Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  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 Yo
u” 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.