the passion right into their early twenties, but even he was losing his
supremacy. It was as if someone dropped a curtain on the past, cleared the
stage and opened with a new show. Lights out Elvis!
Miles across the Atlantic Ocean an ambitious merchant had an
original thought and put it in action – that person would soon be the Beatles
first manager, Brian Epstein.
"I was immediately struck by their music, their beat,
and their sense of humour on stage – and, even afterwards, when I met them, I
was struck again by their personal charm. And it was there that, really, it all
started," says Epstein after catching the band at the Cavern Club on
Mathew Street in Liverpool.
Epstein worked in the family department store, in the record
department. He absorbed not only the music but sales techniques of his peers.
Although he understood marketing he had little understanding of contracts and
the music business. That would cost songwriters Lennon and McCartney dearly through
rights giveaways of original material by way of publishing house Northern Songs;
that still haunts today.
From a teenage boy’s perspective change came too fast and
with consequence. Like so many young men of my time keeping pace with the
Beatles meant growing hair below the ears and dressing apart from the crowd.
Our house was a battlefield. Pops took offense with our non- conformity. He saw
it as a threat to his position in the community and at times embarrassing.
A good part of America was not accepting. By this I mean,
the Beatles seemed a harmless diversion, but any influence on people’s set
ways, would be met with conflict – which played out home to home depending on family
values. Sports and war personalities were the measure of a man – musicians –
way too radical and unemployable to be considered members of a stable family.
I remember meeting my mother at a Kroger’s supermarket downtown
Jeffersonville, Indiana and having a woman walk up to her and ask, “How can you
live in the same house with a Beatle?” We are talking about me having hair no
more than an inch or two in length. Another incident solidified the necessity
to one day move. I was waiting for a bus on my street corner when a woman walks
up and spits on me. She then castigates me for looking like a Beatle. As I’m
getting on bus – she spits again. This is when the bus driver injects – “You
can’t be spitting on girls mama.”
That first wave of Beatlemania sweeping America was refreshing.
The rest of the world viewed the Beatles with great curiosity and embraced
without reservation. They were eloquent, stylish and confident trendsetters; above
all – big fun!
They were made for television. Ed Sullivan took a fancy to
the group. They came absent the kind of criticism Sullivan endured for showing
a sexually charged Elvis doing the infamous leg-tremble.
Colonel Tom Parker managed and mismanaged Presley’s choices
of film projects. The singer’s potential was wasted after his debut in ‘Love Me
Tender’ on Hollywood schlock. Busty bikini clad playmates, dumb scenarios; fast
cars, contrived storylines, lured young women into theatres and filled the
Colonels bank account but did nothing to secure Elvis a life immortalized on
film.
The Beatles on the other hand stood with an art-film maker –
Richard Lester. He chose to craft a comedy integrating their personalities - Hard Day’s Night, starring John Lennon,
Paul McCartney, Ringo Star and George Harrison; splendidly shot in black and
white and loaded with great songs. Plenty of singles recordings ripe for top-forty
airplay.
Lester and writer Alun Owen tapped into an evolving film
genre by following the rhythm of the new wave of British film making and
allowing the individualities of the Beatles dominates. The film follows two
days in the life of the band- and yes, plenty of screaming.
I caught the film with my brother Wayne at the Rialto, 4th
Street just south of Chestnut in Louisville, Kentucky. Elvis even played there
in 1955. I figured nothing this carefree and blissful existed in our home
sphere but was willing to believe otherwise. We returned a couple years later
multiple times for the Beatles follow-up film, ‘Help.” The Beatles were a
welcomed fantasy in our world, far removed from the claustrophobic melodramas
playing out at home and in high school.
Where Elvis came across as slow and coy, the Beatles fired
on all cylinders – much like the Marks Brothers in Night at the Opera.
“And I Love Her, I Should Have Known Better, Tell Me Why,
I’ll Cry Instead along with Hard Day’s Night,” played endlessly on radio.
Early on, Lennon and McCartney established themselves as
songwriters seeking out covers of their songs amongst the many middle-of-the
road singers who inhabited BBC radio. In many ways, that’s where your
credentials as inspired song writers were validated.
It was the willingness and compromise between the two that
brought the collaborations into the realm of superior works of music.
Lennon and McCartney admired the partnership and
completeness of hit songs scripted by the duo Carol King and Gerry Goffin who
wrote such hits as; “Will You Love Me Tomorrow, One Fine Day, (You Make Me Fell
Like A ) Natural Woman, Some Kind of Wonderful.”
The process was based on listening and setting all egos
aside. Lennon and McCartney had a style and tone to their approach. Lennon had an edge and creative fiction writer’s way of telling a story, detached from any instrument. McCartney, the more proficient musically, could pick up a guitar, hammer away at the piano or build from an exquisite bass line, a song in a more traditional manner. There was a bond of trust between the two allowing each to ask for help when a song was near completion and hopefully find a solution for a challenging bridge or verse. It was about having another point of view. They thought nearly alike but different.
John’s originals came from a place a great distance from
McCartney’s. Titles like; “I Am a Walrus, Come Together, Lucy in the Sky With
Diamonds, Strawberry Fields Forever,” all required complex, innovative
arrangements and instrumentation.
McCartney’s; “ Hey Jude, Yesterday, Fool on the Hill,
Blackbird, Here, There and Everywhere seemed as if they could have been
conceived in the Mecca for songwriters – Manhattan’s Brill Building.
Together – they were able to bring the colors, shapes and
universality of the moment into such hits as; “A Day in the Life, Day Tripper,
A Hard Day’s Night, She Loves You, and the hit that started it all, “I Want to
Hold Your Hand.’
They never resented others for the remakes of their songs.
Paul admitted he liked some of them more than their own versions. There are
thousands; from jazz, to folk to pop to rhythm & blues covers. It was the
melodies and harmonic possibilities that attracted other artists.
I for one was drawn to the sound of the band. Each recording
came fully arranged and with specific parts for each player.
I used to test my parents over dinner with everything from
Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” to John Coltrane’s long playing “India.” Both
would surpass the duration of sit down dining and linger into study time. Pops
patience was tested with Coltrane’s bag-of-snakes-dance and ferocious energy emanating
from his soprano saxophone on a song called “India” causing him to shut it down
during dinner. It was all burning - churning barks and squeals for fourteen
heroic minutes. Then one evening I serve up the Beatles “I Feel Fine.” At two
minutes and ten seconds it took multiple plays to complete first course. I was
enamoured with Ringo Star’s drumming. He had adopted a jazz rumba beat I was
familiar with and played it with great authority throughout. Towards the end
the band does this breakdown section leaving Ringo to fill in with a couple syncopated
strokes of the toms and snare drum. I found myself spinning the single over and
over just to hear that fill. Needless to say, it was received with the same
enthusiastic welcome as Coltrane.
One of the major casualties of Beatlemania was local disc
jockeys. The old guys who spoke with a sweet Southern drawl or brain popping
teenybopper cadence were tossed aside in favour of younger men with a fake
British accent. Not only was tone a requirement but DJs were now expected to
meet the public in a manner unheard of before. There would be all sorts of gimmicky
promotions. The new guy would ride around the city in horse and buggy mimicking
what Americans perceived British lifestyle. The fellow would be draped in
London’s chic Carnaby Street tailored garments. The sock hops that usually
featured ten-piece cover bands playing the latest top-forty hits were now
morphing into four piece units familiar with the recent Beatles catalog. This
was a game changer.
Foremost, the Beatles were a band that played their
instruments well and were exceptional writers and singers. Most pop concerts to
that point featured a single artist who coasted on the success of a solitary
recording backed by a competent local band.
As the years gather the Beatles become the world’s finest
studio recording band owing much to producer George Martin. Martin’s long
service and aptitude within the walls of London’s top recording studios served
the Beatles well. They were innovators; curious and demanding of themselves and
the limited technology afforded them. The spent long hours finding the right
groove, a sound for each song that gave it an identity. A drum fill, guitar
riff, bass line – a vocal harmony that would set them apart from anything that
had come before. Most hit records before were accomplished by employing the
same collection of studio veterans then let producer fill in the holes.
Standing on the sideline awaiting their turn; the artist.
On a social level – the Beatles transformed the world. They
spoke out much the same as the left-leaning union activists and songwriters of
the times – the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthries; many who were labeled
communists. The Beatles got a pass. They were far more cheerful and easy to
read. They were by now safe. The message was the same but the delivery was
cloaked in sweet harmony, gentle verse, accessible humour and often complex
experimental sound-scapes.
The hard hats demanded their heads but few actually took
their demands seriously. By the early eighties those Southern men whose heads
had been flattened and stripped of hair were now looking like Taliban tribesmen
from the distant future.
The Beatles also changed with the times. As the war in
Vietnam escalated and the youth movement became more politicized the Beatles
began acting their age and committed themselves to numerous causes. They
experimented with mind-altering drugs and flirted with mystical shamans. They
were in step with the times.
The vast catalog of songs and recordings captures the
evolution and growth – from delicate tunes about catching a first kiss or a
girl’s attention to putting the brakes on genocide.
It’s never easy being all things to all people yet the
Beatles covered a lot of ground in one decade leaving the planet humming
unforgettable melodies that to this day, still impact our lives. I learned to
appreciate them long after they packed it in April, 1970.
The world cried, begged and telephoned but no amount of
coaxing could bring them back together. 44 years later, and considering their
lives in between, perhaps it was the best decision.
Rubber Soul, Revolver,
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band, Abbey Road, the Beatles, reigned supreme on my various turntables for
years to pass. It’s been a Hard Day’s
Night!
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