The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  The Beatles Are Here!

  50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians, and Other Fans Remember

  —Edited by—

  PENELOPE ROWLANDS

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2014

  Also by Penelope Rowlands

  ANTHOLOGY

  Paris Was Ours: 32 Writers Reflect on the City of Light

  BIOGRAPHY

  A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters

  MONOGRAPHS

  Jean Prouvé: Visionary Humanist

  Eileen Gray: Modern Alchemist

  ILLUSTRATED BOOK

  Weekend Houses (with photographer Mark Darley)

  For Julian, always,

  & for my sisters in screaming:

  Vickie

  Joann

  Linda

  “All those beautiful songs that helped me exist . . .”

  —CYNDI LAUPER

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Tools of Satan, Liverpool Division by Joe Queenan

  Greil Marcus, rock critic

  We Saw Them Standing There by Amanda Vaill

  A Newspaper Article by Gay Talese

  In Love with Gorgeous George by Penelope Rowlands

  A Letter from Vickie Brenna-Costa

  Henry Grossman, photographer

  Good Bye, Mitzi Gaynor by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Jamie Nicol Bowles, fan

  Billy Joel, musician

  Swimming to John by Noelle Oxenhandler

  Gay Talese, reporter

  My Four Friends by Cyndi Lauper

  A Facebook Encounter

  Vickie Brenna-Costa, fan

  America’s Beatlemania Hangover by Debbie Geller

  “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, disc jockey

  Sister Mary Paul McCartney by Mary Norris

  Peter Duchin, bandleader

  Anne Brown, fan

  A Diary Entry by Anne Brown, age 15

  Springsteen’s Hair Stands on End by Peter Ames Carlin

  FUN by Véronique Vienne

  Vicky Tiel, fashion designer

  Tom Long, fan

  Janis Ian, musician

  A Way to Live in the World by Carolyn See

  Up, Up, Up by Lisa See

  Joann Marie Pugliese Flood, fan

  Into the Future by Pico Iyer

  Fran Lebowitz, nonfan

  Michael Laven, fan

  An E-mail from Phillip Lopate

  White Out by Judy Juanita

  Renée Fleming, soprano

  Where Music Had to Go by Anthony Scadutto

  Tom Rush, musician

  Thawing Out by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Laura Tarrish, fan

  Screening the Beatles by David Thomson

  Gabriel Kahane, composer and songwriter

  Vera, Chuck and Dave by Roy Blount, Jr.

  Linda Belfi Bartel, fan

  David Dye, radio show host

  The Back of the Album by David Michaelis

  Will Lee, musician

  Why Couldn’t They Leave Us Alone? by Sigrid Nunez

  Leah Silidjian, fan

  Independence Day, 1976 by Will Hermes

  CONTRIBUTORS

  SOURCES AND PERMISSIONS

  INTRODUCTION

  WE WERE THERE.

  We were there when the Beatles first landed on American shores, half a century ago.

  This book is about the impact of their arrival. It is a “scrapbook of madness,” in John Lennon’s famous words.*

  Our madness, and theirs.

  People who weren’t around then can scarcely imagine how it was when the Beatles came. How quickly they changed . . . everything.

  Suddenly, they were here. There. Everywhere. The band infiltrated the airwaves by way of AM radio, at first via just a few songs, including, notably, “She Loves You,” with its famous “Yeah, yeah, yeah” chorus and insistent, captivating beat. Two minutes and nineteen seconds that seemed to render almost everything, musically, that came before it obsolete.

  It erased so much.

  The world was so different then—as so many witnesses to the Beatles phenomenon attest in the following pages. The Atlantic seemed impossibly vast. There was no Internet, of course. News traveled by way of long-distance calls (rare because of the expense) and telegrams. Telegrams!

  Beginning in late 1963 the songs arrived, ultrafast, delivered to us via quick-talking DJs and in vinyl form—45s, EPs, LPs. Each album came in mono or stereo. Whatever the format, each Beatles song was a burst of fresh sound, with a danceable beat, sweet, easy lyrics. I can still recall how electrified—shocked!—I felt by the first one I ever heard; from its thrilling opening drum roll to its curious last chord, “She Loves You” took me somewhere else.

  One release followed another in staccato succession—“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Love Me Do,” “I Feel Fine,” “Eight Days a Week”—a sustained climax that went on and on. Which partly explains the intensity of the experience. Within a quick slice of time the band changed the way we dressed, moved, listened, thought. The way we were.

  One writer in these pages, Sigrid Nunez, likens the experience of Beatlemania to drinking a potion. It was that transformative and abrupt. Joe Queenan describes a revolution: “The Beatles swept away Pat Boone, Vic Damone, the Kingston Trio, doo-wop, and all that other twaddle in about thirty-six hours.”

  We carried around the Beatles’ songs on plastic transistor radios with their scratchy sound. We moved to the music. We came alive to it on boardwalks “down the shore” in New Jersey; in sleepy Southern towns; on farms in Oregon; in Detroit cityscapes. We blared it out to our American world from streamlined, finned, gas-guzzling cars; suburban houses with pristine lawns; urban apartments overlooking sooty alleys. And some of us heard it in our heads as we chased the Beatles down hotel corridors or yelled up to them from the sidewalks below.

  We were so primed to scream. As quite a few people in this collection, including “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, the legendary disc jockey, and the musician Billy Joel, remind us, the band’s arrival in February of 1964 seemed to awaken this country from a profound, shattering grief. President Kennedy had been assassinated only six weeks before. America was in shards.

  I remember coming home from school through the streets of Manhattan on the day JFK was killed, walking among hollow-eyed, tear-stricken adults. Grown-ups who had apparently emerged from a black-and-white horror film, lurching along, as if barely alive themselves.

  Within a few short months, I was running through those same New York streets with a pack of girls I scarcely knew, following the Beatles and other British rock and roll bands around town, shrieking at the top of our lungs.

  Which is how The Beatles Are Here! came about. Many years after the photograph on the cover of this book was published in the New York Times, I wrote about both that image and my Beatlemaniac years for Vogue. Several years later, the girls in the picture (actually, all but one) found one another again. We had stood side by side almost fifty years earlier on a sunny city street, fellow Beatlemaniacs, united in screaming. When we met again, through miraculous, Internet-era kismet, we felt a bond.

  One that endures to this day.

  Our story, among so many others, threads through this collection. It is our scrapbook of madness, comprised of written essays, interviews (the two can be distinguished in the pages that follow by the icons before each one: a microphone for interviews, a pen for written texts), and other fragments—including an email, a Facebook exchange, a handwritten diary entry. Some of the voices here are famous, others are not, but all touch on how profoundly affected we were by the arrival of the Beatles in our midst. And by “we,” I don’t mean just those who
experienced them firsthand: a few of these contributors weren’t even born when the band tore into town. Yet they, too, experienced them vividly, if at some remove.

  One person after another bears witness to a cultural event so enormous that it’s hard to imagine an equivalent. The writer Verlyn Klinkenborg exults—counterintuitively, at the very least—over not attending a performance of the band he revered when they played near his California town. For Véronique Vienne, a Frenchwoman who came to live in New York City just when the Beatles arrived, the group provided a soundtrack to a strange and surreal-seeming way of life.

  Singer Cyndi Lauper, standing distractedly by a highway near Kennedy Airport, missed seeing the band’s limousine as it roared by. No matter. Ringo, John, Paul, and George were omnipresent in her bedroom in a nearby Queens neighborhood in the fan photos she’d taped, adoringly, to the walls. It’s tempting to believe that, even in two-dimensional form, they asserted their power, awakening this future superstar to love and music.

  They did the same for so many of us.

  For me, as this book’s editor, culling this material was a quiet education, instructive in countless ways. It was fascinating to see how often disparate narratives aligned with each other, then diverged. And I was intrigued to learn from a host of musicians why the Beatles’ music was so powerful then—and remains so to this day.

  The singer and songwriter Janis Ian explains precisely how that chord works, the one that sends chills down our spines at the beginning of A Hard Day’s Night. The glorious soprano Renée Fleming, who has recorded her own stunning, dusky rendition of the Lennon-McCartney ballad “In My Life,” marvels at the perspicacity of the Beatles’ lyrics, as does the omnitalented young composer and songwriter Gabriel Kahane. And musician Tom Rush takes us poignantly back to the moment when folk music was the unlikely center of popular radio culture. It was doomed, of course. It was soon to be engulfed by you-know-who and the clamorous rockers that came after.

  These narratives hold a mirror up to our society as it was back then. The reflection in some ways came as a shock. How could I have lost sight of how jaggedly divided the country was in this period? The Civil Rights Act hadn’t yet been passed. De facto segregation was the order of the day, a full decade after the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, put an end—on paper, at least—to racial segregation in American schools.

  Numerous commentators recall the fraught racial atmosphere of the early 1960s. Yet for the novelist Judy Juanita, who grew up in East Oakland, California, and edited a Black Panther newspaper in college, the Beatles provided hope. To her, their music, with its roots in American R&B, provided gorgeous, unexpected proof that black music and culture, willfully ignored by the white media for so long, could be kept down no longer.

  The U.S. population itself was so different! Gay men and women were near invisible, at least to many. Female professionals were scarce. The Roman Catholic population, never quite in the mainstream, had been energized by the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, one of their own, to the White House. So many ethnic groups that are now such a vibrant part of American life—Latinos, Middle Easterners, Indians and others from the subcontinent—hadn’t yet arrived in significant numbers.

  One strong evocation of the era is provided by Gay Talese, these days a gray eminence, a man of letters, but then a fledgling journalist for the New York Times. Recalling the experience of reporting on the Beatles for that paper, Talese re-creates the New York they found on their arrival, with its riots over the draft and civil rights, its burgeoning working class, and its very own (these days, almost paltry seeming) one percent.

  Talese’s Beatles story, which accompanied that photo of us screaming girls, is reproduced in these pages. It yields some surprises. For one thing its language is surprisingly fresh, as if it had been written just yesterday, and it’s replete with the wry observations and witty turns of phrase that would make Talese—along with other writers such as Nora Ephron and Tom Wolfe who, as young newspaper reporters, also covered the Beatles’ arrival in New York—famous as a practitioner of what came to be known as the New Journalism.

  A glance at some of the other articles in the same issue of the Times demonstrates how radical Talese’s approach was for the period. On a smaller, yet telling, note, it’s disconcerting to see how many errors the piece contains, probably ones inserted in the course of editing the piece or setting it in type. (“Hot type,” as it was then.) Yet these glitches, too, have a point to make, emphasizing the exercise in time travel that is at the heart of The Beatles Are Here! For each typo reminds us that not so long ago—and well after four young men from Britain came along to upend our lives—we had no spell checks, or indeed computers, at all.

  I listen to the band’s songs as I write these words, wondering why they mattered so much then—and do to this day. I start with the first songs, the ones to which I, and so many, first awakened, then move on chronologically. Today, on the far side of the Beatles phenomenon, I’m struck by the purity of their musical offerings, the seductive simplicity of the stories they tell.

  In “Something,” there’s a woman who moves. Little else intrudes beyond the emotion that that movement, and person, inspires. In “Till There Was You,” there are birds, singing, and a female who makes the singer (Paul) hear them as if for the first time. The Lennon-McCartney songbook is full of those who want to hold us tight, be our man, whisper words of love. And they want to do so “Eight Days a Week”!

  These lyrics can be unabashedly romantic. Yet the Beatles themselves, even then, were somewhat different, as we would later learn. “They weren’t innocent at all,” remarks Anne Brown, one of a core group of die-hard Beatlemaniacs interviewed for this volume. As she wryly points out, “They did not want to hold your hand.”

  Oh, well. At least at first, they pretended they did. Later their music darkened, becoming metallic, out of control by comparison. And psychedelia, which the Beatles would soon take up—or is it the other way around?—seemed to lead straight to the apocalypse. It deconstructed the mind, each individual, all the world, and it presaged the violence to come.

  But most of the music that acts as a subliminal soundtrack to The Beatles Are Here!—the songs evoked over and over by writers and fans in these pages—was written before rock music darken and metallic, out of control . . .

  In 1964, when the Beatles first landed on our shores, America was reeling, in mourning, divided against itself. Some of us, growing up, felt we needed to run—away from our homes and families, toward something new. No wonder the band meant as much to us as it did! We needed its simple, hand-holding message. We needed its love.

  And there it is, in the Beatles’ gentle early songs: “Please Please Me,” “All My Loving,” you name it. Each is a distinct universe, shiny and pristine, each one a haven. You can walk right in, and be safe.

  Which I think partly explains why these musicians mattered so much then—and still dominate half a century on. Their music seduced us all those years ago. It won us over. Then it changed just as radically as its audience did, moving through violence, protest, drugs, spiritual awakening, and more. It brought us to the next phase, long before some of us even suspected that change was in the air.

  It’s amazing, yet entirely right, that this band is still on top. The Beatles Are Here! indeed. In many ways, they never left. Today, they’re as vivid, appealing, and powerful as the very first song of theirs that some of us ever heard:

  “She Loves You.”

  We loved them.

  We were there.

  * When asked in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview where he and Yoko Ono would like to be when they were sixty-four, Lennon said, “I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland, or something like that, looking at our scrapbook of madness.”

  Tools of Satan, Liverpool Division

  by Joe Queenan

  MY FATHER WOULD not let me and my three sisters watch the Beatles when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 196
4. His official reason for imposing this interdiction was because the Catholic Church had identified the Beatles as tools of Satan. This was strange because even at that very early juncture, the Beatles, with the possible exception of John, seemed quite harmless and even cuddly. I cannot recall in what capacity, or through what specific channel, the Church had singled out the Beatles as minions of Lucifer; their proscription may very well have obtained only at the Tri-State level, with reports of their villainy appearing in a popular Philadelphia publication, the Catholic Standard & Times, which kept tabs on satanic activity in the Delaware Valley.

  Whatever his reasoning, my father, a devout though not especially satisfactory Catholic, told us in advance that he would be commandeering our tiny black-and-white television on each of the three consecutive Sunday nights in question, preventing us from participating in one of the most famous events in the history of the medium, if not the planet. He was devout, he was doctrinaire, and he was breathtakingly mean.

  My older sister says that I circumvented this edict by sneaking over to our uncle Jerry’s house and watching the Beatles on his television set on that first Sunday evening. I seem to recall that my three sisters, fourteen, nine, and six at the time, got left out in the cold, an injustice that may have scarred them for life. They have no clear memory of seeing that first show. But I have never actually raised the question with them. My uncle was no more a fan of pop music than my father—he was the only Republican in our family and positively worshipped the duplicitous, vindictive Richard Nixon—but he was not an out-and-out jerk. He recognized that these broadcasts were important to us, and he treated them with commensurate gravity. He understood that things are serious to those who take them seriously, even if they seem frivolous or ridiculous to you personally.

  Moreover, as a hotshot salesman for Philadelphia Gas & Electric, he knew a hot product when he saw one. He could see what was coming—a tidal wave—and he understood that it was time to get out of the way. The Fifties were over, the age of the silver-throated crooner had passed, and the Big Bands were not coming back. I seem to recall my uncle snickering at the Beatles’ silly hair and cutie-pie laminated suits during their legendary Ed Sullivan appearances. But in no other way did he interfere with our viewing pleasure.