The Beatles so thoroughly revised our ideas about “American” music, its style, roots, and tributaries, that it’s hard to imagine how they ever could have remained a British phenomenon. All through 1963, Capitol Records waved off American release of their hits even as Britain, the far more conservative cultural sensibility, succumbed. This was peculiar not least because EMI, Parlophone’s umbrella company, was, after all, a global conglomerate, and Capitol Records its subsidiary. Capitol’s leverage was sheer numbers: the American music market swamped the UK in terms of sales, and Britain’s track record with pop stars was perceived as terminally lagging, although this was more a matter of perception. And the prevailing myths about the Beatles’ “American moment” tend to get abstracted by the gust of their arrival.
George Martin’s status as a boat rocker within EMI made it hard for him to exert much influence on getting his band marketing support abroad. Once again, the era’s extreme cultural xenophobia, in both America and Britain, flattened any arguments about potential popularity until Ed Sullivan hitched his wagon to Beatlemania just as the royals had. At each stage of the game, Beatlemania saw the establishment catching on to a youth-driven yet supremely talented phenomenon, not inflating an artificial hype around a manufactured act. Fleet Street figured out how to sell more newspapers than even Profumo through the Beatles, which was good business practice even before it was sincere cynicism. For once, America would have a lot to learn from the British charts—and acquiesce to a new cultural trade imbalance.
Epstein’s underrated strategy had them in front of the press immediately after landing, and the interviews persisted—in the back of limos, in hotel rooms, over the phone—throughout the visit. “Direct” documentarians Albert and David Maysles, who had just finished shooting Orson Welles in Spain (1966), filmed the entire visit with hand-held cameras for a possible TV special, now an indispensable eye-of-the-storm piece called The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit. Epstein knew the Beatles were unflappable, and he was playing their second-strongest suit to put them over now that they had their first American hit record: their charm. If they could win over the American press the way they had Fleet Street, he reasoned, the music would do the rest. As America greeted them as newcomers, they leaned on a whole year’s experience as gadflies. They held the press the same way they held their audience: through irreverent retorts that skirted vulgarity, and a knowing sense of show-biz politics that made them seem perched on some higher vantage, laughing at the circus erupting all around them. They made the overhyped atmosphere seem ridiculous even as they exploited it. Presley sneered at how easy it was to puncture stale showbiz traditions; the Beatles amplified this with mirthful self-consciousness.
Ringo Starr ultimately had the simplest explanation for how this final stretch of audience was conquered: “Things used to fall right for us as a band. We couldn’t stop it. The gods were on our side. We were fabulous musicians, we had great writers; it wasn’t like a piece of shit was being helped, and things just fell into place . . . but we were worried about America.”1
By the end of 1964 the Beatles had become a cultural meteor, a global phenomenon, with hit records from Australia to Ireland, and stars in the runaway movie A Hard Day’s Night, embraced even by doubting critics. The barrage of Lennon-McCartney songs that poured out this year alone made them ruling titans, and they gave a fair number away to lesser acts (Billy J. Kramer, Cilla Black, Peter and Gordon), showing astute aesthetic judgment about what they recorded with the Beatles and what they handed off to others.
Before they crossed the Pond, though, Lennon and Harrison continued courting Veronica and Estelle Bennett with fancy dinners in London as the Ronettes finished up their tour with the Rolling Stones. Ronnie remembered: “ ‘Tell us about the Temptations,’ George would say. Then John would ask, ‘What’s Ben E. King really like?’ So we’d just go down the list, telling them stories about all the acts we worked with at the Brooklyn Fox. And as we’d talk, John and George would sit there like they were hypnotized.”2
On January 16, the Beatles began a three-week booking at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, staying at the Hotel George V. Harrison brought along a copy of a new record he was obsessed with, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. On only his second album, Dylan turned in an all-original breakout with meteors like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Lennon and McCartney sponged it up as only two songwriters could while they hammered out sound-track songs for their movie, which would begin filming in March. Photographer Harry Benson also remembers them working on “I Feel Fine,” and future biographer Barry Miles recalls McCartney playing a working draft of “Yesterday” for publisher Dick James, whose only response was “Do you have anything that goes ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’?”3
In Paris, Epstein got word that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had shot from its number forty-five debut to number one in America, 1.5 million copies sold in five days. Meet the Beatles was rushed into stores to piggyback on the song and became the fastest-selling LP in history. When they sat down to celebrate the news, somebody snapped a picture of the Beatles with pots atop their heads. Later that night, Benson took photos of a celebratory pillow fight Lennon started back in their hotel room.
The Beatles gathered up friends to fly with them to New York. Lennon insisted on bringing Cynthia, refuting Epstein’s dictum about pop idols not having wives more firmly than ever.4 But Phil Spector wouldn’t allow the Ronettes to take up Lennon’s invitation to join the flight. He sent them home early, perhaps suspecting Lennon’s designs. Back in New York, Ronnie was watching on television as Phil Spector got off the plane behind the Beatles at John F. Kennedy International Airport. “I wanted to strangle him!” she wrote. “We couldn’t fly back with the Beatles, but there he was, standing in front of all the cameras after the Beatles got off their plane. . . . That’s when I first realized how badly Phil really wanted to be a star himself.”5 Spector, whose pop dynasty had influenced the British groups beyond all description, glommed onto the Beatles. He cast himself as a symbolic protector, shepherding them into his own promised land, as if he were engineering the vast changes beginning to pour in from Britain. Spector’s moment was ending as a new one began.
The Beatles’ arrival in America finds broadcast news flirting with myth. Because of the huge impact of their first visit, though, many still confuse this early American trip with their U.S. concert tour later that August. In fact, this first visit included only three TV appearances (two in New York, one in Miami) and three live shows (two at Carnegie Hall, one in Washington, D.C.).
America, of course, had just walked through one of its darkest holidays in the weeks following the Kennedy assassination. Most of the tired psychobabble on Beatlemania revolves around the cliché about a nation’s pent-up anxiety following this national grief. This assumes that had the Beatles not arrived, many of the same teenage girls would have been found weeping in their rooms over the fallen young hero, or that TV ratings in general would have dropped. In fact, it’s far more plausible that the outburst of Beatlemania channeled a complicated mixture of forces that sent the country into swooning denial over Kennedy’s persona, his recklessness in both his personal life and his rash Cold War Cuban-missile-crisis machismo. In death, America absolves its heroes of all manner of sins.
But putting Kennedy aside, Beatlemania was a far bigger phenomenon than the grief over a presidential assassination and a country’s ideas about itself. The trauma drew Hollywood right into its internal debate about its virtues, and how the West’s lawless past had suddenly reared into the present as nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television. Ever since Elvis Presley had returned from Germany and resumed his career, for example, Hollywood had been reshaping the King’s image with an eye toward how his teen base was settling down into mainstream middle-aged family life. With Kennedy cut down, new cultural totems sprang up to fill this void. Even as Hollywood struggled to figure how to remake Johnson into its new leading man, rock ’n’ roll suddenly provided at least two. This Beatles Ed Sullivan appearance suddenly made Hollywood seem vaguely irrelevant—as if Tinseltown was losing its touch with youth icons. By extension, the old music order, ruled by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Perry Como, simply wilted.
“What was truly fresh in 1964 was the post-Kennedy euphoria,” writes J. Hoberman in his survey of 1960s cinema, The Dream Life. “The apocalypse had happened and we remained. The fever broke. The crisis passed—anything seemed possible. . . . Where The Manchurian Candidate anticipated the fearful Kennedy scenario, Dr. Strangelove simply dismissed it. . . . Kennedy was dead and we lived on!”6 For Capitol Records, the holidays were spent in overdrive. Company executives sensed a volcano rumbling and had pressing plants churn out copies of the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” / “This Boy” single and a debut album, Meet the Beatles, which plucked numbers from Parlophone’s Please Please Me and With the Beatles. By January, radio had come to a boil, and the marketing campaign took hold. Americans now heard Beatle records daily, if not hourly, and the Christmas push ensured enough product for the deluge. A fierce scramble for advertising dollars erupted between competing stations, like WMCA, WABC, and WINS (Murray the K’s third-place top-forty station) in Manhattan, all vying for teen ears. Running a radio contest promising T-shirts for airport visitors was simple and effective, even when demand far outgrew supply after the first thousand shirts ran out. Different numbers get reported, but Capitol’s marketing campaign brought at least three thousand teenagers to the airport, and a fierce radio advertising war snowballed their exposure to a state of delirium—it took on a raucous momentum that found deejays staking out hotel lobbies and bribing stagehands.
The hype alone might have smothered less determined and charismatic acts. A lot of the media noise simply confirmed the cynicism then fueling the flimsy Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie. In Birdie’s world, Ed Sullivan played pope, laying his hands on young performers and ushering them into a new status as mainstream celebrities. The nation gathered around his communal campfire each week to sanctify its most cherished stories of talent and self-invention. The Beatles upended this fable with an unforeseeable twist: here were British musicians performing previously American archetypes—and reviving the style as if it were somehow worthy of respect. As New York succumbed to Beatlemania, the UK screams got a jolt of American boosterism, with Liverpool cast as the new Bethlehem, and the Brits suddenly mystical, exotic avatars.
The flight to America was ripe with anticipation, nerves, and some pop-industry heavies catching a ride. The press pool included the Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave; the Daily Express photographer Harry Benson, who booked the exclusive shoot on the flight; and the Liverpool Echo reporter who shared a name with Beatle George Harrison.7 Epstein sat in the economy cabin with the press while the Beatles stayed up front in first class. Beatle Harrison was coming down with the flu, but there were salesmen pitching trinkets, and stewardesses brought a stream of pens, bracelets, pillows, and plastic watches for the Beatles to look at for endorsement. Epstein was flooded with proposals and had set up Seltaeb (“Beatles” spelled backwards), the endorsement company, to handle these petty affairs. Nobody had ever made much money on trinkets.
Lennon sat next to Cynthia, alternately enthused and petrified. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had changed the game, but there was the immediate, crushing question of whether they could meet sudden American expectation, especially where even Britain’s biggest teen idol so far, Cliff Richard, had faltered. Lennon had talked openly with writer Michael Braun about their American jaunt and how slim their chances were. “After all,” he had said, “Cliff went there and he died. He was fourteenth on a bill with Frankie Avalon,” and George said that Richard’s movie Summer Holiday was second feature at a drive-in in St. Louis.8
But successful British pop crossovers were actually more common than many assumed. The first British act of the modern era to reach Billboard’s number one was Vera Lynn, in 1952, with a song called “Forget-Me-Not.” Lonnie Donegan, the skiffle king, actually appeared on The Perry Como Show with Ronald Reagan. The Tornados had scored a number one with “Telstar,” Joe Meek’s oddly futuristic junkyard production, in 1962. And as recently as November 1963, Dusty Springfield had had a hit with “I Only Want to Be with You.” In Lennon’s mind, fear sparred with these breakthroughs. He knew he had a chance; what he couldn’t predict was how Beatlemania might translate. Was it merely a British fad? Would their softer material dilute their commitment to Chuck Berry and Little Richard? Or, conversely, would they need to ponce themselves up even more than Epstein already had to get over as big as they hoped?
Approaching Manhattan’s intimidating spires, the pilot announced that there was a crowd down below. At first the Beatles thought a dignitary was landing ahead of them. Then the pilot clarified: there was a crowd waiting for them. “It was so exciting,” Ringo said, “flying into the airport, I felt as though there was a big octopus with tentacles that were grabbing the plane and dragging us down into New York. America was the best. It was a dream, coming from Liverpool.” McCartney distinctly remembered feeling all the worry fall away: “We thought, ‘Wow! God, we have really made it.’ I remember . . . the great moment of getting into the limo and putting on the radio, and hearing a running commentary on us: ‘They have just left the airport and are coming towards New York City . . .’ It was like a dream. The greatest fantasy ever.”9
Once they descended from the plane—looking back at Benson for one of the few photographs of the police barricades below—Epstein had them stand on a Pan Am dais for a press conference. Expectations for a British pop band were low; Epstein knew the first flank could be crucial. If he could get stories running ahead of the Sullivan TV appearance that weekend, they’d gain a bigger audience. His hunch became an extraordinary media coup, flooding the airwaves and news programs with Beatle quips and giggling asides—once they were media fodder, the only question was how they might possibly live up to their publicity.
To their huge new audience they seemed natural and fresh and unflappable, handy with a quip for any situation and with an unerring sense of how to keep the press off guard. But another glance at Michael Braun’s Love Me Do!, the quickie biography that appeared in British shops in the fall of 1963, reveals how much of the Beatle persona was in place by the time “She Loves You” hit the charts in August 1963, and how much of the Beatles’ repartee of February 1964 was well-rehearsed patter. When reporters started in with their inanities, the Beatles simply welcomed them to their ongoing party. “What do you think of Beethoven?” someone cried out, highlighting all the prevailing assumptions about pop music as trendy piffle. “Great—especially his poetry,” Ringo responded on cue. In fact as detailed by Braun, this kind of thing had been an inside joke between the Beatles and the British press for several months. Press conferences had become a tired show-biz cliché (“How do you like your costar?”), but nobody expected pop stars to strip the form of its legitimacy. “Can you play us a song?” came another query. “No,” Lennon said. “We need money first.” These quips, now standard Beatle lore, quickly entered the American lexicon. Low expectations gave them spark; cheeky accents gave them sting. Pop stars one-upping Groucho Marx—now, that’s news. And these were British pop stars. The American press succumbed to the swoon.
They landed in New York on Friday, February 7, and the news cycle was ready for its upbeat weekend color story; Friday’s quotes ran on that evening’s news and in the next day’s papers. Murray Kaufman—Murray the K—an insecure balding deejay who rang through to interview the Beatles by phone in their room at the Plaza, was obliged with station IDs and chatty quotes he reran for months on end. Kaufman inserted himself into the band’s graces, but the Beatles found him perplexingly gauche. At one point during a live broadcast, Lennon called him a “wanker” (Scouser slang for “jerk-off”), daring him to figure out what it might mean.10 Murray sprinted ahead, ignorantly preening just to have access. In America, such oblique Lennon vulgarities went in sideways, all the more charming for their inscrutability.
On Saturday, they held a rehearsal on the Sullivan TV set. Afterward, Epstein had set up a meeting with Rickenbacker’s owner and president, Francis Hall, across Central Park. An astute marketer among musicians, Hall had noticed Lennon’s Hamburg Rickenbacker from news clips and figured he could interest the Beatles in some newer models. Hall understood how territorial musicians feel about their instruments, so he brought along Toots Thielemans. Lennon remarked on his work with the George Shearing Quintet. “If it’s good enough for George Shearing, it’s bloody good enough for me,” Lennon said. The scene undermines Lennon’s exaggerated contempt for jazz. Lennon doubtless knew Thielemans’s “Bluesette,” his 1961 solo pop hit, which featured the great harmonica player and guitarist as a whistler. Lennon was so proud of this meeting he went back to Britain and bragged about it to Chris Roberts at the New Musical Express: “For the people who say we’re not interested in music, we get the chance to meet a lot of great musicians and talk to them. This guy knocked us out.”11
Sunday morning brought yet another rehearsal, and this time Harrison stayed in bed with the flu to rest up for the performance; Neil Aspinall stood on his stage marks for the cameras. In the afternoon, with George in place, the band taped “Twist and Shout,” “Please Please Me,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on a new set for their third Sullivan appearance (broadcast on February 23, after their debut, live, later on the ninth and the Miami show on the sixteenth).
Ringo Starr remembered that rehearsal as both crucial and mind-numbingly frustrating: after run-throughs, they visited the control room to make adjustments to the sound board, making sure the balance levels between voices and instruments got flagged with chalk. While they went off to lunch, though, a cleaner came in and wiped all the chalk off the board.12 These sound deficiencies marred Lennon’s vocal mike.
But the overall impression the Beatles made bulldozed any balance problems. By Sunday evening, the momentum that had built up around the Beatles exploded into seventy-three million viewers, besting the Presley record of sixty million eight years before. Brian Epstein deserves credit, but no press agency would dare it: a smash hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; drawing kids out to the airport for a triumphant arrival on Friday; newspaper quips and adult misgivings throughout the weekend; a watershed first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that Sunday; and suddenly a huge, larger context loomed up—an all-conquering musical euphoria that swept aside all hesitation. The broadcast trumped even the arrival’s hysteria, the press conference, even the hit single’s juice, in a thrilling set that connected previously stray dots.
The size of the audience remains inexplicable; the musical galaxies that came into view still glow. At least half the fun was watching the Beatles, performing with preternatural self-confidence, light their sonic firecrackers right in Sullivan’s staid living room, his embalmed stare suddenly the look of mummified Tin Pan Alley. “So you think America bounced back after the war, do ya?” their attitude chided, outmaneuvering witless Yanks at their own game. Attempting to smile back, Sullivan revealed a cosmic disconnect, sealing the Beatles’ bond with their audience.
Cynicism took a holiday: the Beatles played right into Sullivan’s variety-show format while transcending it. Their first number, a jaunty original (“All My Loving”), was followed by McCartney (the bassist!) singing “Till There Was You,” from 1957’s Broadway hit The Music Man. This took cheek—and this McCartney guy had cheeks to spare. How could a band so hip get away with such hokey sentimentality? It had to be a joke, right? (The arrangement, complete with flamenco acoustic guitar, was lifted off Peggy Lee’s 1960 Latin ala Lee! album, which was not remotely rock ’n’ roll.) On the other hand, where did this joke land? On Sullivan? On parents? Elvis Presley had sung gooey ballads, sure; but that was almost the only rule he didn’t break. The Beatles delivered this “girly” stuff with relish, as if scribbling delirious mash notes between tossing imaginary cherry bombs into the surrounding magic and comedy acts.13 As with a lot of the pap their records sat next to on the pop charts, the Beatles ridiculed prevailing show-biz hackery simply by performing on the same bill; the rock ’n’ roll slot made everything else seem hopelessly dated.
This Sullivan set, combined with the Meet the Beatles LP fans were devouring, transformed a genre that was widely considered dead or dying. Critic Richard Meltzer called the Beatles’ revival of rock ’n’ roll “the biggest long-shot in the history of long-shots.”14 The idea that music by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Little Richard could recapture a younger audience—indeed, find their songwriting royalties tilted upward through Beatles sales—was simply unimaginable, even as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” climbed the American charts in the wee hours of 1964.
By connecting so many dots hidden away in this glorious sound, the Beatles confirmed all the latent possibilities in the style, and promised much more. Cramming all of contemporary pop inside the same musical brackets as Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly had radical, albeit counterintuitive, overtones. Right after “All My Loving,” which tumbled out of them like a waterfall, they settled down into McCartney’s doe-eyed “Till There Was You,” which to the parents said Music Man and to the kids said “dreamboat.” This one cover, easily the weakest number of the batch, accomplished the unthinkable: it rewrote the way Americans heard their own music history. Suddenly, in the course of an hour-length TV show, ideas that had lain dormant came alive, and connections were made that set off chain reactions in listeners’ minds even before they had heard the band transform a novelty like “Twist and Shout,” unfurl a peerless doo-wop sail like “This Boy,” or spin something altogether original like “From Me to You.” This shift was both audacious and comic: free-fall rock ’n’ roll in the form of a good-bye song that erased heartache, segued without (much) irony into a soft-core standard from a Broadway musical. The simple contrast between these two numbers was old-fashioned show-business shorthand for “range,” only without the pretense. It immediately endeared McCartney to mothers and gave pause to skeptics preparing their “noisy” pans.
To close that opening set, “She Loves You” was a Roman candle that kept on crackling after the final cadence; it told of unspeakable pleasures and dizzying thrills, a wild ride that shot past in a blur, cracking open rock’s story along the way. Think of Presley’s outrageous metaphors of freedom, the image of the all-American quarterback grabbing a black girl on the dance floor and strutting proudly through white middle-class living rooms. That image had been pressed back at the time of Presley’s army stint and Buddy Holly’s plane crash. Now the Beatles held out something even more intoxicating: long-haired foreigners interrupting the evening with such high comic spirits that they had the family at “All My Loving” and lit sparkles in everybody’s hearts by “She Loves You.” This musical punch went down so easy that by the time its spike kicked in you forgot where you were or how you’d gotten there. The impact spun a thousand heady questions on the tip of its “yeah, yeah, yeah” hook, and those delirious, high-harmony “Oooh”s turned everybody’s mind to mush. The ratings signaled one kind of marker; these intangible musical effects of The Ed Sullivan Show appearance left all parties forever changed.
Rock ’n’ roll had always given off a spirit of inclusion and guile, and the Beatles simply adopted that spirit as their own. Their choice of covers revealed an uncanny connection with everything progressive in pop, from Motown to girl groups. The girl-group material, especially, sent the signal that the Beatles came not just as conquerors, but conversationalists who engaged with the style as if it were some huge, ongoing argument of ideas. The band stormed its stage fully formed, and their “foreignness” hinted at larger, more daring implications.
The Sullivan audience, and fans who ran out to pick up Capitol’s Meet the Beatles, heard galloping embrace, from swooning doo-wop (“This Boy”) to rakish R&B (“I Saw Her Standing There”—an original in the Chuck Berry mold—and Arthur Alexander’s “Anna”). Alongside their Little Richard and Carl Perkins covers, they slung Motown (Barrett Strong’s “Money,” Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”), girl groups (the Marvelettes’ “Please Mister Postman,” the Shirelles’ “Boys”), and soul raves that threw off giddy, intractable sparks. The Beatles were already tinkering with the style—exploiting new cracks in the sound, writing songs that implied even more than they delighted—the crashingly coy understatement of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” for example, or the way Lennon’s attack on “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” was as much about love as it was about white regard for black, or British for American, style.
It has taken history to clarify how far the basic idea, the seed of all the mania, was actually borne out in the music itself, a point missed by too many scandal-driven biographers. As early as shows and radio appearances supporting “Love Me Do,” listeners heard something new in the Beatles that few other pop groups had. It was far more radical than the simplistic explanations of white British “working-class” youth performing sturdy R&B. (This claim must always be qualified by Lennon’s insistence on his grammar-school status—the American equivalent of a prep-school boy.) And while the R&B element in their sound was cued to the seasoned interplay between McCartney’s bass and Ringo’s teasingly expert offbeats, “Love Me Do” is richer even than this. The vocal harmonies on the word “Plea—ee—ee—ease” not only evoke the Everly Brothers, but raise an intriguing question: What if the country-duo-group tradition got hooked up with the Chicago-electric-blues tradition? What if this new band seemed “exotically” foreign, safe, and accessible enough to make the aesthetic argument seem not just persuasive but inevitable?
Range only began to make sense of how the Beatles were reframing American music. The Chuck Berry chassis that anchored songs like “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You,” and “I’ll Get You” was offset by a softer, less pressing impulse, and some of these soft-pedaled songs even bore Lennon’s fingerprints, especially “Ask Me Why,” “All I’ve Got to Do,” and “From Me to You.” Chuck Berry wouldn’t be caught dead singing such romantic pap. But the idea of Berry with a gang of buddies, maybe even a songwriting partner, made a different kind of musical sense, and only made Berry’s impulses sound more contemporary.
In other words, the Beatles became symbolic of something much larger than themselves almost as quickly as they became surpassingly famous: toward a unity, a cross-fertilization and commingling of previously distinct musical strands. Almost as quickly as they became stars, they embodied an idea, a new myth about the music itself and how it might grow. Nobody had made these connections before, and now the future was whirring past in a blur of swaggering offbeats and enticing backup harmonies.
So the context of Kennedy’s memorial to youth gave way to a new exhortation of youth on a grander scale, four-headed and beatific, arty yet giddy, foreign-looking yet somehow familiar-sounding, hilarious on the surface with strong undercurrents of seriousness, lust, and resolve, a sense that enormous shifts had already happened. There is no question that Beatlemania answered the Kennedy assassination, that there are ways in which these two events played off each other, required each other, just as Profumo sought a British antidote to scandal.
Not only was rock ’n’ roll a vital, healthy style which many had taken for dead; it was abruptly redeemed—even better, most parents still despised it, making it a revolution in plain sight. From now on, and for at least the next decade, rock ’n’ roll carried a subversive force within the mainstream that made it seem like truants were the new power brokers. As world politics grew increasingly complicated and interdependent, it brought the Beatles immense cultural prestige.
That this renewal came as a British import made even less sense, which in turn made it irresistible. It gave the Beatles their halo effect. Rock’s second act began on a familiar stage with a transformational new context: these British youths, brash yet enchanting, new yet instantly recognizable, held up an astonishing cultural mirror to Americans. Their command of rock ’n’ roll made it seem like they’d always known us, grinning strangers who had cracked our aesthetic DNA and were suddenly, inexplicably, lifelong friends.
After a day off, as the papers reported the record-breaking Sullivan Show, the Beatles got on a train to Washington, D.C., for their first American concert, at the Washington Coliseum. Ringo, the new kid in Beatletown, was suddenly a star alongside the rest of them: “Being cheeky chappies saved our arses on many occasions, especially then, on the train to Washington, because the guys from the press had come to bury us. These reporters, being New Yorkers, would yell at us, but we just yelled back. . . . That’s what endeared us to them.”15
The Coliseum seated eight thousand fans and placed the Beatles on a stage in the center, like a boxing ring. Unaccustomed to their setup, they simply used their Vox amps and the house’s public address system. There were no stage monitors and no sound check, so they had to balance their ensemble and vocals as they went along. Ringo had to turn his drum set around after every three songs when stagehands rotated the stage. And despite all this, the set is all conquest and hunkering down for the future—old scores are torn to shreds, and raw potential seeps out of every number. (The Maysles brothers include the set in their film.) If promise was a sound, it was the sound of that scream that Epstein and Oldham first marveled at the year before. They may not have been able to hear themselves, but rock tunesmith Marshall Crenshaw holds this set among his favorite Beatle moments: “They played as if they still had something to prove, which of course they did. . . . but nobody expected how much or how sure of themselves they already were. That sound has such thump to it, such force, it really is a proving ground for the Beatles as live musicians.”16
Just as the royals had attached themselves to channel some Beatle heat, so, too, did political functionaries as the band passed through Washington. This kind of thing made Lennon feel like a trained seal: “We were supposed to put up with all sorts of shit from Lord Mayors and their wives, and be touched and pawed like in A Hard Day’s Night, only a million times more. At the American Embassy or the British Embassy in Washington, some bloody animal cut Ringo’s hair. I walked out, swearing at all of them, I just left in the middle of it.”17
In Miami for the second Sullivan Show, the band hung out at their beach hotel, waved to the girls from their windows, and got photographed breaking out into song in the swimming pool for a famous Life photograph. It was the week before Sonny Liston fought the fast-talking Cassius Clay, and photographer Benson got the Beatles to do a publicity stunt with the young fighter.18
Here’s an early peek into celebrity one-upmanship: who was rubbing up against more heat? Who would benefit from the publicity more, the Beatles or Clay? And the photos turned out to have a much bigger historical impact than anybody might have guessed at the time: peering back into February of 1964—with Clay not yet Ali, and the Beatles at the symbolic dawn of the 1960s—the civil rights movement, counterculture, and anti–Vietnam War sensibilities come alive in these pictures. It’s an image of youth rebels mugging madly at stale institutions like segregation—and the only known photos of Lennon and Ali smiling across the canyon.
They also hit the clubs, one night catching insult comic Don Rickles, who brought the spotlight down on the band and cut loose, which made their awestruck British souls recoil. “If we’d had him on our own terms we could have made mincemeat out of him,” Lennon said. Ringo remembered another cherished act they caught, and the gap they began to notice between their view of the style and America’s: “We went out to see the Coasters, who were heroes with ‘Yakety Yak.’ People were dancing to them in the club, and I just couldn’t understand it. These were rock-’n’-roll gods to me, and people were dancing! I was just so disgusted.”19
A homecoming crowd swarmed their London arrival, far outnumbering the three thousand Americans who had greeted them in New York. British fans couldn’t claim any self-respect if they let American fans out-obsess them simply by dint of population. The BBC filmed it as a news event and broadcast the return to triumphant prose during its Saturday-afternoon sports show Grandstand. “What did you think of America?” David Coleman asked. “ ‘It’s bigger,’ said Ringo.20
The American debut proved a watershed, but the Beatles kept moving. Epstein had them tape a Big Night Out performance for broadcast on February 29, and then pointed them back into the studio to finish the sound track for the feature film they would begin shooting in early March.
Their recording schedule registers a slew of new numbers, and a swift new authority in the studio. On the morning of February 25, George Harrison’s twenty-first birthday, they laid down vocal and guitar overdubs for McCartney’s “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the next single, which they had started recording in Paris, before nine takes of Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That,” which was slated for its B side. In the afternoon they recorded McCartney’s “And I Love Her” in two takes and “I Should Have Known Better” in three. Martin dressed up “And I Love Her” with a key change for Harrison’s flamenco acoustic guitar solo, and it sounded like the virgin offspring of “Till There Was You” and “P.S. I Love You,” a choice weave of devotional lyric and worried melody that remains an early peak. Lennon ranked it among his partner’s later classics like “Yesterday” and “Michelle.” These sessions rang out with new vigor, as if all the hints dropped on their first two records had sprouted full-blown tracks.
Lennon and McCartney felt the pressure, and the songs made the necessary leap; heaps of adulation fueled grand creative gestures. All this new material would support their next venture, the full-length film Epstein had set up with comedy producer Walter Shenson. Shenson had come off two successful British comedies, 1959’s The Mouse That Roared, with Peter Sellers, and its 1963 sequel, The Mouse on the Moon. This was the typical deal for a pop group: shoot a quick movie to cash in on its sound track. To hedge their bets, they hired a Beatles favorite, Wilfrid Brambell, from the hit TV series Steptoe and Son, to play McCartney’s wayward grandfather.21 On Steptoe, Brambell’s son was always chiding his father for being a “dirty old man.” Brambell was also Irish, an honorary Liverpudlian to British viewers. This sop to the TV audience meant the movie might at least break even. Epstein and Shenson brought in an American director who had worked in UK commercials, named Richard Lester, who had made a film with Sellers and Spike Milligan called The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. He’d also directed Mouse on the Moon and It’s Trad, Dad. The Goon connection won him Lennon’s approval: “We didn’t even want to make a movie that was going to be bad, and we insisted on having a real writer to write it.”22
Lester led them to Alun Owen, a Liverpool playwright who wrote scripts for television’s Corrigan Blake and Armchair Theatre. Owen had the aura of a Scouser’s John Osborne, a working-class type who had popularized dissent onstage with the West End’s Progress to the Park and The Rough and Ready Lot, and with No Trams to Lime Street for TV. Like Michael Braun, the American writer who scribbled down Beatle dialogue to drive his Love Me Do! paperback, Owen went on the road with the band in the fall of 1963 to observe the crowd phenomenon and write specifically for the band’s situation; since they had never acted before, there was a great effort made to make them comfortable with lines and dealing with other actors on a film set. Casting them as themselves in a familiar situation (“a day in the life”—arriving in a town by train, rehearsing for a TV show, and making an escape) might help them over the most obvious imaginative hurdles.
Owen has never gotten the credit he deserves for capturing Lennon’s character, from which the cruelty, womanizing, and homoerotic danger all seep out subtextually. This was the first fictionalization of “Lennon,” and it went a long way toward introducing him in ways that still make more sense than not. As the seed to his ongoing persona, he couldn’t have asked for better lines. As Braun had, Owen wove key ingredients of Beatles charm into the narrative. Lennon’s character spars with Norm (Norman Rossington) cued by the Epstein chemistry, minus the sexuality. But in so many ways this “Lennon” character works as a soft-core version of the real thing, something he could upstage in real life. It’s his “rattle your jewelry” line done up cinematically, and it signals his harsh side without indulging it. Owen rubs Lennon’s edges down, but only metaphorically.
In the final cut, Lennon’s presence is almost manically subdued. He plays “Lennon,” the smartest, most impatient band member, while “Ringo” gets corraled by the grandfather’s grandstanding. This version of Lennon has no need to break out and go “parading,” he’s keelhauling the parade from the inside. While Lennon went on record many times denouncing what he read as a watering-down of his sensibility, the movie’s reputation rests even more on the script than on its direction. The music alone would have made it a huge hit; the dialogue made it a classic. “Give us a kiss,” he tells the stiff old bag whining about his rights in the first-class train cabin. “I hereby declare this bridge . . . open,” he opines in a campy falsetto, snipping a wardrobe fitter’s tape measure. Disparaging the script rang of protest-too-much refusal: “We were a bit infuriated by the glibness of it. It was a good projection of one façade of us—on tour, in London and in Dublin. It was of us in that situation together, having to perform before people. We were like that. Alun Owen saw the press conference so he recreated it in the movie—pretty well; but we thought it was pretty phoney, even then.”23
This leap to film made all kinds of career sense, but it made Lennon wary in ways that puzzle most Americans. “The trouble is,” Lennon told Braun after reading Owen’s draft, “. . . it’s only us who can write for us.” His first line in the script had him saying, “Uh, who’s your friend, Paul?” “I wouldn’t say that,” Lennon told Braun. “I’d just say, ‘Who’s the old crip?’ ”24 This quote came before Lennon met with Lester, who, unlike many other directors, encouraged improvisation on his sets. Just observe Owen’s scathing indictment of the nameless TV director in a tacky sweater, whom Victor Spinetti plays with imperious precision.
Owen casts Lennon as the wayward brain lost in a world of puffery. It’s all here: the political indignation, the absurdity, the contempt for class distinctions, the offhanded attitude toward all manner of authority. Rock critic Lester Bangs ranted contrarily about the absurdity of Owen’s “generation gap,” how, in a way, Brambell would make more sense as Lennon’s grandfather. “The Beatles were four yobs, or rather three yobs and a librarian named Paul,” Bangs wrote. “Fuck the Beatles, fuck the songs, fuck the cute direction and Marx Brothers comparisons: it’s BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that the most rock ’n’ roll human being in the whole movie is the fucking grandfather! That wily old slime of Paul’s! He had more energy than the four moptops put together! Plus the spirit! He was a true anarchist!”25
But Bangs overlooks how his critique is at odds with Lennon in the rest of the film. Owen has Lennon confront the grandfather for an even better story. This grandfather, teeming with unsolicited candor, teaches our heroes how to sneak into restricted gambling clubs and pick up rich women. (“I’ll bet you’re a fine swimmer,” he says to a heaving cleavage.) Even so, Lennon gets the last word, after they rescue him from the police station with Ringo, the film’s climactic chase scene. “But I’m clean,” he confides to Lennon, after a thousand retorts about how his hygiene somehow makes him “respectable.” His parading over, he looks to Lennon for absolution. “Are ya?” Lennon shoots back, unfazed—he’s had the old man’s number all along.
And he’s mocking every pretension in every scene while slipping straight-faced into poetically charged ballads like “If I Fell,” looking on facetiously as McCartney sings “And I Love Her” even as he supports him, and radiating goodwill and infectious high spirits during filler like “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” and “Tell Me Why,” numbers that would be peaks in anybody else’s set.
British audiences saw all these characters drawn with utmost scrutiny to class distinctions—how these “working-class” northerners tickle staid entertainment-bizzers to death. Spinetti’s director is the kind of arrogant prima donna who’s worked his way up to a “respectable” position and can’t help dropping his class resentment into every conversation. “I’ve won awards, you know.” “I could listen to him all day,” Owen has Lennon say.
Spinetti remembers Lennon and the others as fit, game, and more winning than most through sheer charisma. “Lennon came up to me after our first day on the set together and said, ‘When Dick shouts “Action!” the other actors jump up and become different people, but you stay the same. Does that mean you’re as terrible as we are?’
“The banter that I heard on my first day never stopped,” Spinetti recalls. After catching on to how scenes get wrapped and people hang out, the band became regular players in a floating crap game of conversation. “Soon I found myself sitting with these four young men, talking to them as if we had known each other our whole lives. It was something to do with all of us being provincials. I’d come up from Wales and they’d come down from Liverpool. I’ve made lots of films, but I’ve only met two other people like that—Richard Burton and Orson Welles.”26
This mood fuels the movie’s high spirits alongside its musical bounty: Harrison singing “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” has all the family warmth behind it of older brothers prodding a sibling to take the reins; Lennon’s rhythm guitar on this track kicks Harrison along like he’s spurring a horse. Lennon’s “I Should Have Known Better” sustains one long ripple effect of his careening harmonica; and “If I Fell” balances hesitant devotion on an emotional precipice. With McCartney’s upper harmonies, the song gave Lennon’s onscreen shell a hard-won vulnerability to make him the movie’s most three-dimensional character.
Offstage, Lennon was described as a “hard case.” That’s what Epstein told his father, Alfred Lennon, when a newspaperman brought him around to meet his son on the movie set. This would be the first time the two had seen each other since that Blackpool scene in 1946 almost eighteen years before. Alfred claims to have been reluctant, in his memoirs, and the encounter appears to have been awkward but not hostile. Epstein reassured Lennon that despite what the papers were saying, he had no interest in “jumping on the band wagon,” or asking for money. Alf writes that Lennon “vaguely remembered” being in Blackpool with his dad, but couldn’t remember exactly when. They parted politely if ambivalently, but Alfred was soon short on cash, and sold his story for £200 to a publication called Tit Bits. On Epstein’s advice, Lennon made Alfred a gift of £30, then put him on a weekly stipend of £12 to keep him quiet. This seemed to have worked for a while.27
While the Beatles filmed, the American charts played catch-up with all their British releases. The legendary Billboard charts dated April 4, 1964, showed Beatles singles monopolizing the top five slots, a first and a lasting record. It’s more understandable knowing that American listeners were simply devouring British records made throughout 1963, as the UK recording dates show:
Billboard’s Top Five Singles, Week Ending April 4, 1964
1. “Can’t Buy Me Love” (1964)
2. “Twist and Shout” (1963)
3. “She Loves You” (1963)
4. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963)
5. “Please Please Me” (1963)
Somehow this legend obscures the comet’s tail: seven more Beatles singles listed throughout the top hundred. Swan cashed in on Capitol’s marketing: “She Loves You” bumped “Hand” off the top slot at the end of January; and by March, Vee-Jay scored with “From Me to You,” neither of which Capitol had yet released. Even a Vee-Jay subsidiary like Tollie put out “There’s a Place” and “P.S. I Love You,” and MGM hustled the old Hamburg Tony Sheridan tracks into success by February. Capitol was being punished for its oversight; although every company was simply working overtime to fill a demand that might have gobbled up even more records had there been any.
Finally, there was another Lennon-McCartney on Billboard’s top hundred: “World Without Love,” from Peter and Gordon (which Billy J. Kramer had rejected as too soft). And as famous as this Billboard top five record remains, even that was trumped down under, where the Beatles monopolized the top six Australian chart positions. As Americans dealt with this four-headed monster set loose over top forty radio, the British checked front pages for leaks from the movie set.
The group’s last day of shooting (April 24) pressed up against a TV special (Around the Beatles), Scottish dates in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and BBC radio tapings (From Us to You), before a three-week holiday in May, their last break of the year.
John, Cynthia, and young Julian Lennon had been living in a temporary London apartment that spring. John had bought a family home outside London and hired decorators to overhaul its interior. At least outwardly, he seemed to be investing in some fantasy of domesticity. The three of them finally moved into their new house, called Kenwood, in Weybridge, Surrey, but had to live up in the attic as renovations dragged on. It was yet another delayed homecoming. To soften the blow, Lennon took his wife off to Tahiti for a vacation, via Amsterdam and Honolulu, with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, a model he’d met on the film set. Epstein booked them as Mr. and Mrs. Leslie and Mr. Hargreaves and Miss Bond. During the first days of travel the press caught up with them in Hawaii, but after a first day getting used to their boat (“Cynthia and I were feeling sick and puked everywhere,” Harrison remembered), they had some privacy, swimming and snorkeling and sailing from island to island.28
June and July saw Australia and New Zealand erupt with echoes of the mania that had visited the Beatles in America (Cynthia had to finish settling into Kenwood alone with Julian). Nobody wanted to carry on without Ringo Starr, sidelined with tonsillitis, but the band was pressured to keep its commitments; Epstein could simply not figure when he could squeeze in rain dates with the year so crowded. A session man named Jimmy Nicol played at being a Beatle for three weeks until Ringo rejoined the tour. Reporters were waiting for the band when they returned to London. Lennon wanted to get the rumors out of the way first: they had not been pelted with eggs from “non-diggers.”
Unlike their first three albums, their fourth LP (to be called Beatles for Sale) competed for studio time with near-constant world touring between May and September. Tracks took shape as a patchwork of sessions scattered across several months between live gigs and TV shows. Two sessions just before their American tour inched them toward an album sequence, with two new songs and two new covers: on August 11, they worked up fourteen takes of “Baby’s in Black,” and three days later came “I’m a Loser” (eight takes), “Mr. Moonlight” (four takes), and “Leave My Kitten Alone” (five takes), which got held. On their way back to the States, they did a gig at the Opera House in Blackpool with a mod band called the High Numbers, soon to be the Who. The next morning, on August 18, they flew from London to San Francisco (with refueling stops in Winnipeg and Los Angeles), where nine thousand screaming fans greeted them.
In the six months since the Ed Sullivan Show appearances, North American audience fever had grown. That first trip had been a tease, and a marketing coup. For the summer, fans waited anxiously to see and hear them in their hometowns. Epstein booked twenty-seven concerts in twenty-five cities over thirty days, including such onetimers as Jacksonville, Florida, and Ontario, Canada, cities that would never see the band again. Booked at $50,000 per show in large municipal arenas, the Beatles grossed more than a million dollars in ticket sales alone. Beatlemania swelled: A Hard Day’s Night had proved a major summer hit, so they returned as titans, not upstarts. Beatlemania had only one setting: more.
Fan idolatry began to worry people, and not just the inner circle. As the Beatles worked their way through airports and hotels and found themselves even more hemmed in than before, there were fewer daring escapes, and increasingly complicated evasive maneuvers. The Beatles insisted that Epstein hire his own security detail after a shortage of policemen in Toronto put them at serious risk. Most local police forces were overwhelmed, and improvised with overtime detail, but all of them were learning the game as they went along. Everybody agreed: this was a completely new level of crowd numbers and hysteria, which made those chase scenes from A Hard Day’s Night look tame.
Perhaps Epstein thought the schedule was reasonable, but the sheer press of people proved exhausting, and summoned mixed emotions: this was adulation beyond the band’s wildest dreams, but it was also fierce and defensive daily work that involved enormous compromises to everyday dignities. And it put their fantasy America, the wild Chuck Berry world of burgers and shakes, where they had forged their love for the music, into vivid relief.
A young reporter named Larry Kane, from Miami, joined the tour, selected by Epstein as a regular because his business card made him look like the news director for Florida’s tiny WFUN. In truth, he was green, and ambivalent about his assignment—a hard-news guy who resented getting sent out on this teenybopper story. His basic decency turned him into a lifelong Lennon friend.
From way back, Lennon had had a coarse habit of insulting whoever approached him, as a way of screening out jerks, poking people to find out where they lived. This approach intensified with fame. Kane remembers the first time Lennon greeted him with scorched earth charm. Kane had flown from Miami to San Francisco on August 19. After a meeting of the press entourage with Derek Taylor, the PR liaison, he dropped by to meet the Beatles in their hotel suite, only to be accosted by Lennon. “Why are you dressed like a fag ass, man? What’s with that? How old are you?” Epstein turned red. Kane decided to punch back: “Well, it’s better than looking scruffy and messed up like you.” Lennon simply stared.
Kane played a hunch and switched subjects: he asked Lennon about Vietnam. This caught Lennon by surprise. Kane watched his face light up, and listened to a “scathing diatribe” against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, just passed on August 7. President Johnson had rammed the measure through Congress to begin escalating American troop buildup in Southeast Asia. “I was taken aback by the intensity of his anger and knowledge base,” Kane wrote, “and also by the eloquence of his protest.” Kane left not knowing what to think, but on his way back to his room he felt a tap on his shoulder: “Hey, really enjoyed the interview,” Lennon said, “specially about the war in Asia. Liked the talk. Look forward to more stuff. Sorry about the clothes bullshit.”29
The combination of Kane’s comeback and his challenging political question had won Lennon over. And it told Kane something peculiar about Lennon: he had a fervent political conscience, read the papers, and felt completely at ease discussing American world politics as President Johnson connived his way into the war. It would not be the last time the two discussed Vietnam.
Somewhere the band had mentioned that they liked jelly beans, and suddenly it was hard for them to get through a number without feeling the hard candy shells hitting their bodies onstage. The opening night of the tour, San Francisco’s Cow Palace, had to be stopped twice because the band was getting pelted. Police came onstage and pretended to impose order. Even at this early stage, Kane remembers, there was a quality of mania spinning out of control. Afterward, a plane was waiting to take the entourage to Las Vegas. “How did it feel out there?” Kane asked Lennon.
“Not safe,” Lennon replied. “Can’t sing when you’re scared for your life.”30
The Sahara Hotel was hopping with girls when the Beatles’ limousine pulled up in the early morning after their postconcert from San Francisco. Private hotel detectives shepherded the band in and up to the twenty-third floor, where Epstein had booked his typical entire floor for the Beatles and the touring party. Kane had barely fallen asleep before he awoke to a heavy knocking at 5 A.M. He opened his door to Neil Aspinall’s new roadie, Malcolm Evans. “We need you. Can you put on a tie and jacket?” Evans, Derek Taylor, and Aspinall asked him a favor: would he go down to the lobby and explain to a worried mother that her twin girls were all right—even though they’d been found unchaperoned in John Lennon’s bedroom? They were among a parcel of girls who had penetrated security and threatened to puncture the Beatles’ clean image with scorching headlines. Kane took a deep breath and bailed Lennon out, even though he had no idea what the circumstances may have been. This earned him a trusted place in the tour’s inner circle.
Another incident told of how Lennon tested even trusted confidants. During the flight from Las Vegas to Seattle, Kane heard the word “kike” leak out of the rear of the plane, where the Beatles and Taylor were seated. He heard it again and couldn’t contain himself. He headed straight to the Beatles’ small compartment, stuck his head in, and said, “Listen. I just wanted to say that I heard a word that really pisses me off. I’m Jewish, and I won’t stand for that crap. I mean, whoever said it, can’t you think before you talk?” Everybody blanched. Kane returned to his seat and figured he had just handed in his pass.
After a few minutes, Taylor came forward to put things right, taking the fall even though Kane knew it was not his voice. “Doesn’t matter. It was said nonetheless. I’m sorry,” Taylor replied. Soon Lennon came up to sit with Kane. “We had a relaxed and compassionate conversation about the roots of prejudice in Liverpool,” Kane recalled. Standing up to Jewish slurs was not Epstein’s style: he was treated like a brother for the rest of the tour. Even as a hard-core news guy, Kane was astonished at how big the Beatle story was as it kept unfolding. Epstein caved in and hired a private security detail at every concert. In Montreal, 150 people were treated for injuries after the crowd swarmed the band’s brief set. “American audiences were not just shrill and manic,” Kane remembered, “they seemed to want to devour their idols whole.”31
On their first trip to New York since doing The Ed Sullivan Show six months prior, Ronnie Bennett hooked up again with Lennon at the Warwick Hotel, their base for the area’s gigs in Forest Hills and Atlantic City. Murray the K called her to hitch a ride up to the Beatles’ suite so he could do interviews: the Ronettes, he knew, were on the band’s official guest list. When Ronnie walked into the hotel suite that afternoon, she remembers Lennon turning cynical about the vast array of refreshments. “We’re prisoners up here,” he said, “so they have to feed us well.” After Murray finished his yapping and had his photo taken with the Ronettes and the Beatles, John and George and Ronnie and the others sat down on the floor, spun records, and talked all afternoon.
By evening, Ronnie sensed a change come over the scene. “A lot of the people who’d been hanging around during the afternoon had already left, and as I looked around, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot more young girls in the suite than there were when the press was hanging around earlier. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that a whole new kind of scene was about to start.”32
One of the bedrooms seemed to exert a special pull. “C’mon,” Lennon said to her. “Don’t you want to see what’s so interesting?”
By this point, of course, all kinds of rumors swirled around the Beatles’ activities. They were well-known partiers, and any kind of date conferred immense status.
But the bedroom scene Ronnie described in her memoir reeks of adolescent exhibitionism. “When people saw that I was with John, they kind of moved aside, and that’s how I got my first clear view of the naked girl on the bed,” having sex with one of the Beatles’ entourage. “I guess it was enough to just be in the same hotel suite as them, as if that gave her something to tell her grandchildren.” For Ronnie, then a virgin, the whole spectacle had a surreal air, of deeply forbidden acts suddenly enacted as ritual. “This was 1964,” she wrote, “when you couldn’t even get films with that stuff in them—and here was an actual girl having naked sex in every different position!”
With Ronnie on his lap, on a “ringside seat,” Lennon couldn’t hide his arousal. She felt a mix of discomfort and odd curiosity. “I was all ready to leave the hotel, but for some reason I didn’t particularly mind staying, either. As strange as that whole situation was, I was never the least bit nervous around John. I felt secure around him.” For all his lust, she was moved by something else in him.
Lennon led her into his bedroom to “recapture” the atmosphere they had shared in London. “He stood behind my chair and let his hands fall down on the back of my neck. It felt so good that I had to remind myself that I couldn’t be doing stuff like this.” With all her might, she gently started telling John about her romance with Phil Spector. He interrupted. “I know all about you and Phil. I just thought you and I might have something, too.” Despite his persistence, she left without incident.
Lennon called her up the next day announcing a great escape, asking her advice on where to find some good eats. Ronnie picked John and George up and took them to her favorite barbecue haunt in Harlem, Sherman’s, at 151st and Amsterdam, where she and Lennon wordlessly settled into a friendship. She reported no more romantic encounters.33
A fifty-year vantage makes it hard to appreciate how suddenly everything was happening, and how much pressure Epstein felt about taking advantage of the moment. Martin asked for two albums per annum in addition to quarterly singles. At a time when pop was disposable, in a business sector where every flash of success was fleeting at best, the Beatles were constantly pitched the question “What will you do when the bubble bursts?” as if it were theirs to control, or they had any spare moments for reflection. Answering this question across America became a chore and then a joke and then a tiresome existential broken record.
According to press agent Tony Barrow, Lennon still insisted on humiliating his manager. John walked in on Epstein and Barrow one day, “beaming broadly,” shook Tony’s hand, and walked over to where Epstein was sitting. “At the last moment John’s hand plunged down to Epstein’s groin and he grabbed hold of his testicles and held on tightly. Epstein involuntarily gasped in pain and my eyes watered in sympathy. Still grinning broadly and gripping relentless John simply said: ‘Whoops!’ ” Shocked and disgusted, Barrow could barely speak. “This happened in 1964 at a point in time where John and the other Beatles still seemed to have a great deal of respect for Epstein—far too much, I thought, to do something like this to him, especially in front of any third party.” Like other staffers who recall such scenes, Barrow concluded that Lennon had deliberately humiliated Epstein in front of an employee. “If I had not been in the room I don’t think he would have bothered.”34 Flaunting perversion to both love interests and colleagues seems to have been a Lennon specialty.
Epstein’s ham-fisted scheduling led to disjointed recording sessions between bouts of travel. Three final sessions in late September and early October gave them enough tracks (fourteen) for the next album, although by this point it was happening in such a flurry that all sense of continuity evaporated. On the last day of September, they laid down three more originals: “Every Little Thing,” “What You’re Doing,” and “No Reply,” which Lennon had originally offered to Billy J. Kramer. October 2 and 3 saw them rehearsing and taping an appearance on the American TV show Shindig! On October 6 they whipped off “Eight Days a Week,” thirteen takes, during which a stray “I Feel Fine” guitar lick popped up, and two days later, “She’s a Woman” sprang out of them.
The next morning, on Lennon’s twenty-fourth birthday, they launched a seven-day tour of Britain opening in Bedford and finishing in Hull. October 18 found them back at EMI to work on “Eight Days a Week,” “Mr. Moonlight,” “Kansas City,” and five new numbers, two of which were originals: Lennon’s “I Feel Fine,” and McCartney’s “I’ll Follow the Sun.” The others were Carl Perkins’s “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” and, finally, Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love.” This streak finished off product for the Christmas market deadline and measured their determination at turning so many bullet points into solid work (even if slightly less pronounced than the Hard Day’s Night all-original breakthrough). And still they kept moving: the next day they mounted another week-long UK sprint, opening in Edinburgh and landing in Brighton. When they returned, they laid down “Honey Don’t,” remade “What You’re Doing,” and tore comic holes in the Christmas-record script that Tony Barrow had prepared for their fan club. Then they hit the stage again for a two-week tour, from Exeter through Dublin and back to Bristol. November eased up a little, but included three TV appearances—on Thank Your Lucky Stars, Top of the Pops, and Ready Steady Go!—a BBC radio taping, and Lennon’s appearances to publicize his now-best-selling book, In His Own Write.
In the UK, some of the biggest aftershocks from Beatlemania coursed through the unlikely world of high literary culture. To this crowd, a pop star making girls scream had fairly obvious apocalyptic overtones. But a pop star setting off debate about modern verse—now, that was something so far beyond the establishment’s grasp that their embrace seems almost craven. Michael Braun had became intrigued with some pages Lennon passed along to him during 1963 and showed them to his editors. The punning title gathered a sprawling assortment of absurdity through disjointed prose, cartoons, and verse that cleared the low hurdle of a quickie riding on its author’s notoriety.
Perhaps because the Beatles commanded enormous space across the country’s newspaper real estate, Bob Dylan seemed the far more likely music figure to assume the mantle of bard, or at the very least start issuing volumes of poetry. Already, Dylan attracted British esteem as a “poet,” long before this debate started up in America, and allowed skeptics to disdain Lennon as a mere pop star while Dylan still wore his acoustic folkie halo. Many writers gloss over how Dylan’s leap to rock ’n’ roll during the coming season came as a far greater shock to British sensibilities than it did to American ears. For Lennon to issue verse in book form ahead of Dylan had a kind of weird British advance revenge to it, as though they could not just conquer American music but best them at the word game as well, and who better to do so than the giant pop star whose brains were obviously way too advanced for this rock stuff he would surely grow out of?
Lennon and Dylan began to spar in the British imagination, the antic Scouser who always threatened to go round the bend against the oddly prolific American whose epic abstractions quite nearly absolved him of being Jewish. Since In His Own Write’s release on April 7, 1964, reviewers had gone overboard to praise Lennon’s unlikely literary success while conservative scribblers—like that old man on A Hard Day’s Night’s train—lambasted yet another example of youth’s ingratitude. In His Own Write became another Beatlemania sideshow that gave Lennon’s pop stature heft.
As it had in Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat, Lennon’s verse boasts such a loopy, scabrous energy people overlooked how much subversion lay embedded in its cryptic asides. Two quotes followed this first publication around. The first came from a review from London’s Times Literary Supplement: “It is worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and British imagination.” (Not many read the succeeding phrase: “Humorists have done more to preserve and enrich these assets than most serious critics allow.”)35 The other comes from Lennon himself, who arrived hungover to accept the Foyles Literary Prize at a luncheon, unaware that he was expected to give a formal speech. “Thank you, you’ve got a lucky face” was how the press quoted his mumbled thank-you, and the fiasco, a narrowly fumbled embarrassment, scored as a win.
McCartney wrote the dedication, declaring that absolutely none of it made much sense, and didn’t need to. In a blur, the term “Joycean” became attached to Lennon’s prose, as if he were somehow the great Irish bard’s bastard son, when the truth was Lennon had never so much as read anything by Joyce. When he finally did, his quote was priceless: “It was like finding Daddy.” Lennon and Joyce make a pair in how they contort many of the same techniques and treat language as a rubbery material through which they stretch their thoughts. But the Joyce label does a disservice to Lennon precisely because it springs completely unburdened by the influence; and while the means can be similar, the ends are completely different.
Paradoxically, an American Joyce scholar, James Sauceda, turned in the best analysis of Lennon’s prose in a book called The Literary Lennon: A Comedy of Letters (1983). Sauceda has a good feel for Lennon’s tactics and knows how and when to make the more enlightened Joyce comparisons. Lennon’s prose has the unusual quality of begging for more attention and threatening to suffer from overpraise. He clearly addressed many of these ideas better through music, even when you wish he’d written a “Dead Dog Walking” song. (The best musical analogy to “Unhappy Frank” might be “I Am the Walrus,” which is a good deal more oblique and less cunning.)
Tortured spellings turn into puns, and word mashing creates poetry out of unlikely collisions. Instead of “witty,” Lennon writes “writty,” mashing “witty” and “writing” or “written” into a single pregnant word. Sauceda notes how a lot of this overlaps with some of Joyce’s own wordplay, including some key words like “bored” for “born” in Finnegans Wake, so the serendipities can be striking. But they are only serendipities. Similarly, in “All Abord Speeching,” “abord” can mean both “about” and “aboard,” and “speeching” enfolds both “speaking” and “teaching.” Sauceda notes how many details Lennon gets correct in his gibberish back-cover autobiographical sketch, “About the Awful,” like Hitler’s single testicle (which Lennon calls a “Heatlump,” neatly combining the physical attribute and the reverse reproductive imperative).
Sauceda’s keen insights, however, don’t plumb the biographical aspects of Lennon’s work here; and now that Aunt Mimi’s pedantry and John’s Oedipal rage become clearer, several themes leap out. The first is Lennon’s fondness for dogs, both as a symbol for the Beatles (in the drawing on page 11, “Drawing Two”) and in morbid tales like “Good Dog Nigel.” In “Nigel,” he uses the name of his Quarry Bank mate Nigel Walley—the only witness to Judy’s death—for a sick verse about a happy dog who’s about to be killed, just as Mimi put his dog, Sally, down one weekend while he was away at Julia’s. To the Beatles and their circle, these references would have been sharp, piquant to the point of tragic.
Only McCartney would have identified with how bent humor can express the utter futility that follows losing one’s mother in adolescence. “Unhappy Frank” also doubles as a screed against “mother,” both Mimi and Julia, for overprotection and lack of attention, respectively: “Wart am I but a slave tow look upon with deesekfrebit all the peegle larfing and buzing me in front of all the worled.” Injecting pidgin German into this rant only magnifies the regimented enslavement portrayed as boyhood.
Having squeaked through the Foyles luncheon with a deathless misquote, Lennon agreed to appear with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on their experimental new television show, Not Only . . . But Also, at the end of November 1964. They set it up as a twist on the tired cliché of the author making a guest appearance merely to read from his book, and Lennon seemed relieved at not having to wear his Beatle mask. Moore prefaced Lennon’s appearance with an anticlimactic apology, as if readying the TV audience for some audacious experiment it couldn’t be trusted to enjoy, especially at a phase when rock stars couldn’t possibly put two sentences together. “Poetry and music,” he intoned drily, “this uneasy marriage of the arts has caused a lot of controversy for a long time; many opinions are for and many against. We leave you to judge for yourselves. . . . What we’re going to show you is a visualization and ‘musicification’ of a poem of a young poet named John Lennon. The poem is called, quite simply, ‘Deaf Ted, Danoota, (and me).’ ” Then Lennon began to read from In His Own Write, with the camera crosscutting to several different readers, with awkward pauses and miscued laugh lines going south—none of which distracted from the rhythmic authority of the verse. On the line “Sometimes we bring our friend, Malcolm,” actor Norman Rossington appeared with “Malcolm” scrawled across his forehead. Additionally, Rossington and Moore read “Unhappy Frank.” Right at the end of the program, as the credits were rolling to Moore’s signature tune “Goodbye-ee,” John flitted maniacally in front of the camera, as if escaping from his minders.