Fran Lebowitz, nonfan
AT SOME POINT in my adult life, probably about fifteen years ago, I was at a dinner party in New York City and Paul McCartney was there. There was a piano in the house and I was sitting on the piano bench before dinner talking to people when Paul McCartney came and sat down and started to play the piano. I turned around and said to him, “Hey, I’m trying to talk here.” He was quite stunned.
It did not stop him from playing the piano. Everyone else, of course, wanted him to play the piano.
That’s the level of Beatles fan I am.
THE ARRIVAL OF the Beatles didn’t affect me at all. It wasn’t just the Beatles, it’s all pop music. I’m probably the most unreceptive person to pop music that ever existed. The Beatles made very little impression on me.
In the long run, they must have influenced my life in some way because they were such an enormous cultural influence. I mean, I know probably a million Beatles songs because you can’t not know a million Beatles songs. But at the time, they barely registered, although I do remember watching them on Ed Sullivan.
Soon after they appeared on the horizon a boy in my junior high school class in Morris Township, New Jersey, came to school with his hair combed down like theirs. Boys had fairly short hair then and he had just combed his bangs down. I thought, “What a ridiculous thing to do.” I thought he was a fool, a clown. I was like thirteen years old, fourteen years old. I thought it was clownish to imitate someone else.
He was also, by the way, taken to the principal’s office. The school forced him to comb his hair back. I remember his name but I’m not going to say it because of course there’s never an end to when you can be sued in this country.
Girls were buying these Beatles magazines and they were divided into armed camps over which Beatle they liked the best. All those people seemed ridiculous to me. It just seemed foolish.
I’M NOT SAYING that the Beatles are bad or that they aren’t good. It’s just that I don’t care that much. I never found them exciting the way I did find the Stones exciting. I never quite understood the kind of erotic excitement of the Beatles. They always seemed so soft.
When the Stones appeared, I much preferred them. I would not say I was a rabid Stones fan, either, but I definitely preferred the Stones to the Beatles when that became a dividing line. There was a kind of warfare between Stones fans and Beatles fans.
I wasn’t even in that war. I would say, “I like the Stones much better,” but I didn’t really care. I have a friend who just says to me, “You’re just not a fan, Fran.” I don’t understand why people follow sports teams, I just don’t get this whole thing.
I was even at that young age, as I am now, kind of a floater. I had close friends but I was never in a clique. I would just float around. The upside of this, which I’ve found to be true my entire life, is that you don’t have to ascribe to the rules of each little group. You can just drop in.
I MAY NOT have cared that much about the Beatles, but if someone asked who my favorite was I always said, “Oh, I like Ringo.” I like drumming quite a bit. I’ve been a drumming fan for half of my lifetime. I’ve even drummed myself.
I liked the personality of Ringo Starr. I still do. He was not, of course, the favorite in my school among the girls. Paul McCartney was far and away the favorite. He was the cute Beatle. So it was probably just a contrarian position to choose Ringo Starr.
People forget how men looked at the time. They looked so different. Just the fact that Ringo wore rings. Men didn’t wear jewelry of any sort. The fact that Ringo wore rings was more startling from a look point of view than any of the other Beatles. The only difference really was that they combed their hair that way. Their hair seemed long at the time, but then soon it became short. All the rock musicians had much longer hair, so the Beatles ended up with the shortest.
Those suits they wore, those tight suits with velvet collars? I remember a boy coming to some school event where boys had to wear suits wearing one of those jackets with a velvet collar like the Beatles wore. I remember thinking that he looked so cheesy.
I just couldn’t believe that people would imitate other people, that’s the main thing that struck me. I still feel that way. Of course, people do this. Even adults do this. I once asked a fashion editor, “Why do you publish these pictures of these clothes, I mean these dresses that cost $180,000—who can buy them?” And she answered, “Well, they’re not going to buy them, they’re going to imitate them.”
We’re talking about grown women, not twelve-year-old girls. They’ll buy some cheaper version a dress so that they can look kind of like this movie star who’s wearing this $180,000 one that she didn’t pay for? I guess it’s just human nature to do this.
I NEVER HAD money when I was a child. It never would have occurred to me to go to see the Beatles when they came to Shea Stadium. For one thing, it cost money. I never would have asked my parents for money for something like that.
I would certainly never have wasted money on a record, that’s for sure. I don’t remember even buying them, although I had a rich friend who did. I remember going to her house and listening to Sgt. Pepper one million times because everyone thought it was a work of genius, that it had ironical depths. But I also remember smoking hash at the time—I think drugs added a lot to people’s perceptions of the music.
And parents didn’t like it either, which added to its appeal, I’m sure. People forget what parents were like in that time. Parents didn’t like the Beatles, but basically parents didn’t like us. People forget that. Parents didn’t like the Beatles and they didn’t like the Stones. Basically they didn’t like us.
The relationship between teenagers and their parents was not calm then. Our parents were mad at us all the time. I don’t mean me individually, although mine were mad at me all the time, but even better children than me had their parents mad at them all the time.
Most kids didn’t have any say in the way their domestic life was conducted. I certainly had zero and it didn’t appear to me that most people had much more than I had.
If you were in the car, which we were all the time since I grew up in a small New Jersey town, the person in charge of the radio in the car was whichever parent was driving. I would always try to get them to change the station, but it was pretty futile.
My parents listened to a radio station called WNEW that played the music of their youth—Big Band music, Frank Sinatra. There was a show called Make Believe Ballroom they were always listening to and I was always trying to get them to change the station. Actually, the result is that I ended up liking that music quite a bit.
My mother liked the Beatles somewhat but she was always comparing any male pop star to Frank Sinatra. None of them measured up. I’d ask, “Mom, do you like this or that?” but it was always, you know, Frank, Frank . . .
My mother had a huge number of jazz 78s, which I much preferred—I prefer jazz to almost all forms of music. Nothing compares to it musically.
I PLAYED CELLO as a child, very poorly but enthusiastically. My childhood hero was Leonard Bernstein. I watched his Young People’s Concerts all the time. And there were children in the audience. Someone once asked me, “Did you ever go to one?” I said, “What are you talking about?” I never even thought of it. Of course I saw the children there, they were real children, they weren’t actors, but I never thought, “Who are those children? What kind of life do you have to have that you’re there?” I just never thought about it.
I guess it would be the same thing with the Beatles, except that I wasn’t as interested in them as I was in Leonard Bernstein.
I don’t know who those children were. I mean, they were children whose parents could buy those tickets, if that’s how you got them. In any case, they weren’t me.
I don’t think it was unusual, by the way, the way I felt as a child, which is that it’s another world, it has nothing to do with you. I didn’t think of everything in relation to me, the way people do now.
It’s
the same with divorce. No one got divorced when I was a child—except for Elizabeth Taylor. She was the designated divorcée for the country. There were all sorts of other people, some of them children, who went to the Young People’s Concerts, who actually went there, but they had no more to do with me than Elizabeth Taylor had to do with my mother. My mother wasn’t a movie star. She wasn’t about to leave my father for Richard Burton. She probably would have left my father for Richard Burton, but she didn’t have the chance.
It’s the same thing with the Young People’s Concerts. I wasn’t even thinking I could be part of that world. These things didn’t seem like they were related to me.
THE POPE CAME to America when I was a child. I don’t remember which Pope it was—John, I think.
He had a mass at Yankee Stadium and all the Catholic schools in the country had a contest, an essay contest, and a certain number of children were chosen to go to Yankee Stadium to see the Pope and get communion from him. There were a lot of Catholic schools in the town I grew up in and a lot of Catholic kids on my street. They were praying and hoping to get this—one kid who I didn’t know from one of the schools in the neighborhood actually went.
Which leads me to the Beatles.
Now that I’m grown up, I actually know people who were in the audience when the Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. They were there, people of around my age who lived in New York at the time and whose parents may have been involved in the entertainment business.
And that’s who was in that audience at The Ed Sullivan Show—kids of men who worked for a TV station or some related industry. Sigourney Weaver, for example, was there because her father was the head of NBC.
For me, having a father who worked for a television station was the kind of life I didn’t even know existed. That’s how distant the Beatles seemed to me. Going to see them would have been like going to see the Pope.
Not that I was in the running to go to see the Pope.
I was very interested in him, though, I have to say.
I’m not putting the Beatles in the same class as the Pope, although many people did, including John Lennon, who once said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
Michael Laven, fan
IT WAS FEBRUARY 1964. I was sixteen and a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. I had a small growth on one of my toes, actually on my third metatarsal, and it required surgery to take a piece of bone out of my hip and graft it into my toe. It was reasonably invasive, not life threatening or life altering, but invasive nevertheless.
I had a double room and one evening the center of the San Francisco Warriors—the basketball team that preceded the Golden Gate Warriors—moved in. His team had played the Celtics the night before.
He was Nate Thurmond—6'11", all-American, a top guy in the NBA. (He was actually second to Wilt Chamberlain at the time.) He had gotten a pulled scrotum—as a sixteen-year-old this impressed me very deeply—in the game and ended up in the bed next to me.
I was a boy from the suburbs and I didn’t know from black people. Suddenly there I was with this huge black guy, one so tall that his feet were sticking out from the end of his bed.
It was the early sixties and I was still a relatively conservative high school student. A few years later I started moving around the city, discovered marijuana, joined marches to the Arlington Street Church for draft card burnings, listened to the Dead and Coltrane and had my world opened up. But at that point I was still a kid and the Celtics and the Beach Boys were my life.
Anyway, Nate Thurmond’s teammates came to visit him before their next game. I was lying on my back in bed when suddenly I was surrounded by all these mammoth people. You know, they were sports people, so they were nice guys. It was, “Are you okay, kid?” that kind of thing. So they’re all seven feet tall and I’m lying in bed and there’s Nate Thurmond with his pulled scrotum and that same evening is when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. Everyone knew of the Beatles by then. There was a TV in the room and I tuned in. The show came on. I remember the band came on and the girls were screaming and it was so thrilling. I just remember the thrill of sitting in a hospital bed with a seven-foot black guy in the next bed whose feet were sticking out.
This really is a Beatles story, OK?
To me, it’s the juxtaposition. The Beatles came out with their exuberance and I’m lying in bed in Mass. General watching on a black and white with a famous basketball player in the bed next to me and the screaming girls in the background.
They must have started with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” maybe not, and in some ways they were so clean cut. And there was Ed Sullivan with his “shoe” [the way he pronounced show]. He had that pinched Ed Sullivan accent, like he really needed to run to the bathroom, he was holding it in.
I met Thurmond again years later. I was living in San Francisco and discovered that he owned a restaurant called Big Nate’s BBQ in the South of Market area. I went to it a few times and had ribs from him. It was a just a basic, humble rib shack with pictures of him on the walls.
Nate worked behind the counter. I think it may be one of those sad sports stories, the story of a guy before the salaries got big, who played his heart out, probably got hurt.
When I met him years later at the shack, I told him the story of him being in the bed next to me but he’s an old sports guy and I don’t think he remembered.
So there it is—my memory of the moment the Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show is mixed up with this 6'11" all-pro basketball player and his team towering over me. The memory is crystal clear. It’s like where were you when Kennedy was shot. It has the same level of clarity for me.
An E-mail
from Phillip Lopate
White Out
by Judy Juanita
AMERICAN SOCIETY WAS one big happy family in the 1950s. A melting pot, a Jell-O and white-bread land of perfection and gleaming surfaces. Not for a minute. The truth is, America was one big white out. Growing up in the fifties, my siblings and I had to choose between watching Make Room for Daddy or I Love Lucy for school-night television. On Sunday nights, though, the whole family watched The Ed Sullivan Show on our one set, the high point being when a performer of our race came on. (We didn’t use the word black in self-description then.)
The famous colored pop artists—Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Mathis, Leslie Uggams, Dionne Warwick, Nat King Cole—were so extraordinarily talented they seemed to glow. And yet they looked, to my adolescent eyes, like gifted pets of their benevolent white mentors (Frank Sinatra, Mitch Miller, Burt Bacharach), a status that befit the show’s colorful menagerie of chimps, flamenco dancers, and sensations like Elvis Presley. Colored performers and musicians who seemed of independent mind—Harry Belafonte, Richie Havens, Odetta—had careers in folk or bluegrass, further from the mainstream.
The poet Amiri Baraka would say later the only good thing about television back then was that colored people weren’t on it. There was a loss of dignity when black people entered the arena of television and had to do what white and white-minded directors and producers wanted them to do. Anyway, we weren’t, for the most part, on TV at all, except for Beulah and a token on Star Trek. We were nowhere in advertising.
The sixties meant crew cuts, skinny ties, matching suits, “Teen Angel,” the Beach Boys, the top forty playlist, 45-rpm records, spinning the songs. But in the parallel America, rhythm & blues (R&B) artists were busy providing the gritty backdrop to the violence and oppression of the American dream. Rioters, marchers, protesters, and regular folk followed a different drummer, doing as a popular 1964 song advised: getting “right down to the real nitty gritty.” The breathlessness of the countdown to the top fifteen hits on “Your Hit Parade,” sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes, matched the breathlessness of executions occurring with the same exciting regularity.
Nineteen sixty-three was a banner year for the black race. Things were heating up in the streets. That April, Martin Luther King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Ja
il” to white clergymen who wanted racial segregation to be addressed exclusively in courts, not the streets. The next month, Bull Connor set fire hoses and attack dogs on the marchers in Birmingham. August saw the March on Washington, timed to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation’s 100th anniversary—a great peak for the civil rights movement.
The miracle of television was a lucky strike for the civil rights movement. The abolitionist movement 100 years earlier had gained traction once the world, i.e. London society, understood the horror and treachery of slavery from ex-slaves like Frederick Douglass speaking abroad or from slave narratives. And similarly the civil rights movement gained universal spotlight once viewers saw the hosing, brutality, flaming buses, and overturned normalcy of a South under siege from protestors and arch segregationists.
The England–America exchange of influence went back and forth. At a Beatles concert in Plymouth, Great Britain, in November 1963, police used high-pressure hoses on screaming fans, a show of authority that matched the hosing of demonstrators in Birmingham six months earlier.
Meanwhile, there I was, a black girl in East Oakland, playing the string bass in my junior and senior high school orchestras. As we toured in school festivals throughout northern California, my fellow bassist, a member of the Escovedo musical family, tried to lure me into nightclubs for $10-a-night gigs. I knew better than to mention that to my strict Christian mother. But I loved music and craved it, especially Bo Diddley, Motown, and salsa. I often danced in front of my mirror for six hours at a clip.
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