It had all happened so fast. Exactly a year before, on 17 January 1963, they had been playing the Cavern and the Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead. A year before that, on 1 January 1962, they had been turned down by Dick Rowe of Decca Records, on the grounds that ‘groups of guitars are on their way out’.
And now they had cracked America. In the first three days of its US release, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ sold a quarter of a million copies. It went on to sell five million.
The poet Allen Ginsberg was in the Dom, a ‘hip hangout’ in New York’s East Village, when he first heard the song: ‘I heard that high, yodelling alto sound of the OOOH that went right through my skull, and I realised it was going to go through the skull of Western civilisation.’ To the amazement of his fellow intellectuals, the portly Ginsberg got up and danced around.
When Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys heard it, ‘I flipped. It was like a shock went through my system.’ The current Beach Boys single, ‘Be True to Your School’, had the chorus:
Be true to your school now
Just like you would to your girl or guy
Be true to your school now
And let your colors fly.
In that instant, Wilson realised that the Beatles had rendered him antique. He was two days younger than Paul, but now felt like an old-timer: ‘I immediately knew that everything had changed.’
For the past six months the Beach Boys had been the most popular group in America. But from now on they would be obliged to live in the shadow of the Beatles. To make matters worse, the Beatles were signed to Capitol, the same label as the Beach Boys. The very same executives who had been giving the Beach Boys all their attention now couldn’t stop talking about the Fab Four. ‘The Beach Boys had been it for two years, but now people thought the Beatles were the future. And loyalties ran thin at Capitol,’ recalled their promoter, Fred Vail.
The following April they recorded ‘Don’t Back Down’. Unlike their other songs, it had an air of doom about it: ‘The girls dig the way the guys get all wiped out … When a twenty-footer sneaks up like a ton of lead’. It was to be the Beach Boys’ very last surfing song.
In Freehold, New Jersey, a fourteen-year-old boy was sitting in the front seat of his mother’s car when the song came on the radio. He felt time stop, and his hair standing on end. ‘Some strange and voodoolike effect’ took hold of him, ‘the radio burning brighter before my eyes as it strained to contain the sound’. They reached home, but he didn’t go in. Instead, he ran straight to the bowling alley on Main Street, rushed to the phone booth and called his girlfriend Jan.
‘Have you heard the Beatles?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, they’re cool,’ she replied. He then rushed to Newbury’s, a store with a minimal record section. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ wasn’t in stock, so instead he bought a single called ‘My Bonnie’, apparently by ‘The Beatles with Tony Sheridan and Guests’. ‘It was a rip-off. The Beatles backing some singer I’d never heard of … I bought it. And listened to it. It wasn’t great but it was as close as I could get.’
He instantly set his heart on a guitar displayed in the window of the West Auto store on Main Street. When the summer came, his Aunt Dora paid him to paint her house, and he bought the guitar with the money he earned: ‘That summer, time moved slowly.’ He lived for every release by the Beatles. ‘I searched the newsstands for every magazine with a photo I hadn’t seen and I dreamed … dreamed … dreamed … that it was me … I didn’t want to meet the Beatles. I wanted to be the Beatles.’
Over half a century on, Bruce Springsteen still believes that hearing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ that day in his mother’s car changed the course of his life.
In Chicago, the ten-year-old Ruby Wax was standing in a record shop when the B-side of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ came blasting out.
‘Over the speakers the Beatles were singing “Well, she was just seventeen”, and all of my organs lit up into red alert. This was the most exciting sound I had ever heard – it was a Big Moment. No one man since then has ever switched the “on” button like they did.’
Over the next few weeks, Ruby plastered her bedroom wall with Beatles posters, which she then ritually licked. She collected Beatles magazines, pens, records, sunglasses, clocks, socks and stickers. ‘I would turn up the sound of my Beatles records to eardrum-shattering levels and weep and moan and scream out my love.’ She would even call the telephone operator in Liverpool just to hear her say ‘Hello’ in a Scouse accent. ‘Then I’d become so overwhelmed I’d have to hang up.’
Serving a ten-year sentence in McNeil Island Corrections Center, Washington State, the petty criminal Charlie Manson kept hearing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ playing on the radios circulating among the inmates.
According to his biographer, Manson was impressed by the music, but far more impressed by the adulation the Beatles were receiving: ‘Charlie always yearned for attention; now he decided that fame was what he really wanted. If these four Beatles could have it, why couldn’t he? … Charlie started telling anyone willing to listen and also those who weren’t that he was going to be bigger than the Beatles.’
From that point on, Manson spent his time in McNeil hunched over a guitar. Whenever his mother Kathleen came visiting he would tell her, with an almost manic insistence, that one day soon he too would be famous.