Up, Up, Up
by Lisa See
ON AUGUST 23, 1964, my father and his girlfriend took me to see the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. I was nine years old, a graduate of third grade. I wore a jumper, a long-sleeved white blouse with an embroidered collar, and patent leather Mary Janes. I held my dad’s hand as we walked up, up, up through an effervescent and animatedly delirious river of girls—who were only a couple of years older than I was, but old enough to make me feel like I was still a little kid—until we reached the very top of the Bowl. We sat in the second to the last row of seats. The Beatles were so far away that they looked like little toy soldiers no more than two inches high. I hated all the screaming. I mean, SCREAMING. We could barely hear the songs.
I was not a Beatles fan. At the time, the musical taste in my mother and stepfather’s house ran to Little Richard, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Gary “U.S.” Bonds, mariachis and cojuntos, and Pacific jazz. My dad, who lived in a bungalow in Venice, liked to listen to pop music on his transistor radio while he painted. He often sang or whistled along to the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” and Dion’s “The Wanderer.” My aunt, who was thirteen or so, loved the Beach Boys—a local group—so I loved them too. As for the Beatles, I thought they were dopey. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? Yuck! “She Loves You”? So girlie! But I guess my dad thought the concert would be a nice treat for me . . . or maybe his girlfriend, an ethnomusicologist, was doing research.
I don’t recall the opening act(s). This morning, when I looked online to see if I could find out, people seem to have all kinds of guesses: Sonny and Cher? The Righteous Brothers? (Perhaps we were there to see the Righteous Brothers, because my dad loved them.) Back then, the Hollywood Bowl had a large reflecting pool in front of the stage. What I remember most about the concert—apart from covering my ears and feeling very superior—is that girls started jumping into the pool, either in a desperate attempt to reach the Beatles or from their hysteria. Security guards hauled the girls out of the water, and even from so far away they looked like half-drowned cats. Dripping wet, they still struggled and fought, arms stretched out, legs flailing, to touch their favorite Beatle. I couldn’t imagine doing anything so dumb. All around us, girls cried, screamed, wiped their eyes, screamed, held their cheeks, screamed, held onto each other, and screamed some more. I couldn’t imagine doing any of those things either. (But not many years later, when I was a teenager myself, I would scream, jump, and dance at Cream, Hendrix, and Stones concerts. No public sobbing, though.)
On YouTube, I found photographs, a few clips, as well as the entire recording of the concert. The Beatles came on at 9:30 and played for just thirty minutes before being whisked away. In the audio, you can hear John, Paul, and George tuning their guitars. They sing “All My Loving,” “Twist and Shout,” and “You Can’t Do That.” Between every song, they take deep synchronized bows. (I’m sorry, but they still look like total dweebs.) At one point, John says, “The next song we’re going to sing is an oldie . . . from last year.” Then the boys break into “She Loves You.” Later, Paul encourages the girls in the audience to clap their hands, stamp their feet, and “make as much noise as you’d like ’cause it’s not our place anyway.” You can hear them go wild as he sings the opening bars to “Can’t Buy Me Love.” The Beatles must have been on the road for some time already, or perhaps their voices were strained from trying to sing above the cacophony of screams, but both John and Paul sound hoarse.
It’s odd to look back at that time now. As a country, we were still so innocent, as folks like to say. It had only been nine months since John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and more terrible things were about to come, but in that moment the future still looked bright and promising. My mother and stepfather fulfilled the American Dream by buying a house in Topanga Canyon, and I was enrolled in fourth grade in a new school. Right around the corner was the release of A Hard Day’s Night, which would “loom large in our family legend.” (See my mom’s piece earlier in this volume.)
When I was in fifth grade, a new boy joined our class and was assigned the seat next to mine. His dad was an artist, whose photo would be included on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. That same summer, my stepfather would go to Haight-Ashbury and come home a very changed man, with armloads of very different music. Not long after, I would smoke pot for the first time with my grandfather and the rest of the family. I was twelve.
Today the Hollywood Bowl’s reflecting pool has been replaced with exclusive box seats. My husband and I are fortunate to have one of those boxes. Eight summer nights a year, we invite friends to join us for concerts. I often tell people about my experience seeing the Beatles from the second to the last row. If they are of a certain age, they think it’s cool. But if my son comes and brings a date, she looks at me as though I’m the oldest person on earth. Perhaps I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joann Marie Pugliese Flood, fan
(the girl on the far left in the photo)
I HEARD THEY were a sensation. It was near the end of ’63.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” was what we heard first. The music was upbeat. It was happy. There was something about it that just pulled you right in. There was something about the sound. It was very different and unique.
I went to my local record store in the Bronx. I said, “This group, the Beatles? I heard their album’s coming out. I want you to hold one for me.” When the store owner called to tell me the album was in, I was so excited I ran to the store. I don’t think I’d ever seen a picture of them at that point. I was just so excited about hearing more of their music.
When I saw the cover of Meet the Beatles with their faces half-shadowed out and their hair so long I thought, “How different! How cute!” There was something adorable about each one of them. But when I looked at Paul McCartney, I thought, “Oh boy!” He was just so cute and sweet looking. His eyes were so dreamy. There was just something about those eyes and that face. From that moment on he won my heart.
Vickie and I had known each other since we were four or five years old. We became best friends and were really close. We were together all the time. Vickie was at the apartment of her aunt—we called her “Auntie”—in the same building as my parents. I knocked on the door and Vickie and her cousin answered. “Vickie, look! Meet the Beatles!” Now we were over the top. That’s how it started, really. We’re staring at the album like they’ll come out and talk to us. We played it, and screamed, “They’re great! They’re great!” We just loved the sound.
I HAD A big, reel-to-reel Webcor tape recorder and I used it to tape The Ed Sullivan Show. Vickie came to my house and we sat side-by-side on the floor and screamed in unison as we watched. My father was holding his ears because we were so loud. I turned off all the lights in the room and started taking pictures with my Kodak Brownie from the TV screen. We were so excited when we saw how the photos came out.
My father was in construction. He was a bricklayer and most of his work was in Manhattan. One day, after working in the lobby of the Warwick Hotel, he came home and said, “Guess what? I saw your friends the Beatles at work today. I was working in the lobby when this elevator door opens up and four guys came walking through.”
He said, “You know, they’re all kind of homely looking, except that one you like. You know, Paul? He was kind of cute.”
Vickie, me, and a few other friends from school started running around to different hotels and someone on the street stopped us and said he was selling Beatles’ mementos. The owner of the Riviera Idlewild Hotel, which was opposite the JFK International Arrivals building, sold forks, dishes, and bath towels that he said had been used by the Beatles. Each item came with an affidavit from the manager saying that it had been used by the band when they stayed in his hotel. I bought a piece of towel with a photo of Paul McCartney attached. I think I paid a dollar for it.
I still have that and a lot of other Beatles memorabilia, including my concert t
icket stubs. My uncle Jack worked for BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation, now British Airways]. They had a Beatles Bahamas Special after the band finished filming Help! in Nassau and were on their way back to London. My uncle gave me a BOAC Welcomes Aboard the Beatles, March 1965 menu from their flight. They served fresh Canadian salmon with mayonnaise.
WE WENT TO the concert in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, on August 28, 1964. Vickie’s parents drove us. It was just crazy, pandemonium, with people screaming so loud you couldn’t hear a thing. We couldn’t wait to hear the Beatles. We didn’t really want to hear those “other guys” first but then later my cousin, Linda Belfi, said “Oh, they weren’t too bad.” It turns out “they” were the Righteous Brothers.
The concert is like a blur. We were sitting pretty far away from the stage. I think the Beatles were helicoptered in. They only played for about forty-five minutes. (I also went to their concert at Shea Stadium the following year.)
Vickie, my cousin Linda, and I decided to go down to the city on September 20. We knew the Beatles were going to be at the Paramount Theatre giving a benefit concert that evening, so we decided to hang out. They were staying at the Delmonico Hotel and we thought somehow we might see them. We wanted to be part of the whole scene. I took pictures of the hotel and crowd.
Linda made the sign. She’s the girl on the right who has on an “I Love George” button. Back then she lived in Monsey, New York, up in Rockland County. Her father dropped her off at my house in the Bronx. We were going to take the train into the city. She had the sign and we were just so excited. I think she’d made the sign at her house in Monsey.
When she showed me the sign I said, “Guess what?” She had spelled the band’s name B E A T E S. I got some Magic Marker and I put a little L in. You can see in the photo that it’s small.
When we got to the hotel, we stood behind the police barricade and set up the sign. The curtains would move. I remember a hand waving out of the window on the fourth or fifth floor and everyone screaming.
I definitely remember a guy walking by with a camera. He saw the sign and he saw us and said he wanted to take a picture. He said he was a photographer for . . . but we didn’t hear him. “Are we going to be in the newspaper?” we asked. He said, “Yeah, you probably are. Look for it this week.”
Vickie and I were buying the New York Daily News for weeks, and the Post, too, looking and looking but it never appeared. My father read both papers regularly and he checked them, too. We never knew it was the New York Times. Or that the photo would become somewhat iconic.
THE BEATLES WERE very nonintimidating. They were cute. I loved their voices, their harmonies, and their British accents. They were very sweet and I think that was part of their appeal to girls our age. It was about love. They were writing from their hearts, without pyrotechnics and costume changes, and that’s what I loved. It was rock ’n’ roll, just music from the heart.
Most of us were innocent. A lot of us girls were probably between thirteen and fifteen—that was probably the average age. We weren’t sexually active, we didn’t have boyfriends.
I wasn’t a fantasy person who would fall in love with someone they didn’t know. But there was just something about them. . . . I even remember guys at my school who were really taken by them. You had your favorite and whoever that was you had a love crush on him. You thought, “Maybe I’ll get to meet him one day.”
I know a lot of girls thought that if she could only meet her Beatle he’d fall in love with her and she’d get to marry him. He’d choose her out of, you know, 500 million other girls. I always thought that was a little farfetched. I was more of a realist.
Years later, when my daughter Kristin was sixteen, I took her to hear Paul McCartney when he played in Tempe, Arizona. When they came on stage she was in awe. She said, “This is the best concert I’ve ever been to.” We stood up, both of us, and waved our arms back and forth and sang the songs at the top of our lungs. She later told me, “Mom, I loved watching your eyes light up and you were so very happy.” It gave her a glimpse into my teen years. I loved being able to share that part of my life with her.
I THINK IT was in October 2007 that Vickie called and said, “You’ve got to get a copy of Vogue magazine, the August issue. Call me back when you get it.” I said, “Vickie, I haven’t seen you in ten or fifteen years, you don’t say ‘Hi, how’re you doing?’ You just say to get Vogue magazine? This is crazy!”
She told me to call her before I opened it, but I looked anyway. I thought it must have something to do with the Beatles. I turned to the article and all of a sudden I saw that picture and I thought, “Oh my God, there we are!” Then I saw your name and realized you must be the girl who was in the middle with the reddish hair.
Honestly, when Vickie called me it came at a time in my life that my heart was so very broken. I was devastated. My daughter, Kristin, had cancer. It, along with the chemo, was ravishing her body. At that point I was so depressed.
I hadn’t thought of the Beatles in a long time. . . . When I saw the Vogue article it pulled me up. It was a little bit of a positive kick. It kind of brought all that happiness back and that fun and that excitement. It really lifted my spirits.
I remember making a photocopy of the article and sending it to my daughter. I was so excited. I was trying to make her happy. I knew that the article and photo would do just that. She grew up with a mother who loved the Beatles. Every birthday I would play her the song “Birthday” by the Beatles, or sing it to her, and it became a tradition.
Kristin passed away a couple of months later, in January 2008, when she was thirty-four. She was my only child. After she had passed, I was back here and very depressed. I was so down and distraught, I can’t even tell you.
Then my neighbor told me about a local Arizona group he heard called Marmalade Skies that plays Beatles songs. They’re not imitating the Beatles, they’re a tribute band. I thought, “I have to find out more about this group!” I signed up for their e-mail notifications. Believe it or not, the first one I received had that photo of us in it! There we all were, screaming behind the sign.
I just fell in love with this band. They’re really great musically and just really nice people—all seven of them. I got to know them over the past years and it brought back some fun and some joy and some happiness. They just love the Beatles and were influenced by them growing up. One of the band members told me, “This is the best music in the world. The magic is in the music.”
I don’t think of things as coincidences. I think of things as being spiritual and “God things.” When Vickie called it was such an uplift. It was the same with Marmalade Skies. Every time I see or hear that group I’m fifteen again.
Into the Future
by Pico Iyer
SUDDENLY, THERE WERE black insects being shown crawling over our (black-and-white) screen on the 7:00 p.m. news broadcast, and the rather droll, highly cultured newscaster was saying something about beetles taking over the world.
I was only seven years old then, and not much ever seemed to happen in grey and red-brick North Oxford. My parents and I tuned in, near-religiously, to watch Lucille Ball and Dick Van Dyke on our rickety little monochrome TV, and occasionally got even stronger whiffs of the exotic new culture of glamour across the ocean when Perry Mason or the Beverly Hillbillies paid a house call. America, largely known to us through images on big screens, was everything the academic, tradition-heavy environment around us was not: open, spacious, freed from history. Outside our damp little rooms we trudged in the footsteps of ghosts who had been walking the same narrow pathways for centuries; onscreen—in our imaginations—we were free to take flight.
We’d heard of Mods and Rockers then, of teddy boys and skinny boys in skinny suits and ties standing rather woodenly on “Top of the Pops,” playing sweet melodies and fast guitars. But we hadn’t yet heard of the Who or the Stones—not in backward-looking Oxford—and this newscast was telling us about those mop-haired boys we’d previously a
ssociated with wanting to hold our hands and loving us yeah, yeah, yeah. Every time I came back from the little hairdressers in the Turl, our cleaning lady, Miss Bennett, would say, “He looks like a right little Beatle, he does.” We hadn’t yet moved on to discussing which one.
In the years to come, after we made our own move to America, sixteen months later, my father would sit in his study in the dry hills, rattlesnakes and tarantulas sometimes visible in the brush outside, and explain to his wide-eyed (and often psychedelically altered) students about the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album and what sitar ragas really meant in our ancestral India. The Beatles, very soon, would make the anarchism and the transcendental states of being my father liked to talk about fashionable, even de rigueur.
But for the moment they were the path-breakers while we, in dripping, slow-moving, ancient England, where shops never opened on Sundays and horizons seemed cut short by the grey walls next door, were watching their ascent with a mingled pride and envy. These peppy, well-mannered boys from Liverpool, whom you could easily imagine introducing to your mother, were taking off; England, which drew so much of its cultural energy and freshness from America, was threatening to offer something potent in return.
The copies of The Listener piled up in my father’s study. “The popular newspapers [carried] pictures of girls screaming their heads off at concerts,” as J. M. Coetzee wrote of the same period, in his memory book, Youth. Soon the Swinging Sixties would come to London, and Twiggy and David Bailey and Alfie and the rest might all seem to be coproduced by the Beatles. But for now the Beeb [BBC], in its auntish way, was making jokes for entomologists, and pretending that a lower form of insect was somehow taking that renegade colony across the water hostage.
It would be years before I realized that the name was actually spelled with an a and in fact represented a subversion much deeper than the BBC could acknowledge. Britain was no longer trapped inside the past and was offering the New World something even newer, more radical and current. The day the Beatles landed in New York City was the day the United Kingdom could finally see that it wasn’t just yesterday’s power, on the decline, but part of what would form tomorrow’s trans-Atlantic axis. They were flying into the future, really—our future—and the next thing we knew, Britain would be branding itself as the new America, freshly awake after twenty years of deepest postwar sleep.
The Beatles Are Here! Page 12