At 6:30 p.m. Friday, local resident Leon Posey and his friend Emerson Lashley went to a barbershop. While Lashley watched from the barber’s chair, Posey stepped outside to see what was going on down the street. Lashley recalled, “The next thing I knew, then I heard some shots. Then I just saw him fall.”15 Posey’s was the first death. A crowd had been throwing rocks at the LAPD, believing the police had orders not to shoot, and the police had panicked. Charles Fizer, a member of the R&B group the Olympics, which had recently released the original “Good Lovin’,” was shot to death on his way to rehearsal. Using guns stolen from gun shops, rioters shot sniper-style at officers and helicopters.
Comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory wrote in his memoir Callus on My Soul that he
decided to head up to Watts and try to help in any way I could. The first thing I saw when I got there was a little Black boy standing over a body, crying. As I got closer to the scene, I found out that the little boy was crying over the headless body of his father … I don’t know exactly how it happened, but at some point I found myself right between riot-helmeted police and a group of very angry, armed Black men. This confrontation was happening in a housing project; clearly, innocent people were going to die in this standoff if someone did not stop them. I walked between the two groups and tried to calm things down, but after I’d walked about one hundred feet, bullets started to fly. I kept walking, even when I felt a burning pain in my leg. It took me a few more minutes to realize that I had been shot. I couldn’t believe it! After all the marching I’d done in the South, after all the times I’d been arrested by redneck deputies in the past four years, here I was shot by a Black man in California! But the face of that little boy crying over his father’s corpse, and the faces of all the little children of Watts who were in the line of fire, overshadowed any physical pain. I kept walking. Either side could have easily killed me, but I think the brothers were as shocked as I was that I’d been hit. When I yelled at them, “Alright, goddamn it. You shot me, now go home!” they turned and started going back into their homes.16
At 12:55 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning, a car drove into the Guardsmen, at which point they were instructed to load their weapons and affix bayonets to their rifles. Looters were now shot, and the cases against the Guardsmen later ruled as justifiable homicide. A hundred fire engine companies entered the area. By 3:00 a.m., the Guardsmen numbered more than three thousand, but the bedlam continued. The riot had spread to fifty square miles.
By 11:30 p.m. Saturday night, there were 13,900 National Guardsmen present. On Sunday, August 15, the Guardsmen, LAPD, and Sheriff’s Office secured the area. That day, Governor Pat Brown walked through the neighborhood rubble. On Monday morning Magnificent Montague switched his catchphrase to “Have mercy, baby!”
Over the course of six days, thirty-one thousand to thirty-five thousand adults had, at some point, engaged in the riots. Thirty-four people were dead, twenty-five of them black. A thousand were hospitalized and four thousand arrested. Six hundred buildings were damaged or destroyed, the equivalent of more than forty million dollars in property damage. The governor’s McCone Commission report said the causes of the riots had included high unemployment, bad schools, poverty, inequality, bad housing, housing discrimination, and “a deep and longstanding schism between a substantial portion of the Negro community and the Police Department.”17
Watching the riot on TV, Frank Zappa wrote “Trouble Every Day,” in which he sings that it happened because all Watts residents could hope for was to grow up to be a janitor. Phil Ochs sings in “In the Heat of the Summer” that anger, greed, drink, and police brutality all played a part, and the community had been down so long that they had to make somebody listen.
Watts resident Tommy Jacquette said,
People keep calling it a riot, but we call it a revolt because it had a legitimate purpose. It was a response to police brutality and social exploitation of a community and of a people … People said that we burned down our community. No, we didn’t. We had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here trying to exploit and oppress us. We did not own this community. We did not own the businesses in this community. We did not own the majority of the housing in this community. Some people want to know if I think it was really worth it. I think any time people stand up for their rights, it’s worth it.18
Victoria Brown Davis, an eighteen-year-old Watts resident at the time, said, “The mood of the people after the riots? Some of them were still angry, wondering what was it all for. Because now they didn’t have the stores they had frequented or the facilities they needed.”19
On his ranch in Texas, a stunned and demoralized LBJ didn’t answer the phone for the first two days of the riots. “How is it possible? After all we’ve accomplished? How can it be?” he said to aide Joseph Califano.20 He told another aide, “I have moved the Negro from D+ to C−. He’s still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out on the streets. Hell, I’d be there, too.”21 To Martin Luther King Jr., Johnson said, “There’s no use giving lectures on the law as long as you’ve got rats eating on people’s children and unemployed and no roof over their head and no job to go to and maybe with a dope needle in one side and the cancer in the other.”22
The following September, Johnson made the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) a Cabinet-level agency, but he knew his Great Society had been dealt a devastating blow. About two weeks before the riots, on July 30, he had signed the Medicare bill; and the following week, on August 6, MLK was there with him when he signed the Voting Rights Act, which finally ensured black electoral power in the South. But within the very same week that the most powerful civil rights legislation in the country’s history had been enacted, the riots frightened many white voters and sent them in droves out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican camp for the next generation. The many riots that followed over the rest of the decade would transform numerous inner cities into burned-out war zones that would never recover.
16
Help!
Lennon records his theme song for the Beatles’ second film, released July 29, and the group has two very different visits, with the Byrds and Elvis, in Los Angeles, on August 24 and 27.
The Beatles held their place at the “toppermost of the poppermost,” as they called it, by maintaining the same staggering output they had the year before—another two albums, another movie, more huge tours, a second book of short humor pieces by Lennon. Lennon-McCartney’s songwriting company, Northern Songs, was floated on the British stock exchange. “Let’s write a swimming pool today,” they’d say.1 “I always liken songwriting to a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” McCartney later commented. “We’d be amazed to see what kind of rabbit we’d pulled out that day.”2 Their self-titled Saturday morning cartoon debuted, and while the Beatles initially detested it—Starr was painted as a big-nosed buffoon—it would drum their music into the heads of subsequent generations through syndication over the next couple of decades.
On their tours, police barricades had to be set up at the hotels the band was staying in, to keep the throngs at bay; some kids tried to climb the sides of the buildings. The hotels were besieged with fan mail; sheets and doorknobs were stolen as mementos. Evenings might start with a helicopter ride descending into a sea of exploding flashbulbs. After the concert was the daily escape in delivery truck, armored car, or ambulance. Then, after the flight to a new city, perhaps they’d take it easy by playing Monopoly or watching TV. Or maybe it’d be time for “Satyricon,” as Lennon would later dub their escapades, referencing Fellini’s surreal film about debauchery in ancient Rome.3
A Hard Day’s Night contains just the barest hint of what went on backstage. Lennon offhandedly sniffs a bottle of Coca-Cola on a train, a gag presumably no Beatlemaniac of the era understood. When McCartney berates Starr for allowing his grandfather to go to a gambling casino, he rues, “He’s probably in the middle of some orgy by now!” to which the other B
eatles cry, “Orgy? Oh yeah!” and run out the door. In real life, Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the Ronettes, relates in her memoir the night Lennon brought her into the back of the group’s hotel suite, where a crowd had gathered around a member of the Beatles’ entourage having sex with a woman on a bed. “This was 1964, 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!” When the innocent Spector gasped “Oh my God” in a mixture of disgust and fascination, Lennon quickly escorted her out.4 Whenever reporters witnessed improprieties, the Beatles kept them quiet by giving them exclusives—or free hookers, as they did one time in Atlantic City.5
But as success became commonplace it lost its thrill, leaving just the exhaustion of relentless touring and record deadlines. Fame also prompted the return of Lennon’s father, who had disappeared on him when he was five. Freddie Lennon looked a lot like his son, if his son had lived sixty years with one foot in the gutter and had lost his teeth. On June 24, Lennon released his second volume of writing, A Spaniard in the Works, which includes the poem “Our Dad,” in which Lennon throws his father out, calling him a clown and a ponce, and his father in turn calls John’s mother a whore. On December 31, Freddie tried to make some money by issuing a single on Pye Records (the Kinks’ label) called “That’s My Life (My Love and My Home),” perhaps in response to Lennon’s “In My Life.” Freddie’s B side seemed to be a reprimand to his boy: “The Next Time You Feel Important” asserted that kings come and go and glory fades away, but only God remains.
Beyond his father, the daily crush of people Lennon had to navigate was maddening, from government officials who threatened to leak Beatles scandals to the press unless they met with the officials’ kids, to darker sycophants lurking in the wings. Richard Lester recalled, “I saw it happen to Paul McCartney once—the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, trying to persuade him to take heroin. It was an absolutely chilling exercise in controlled evil.”6
Former groupie-author Pamela Des Barres writes in her memoir about seeing Lennon that year, when she was a teenage Beatlemaniac. “We had to get past the Beatle Barricade and onto someone’s personal property so we could prowl the Bel Air [Calif.] hills and FIND THE BEATLES!!!… On the way down the hill, a limousine passed by, and I saw John Lennon for an instant. He was wearing his John Lennon cap, and he looked right at me. If I close my eyes this minute, I can still see the look he had on his face. It was full of sorrow and contempt. The other girls were pooling tears in their eyes and didn’t notice, but that look on John Lennon’s face stopped my heart, and I never said a word … The look on John’s face made me grow up a little, and I worked hard in school and decided to get a part-time job.”7
* * *
In the Beatles’ second movie, the sacrificial ring from a bloodthirsty cult lands on Starr’s finger, and the sect resolves to kill him. Most of the screen time features the boys trying to escape the villains in what was intended as a parody of the James Bond series. Originally the film was to be entitled Eight Arms to Hold You, a pun both on the number of Beatle arms and the arms of Kali, the Hindu goddess. But while many Beatlemaniacs may not have minded being held by all four Beatles simultaneously, some wise soul came up with the less creepy title Help! The release of “Help Me, Rhonda” on March 8 may have subliminally contributed. Another “help” song, “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” was released on April 23.
John banged out the theme in one night that April, just as he had written the theme to A Hard Day’s Night in one evening a year earlier. At the time, Lennon didn’t think much about it. But a comparison of the two tracks shows him feeling galvanized in the earlier song and desperate twelve months later.
Journalist Maureen Cleave, with whom Lennon was having an affair, asked him why he never used words with more than one syllable, so he included “insecure,” “independence,” “self-assured,” and “appreciate” in the lyrics.8 She still wasn’t impressed, which was probably one reason he liked her.
Lennon sings that when he was younger he never needed help, but now he’s changed his mind and opened up the doors. The part about being younger may have been inspired by the chorus of Dylan’s “My Back Pages.” And as for the “doors,” they could have been inspired by Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception, about his experiences with hallucinogens. The book takes its title from the line by poet William Blake “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” Lennon wrote the song two weeks after his first acid trip. Perhaps when Lennon and Harrison recounted their LSD experience to friends, someone told them to check out Huxley’s book. While psychedelics and the literature about them were still largely unknown, McCartney’s good friend Barry Miles worked at Better Books, one of London’s countercultural hubs, where Ginsberg read that spring.
The group recorded “Help!” in a four-hour session at Abbey Road on April 13. The other Beatles encouraged Lennon to speed it up to make it more pop. McCartney added a countermelody; he and Harrison sang the lyrics a half beat before Lennon did. On the twelfth take, Harrison added the lead guitar arpeggios, and then overdubbed the descending guitar notes in the vein of Nashville’s Chet Atkins.9
Rolling Stone later rated it the twenty-ninth greatest song of all time. It was a precursor to the stark honesty of Lennon’s solo album Plastic Ono Band. When Lennon recorded that album, in the midst of undergoing “primal scream” psychotherapy, he remarked that the lyric of “Help!” was still “as good now as it was then. It is no different, and it makes me feel secure to know that I was aware of myself then.”10
The genius of the group was that, at the height of Beatlemania, when they were the most successful band on earth, they let us in on their insecurities. While the lyrics were simple, they were no longer adolescent. Their music was now adult; they acted their age.
The song was so strangely confessional for its time that it’s surprising that it became one of the top five worldwide best sellers of the year. But it resonated because it mirrored the insecurity of the culture at large. To parents who had survived the Depression and World War II, America’s rampant consumerism represented security, but it left many of their children feeling empty as they began to question age-old assumptions about sex, patriotism, race, religion, and drugs. Soon the baby boomers would begin seeking out new cures to their anomie. “Help!” served as both Lennon’s and his generation’s theme song as they journeyed through the many self-help options the new global village offered, from pharmacology to psychotherapy, religion, meditation, and activist politics.
“Help!” resonated, too, because of the camaraderie implicit in the group’s performance. Wrote critic Dave Marsh, Lennon “sounds triumphant, because he’s found a group of kindred spirits who are offering the very spiritual assistance and emotional support for which he’s begging. Paul’s echoing harmonies, Ringo’s jaunty drums, the boom of George’s guitar speak to the heart of Lennon’s passion, and though they can’t cure the wound, at least they add a note of reassurance that he’s not alone with his pain. You can make some great music on that basis. And they did.”11
* * *
Help! cost twice as much to make as A Hard Day’s Night, and critics had high hopes for the film. Night had bowled them over, and the movie that director Richard Lester made afterward had just won the Cannes Palme d’Or, the grand prize at the world’s premiere film festival.
The Knack … And How to Get It (released June 3) was far more honest about Beatlemania than A Hard Day’s Night could afford to be, since the Beatles movies needed to uphold a wholesome image for the group’s young fans. The Knack, on the other hand, opens with a neurotic nerd (Michael Crawford) watching in awe as an endless stream of women wait to enter the apartment of the domineering rock star (Ray Brooks) who lives upstairs. Whenever a young lady leaves the rocker’s room after a tryst, he solemnly pl
aces a medallion around her neck and gives her a stamp for her stamp book, Lester’s metaphor for how “bagging a Beatle” was the ultimate validation for the proto-groupies.
The nerd asks the rock star to teach him “the knack” of seducing women—until they become rivals for the affections of a young lady (Rita Tushingham) just arrived in London from the hinterlands. The film was Lester’s take on the sexual revolution, symbolized by a surreal set piece in which the characters push a giant iron bed through the city while a Greek chorus of elders voices its disapproval.
With stunning black-and-white photography by David Watkins (who would go on to shoot Help! in color), haunting score by Bond composer John Barry, silent gags and frenzied Pop Art editing, it was a hit with the New York Times, Newsweek, and most reviewers, though the rock star’s misogyny dates it today for some. Ironically, it was based on a play written by a woman, Ann Jellicoe.
Unfortunately, such zest was not to be found in Help! because, as Lennon later explained, “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast … and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just all glazed eyes, giggling all the time. In our own world.”12
The screenplay that Charles Wood and Marc Behm came up with was not as witty as A Hard Day’s Night’s Oscar-nominated script by Alun Owen, and as weed replaced speed, the boys were not inspired to match the barrage of one-liners and asides that delighted in the first film. Now they were bored with the filming process, running off to sneak hits as often as possible. In fact, Help!’s quirky humor often arises from how the deadpan foursome can’t even be bothered to act. So while Bob Dylan’s gift of pot revolutionized the group’s music, it seems that pills were better for making classic films.
Richard Lester was thus forced to pad out the movie with the antics of other comedians. As Lennon commented, “It was like putting clams in a movie about frogs.”13 There are nice touches, such as the Beatles’ fantasy pad, in which each Beatle has his own section of a large one-room apartment in a different color. Harrison’s has grass on the floor, which a landscaper mows with a pair of chattering teeth. Starr’s has vending machines. Lennon’s bed is one of the more interesting ones in cinema: a sunken pit in the floor with steps leading down and a mini bookcase. The film inspired The Monkees TV show, which would later be credited with making hippies safe to parents. Lester’s zany Technicolor style was also emulated by the TV show Batman and the next generation of advertising.
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 20