The joke I used to try to tell in order to determine how generationally disparate people were was to ask them to describe Paul McCartney. No matter how they’d respond, I’d always quip “We would have been in trouble if I would have had to remind you that he was in band before WINGS. We would have been in real trouble if you would have asked me ‘who is Paul McCartney?'”. And that in a nutshell is why my feeble attempt at a comedy career never took off.
But thanks to a recent flurry of globally successful works, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t capable of at least answering that basic question, as well as the names of his bandmates. And as YAHOO! ENTERTAINMENT’s UK editor Tom Butler wrote yesterday, there’s now another opportunity for folks who do remember, as well as those newer to the party, to learn a lot more about exactly what made THE BEATLES the answer to the question “you say you want a revolution?”
Fans of The Beatles have been spoiled with documentaries recently with Get Back, Let It Be, and now Beatles ‘64 all being released over the space of three years.
But where the former two delved into the beginning of the end for the Fab Four, the latest — streaming on Disney+ now — covers the end of the beginning. Combining archive footage with new interviews, the documentary from producer Martin Scorsese and director David Tadeschi explores the band’s seismic first trip to America in 1964.
Those are pretty impressive chops, and if you did happen to around at that point BEATLES ’64 will truly touch your heartstrings. I was barely old enough to be aware of exactly what was going on, but I distinctly remember my dowdy housewife mother bobbing up and down in her chair, her ubiquitous Marlboro filter tip flicking ashes over our cheap nylon carpet, when we sat down to watch television on a frigid February evening. As BILLBOARD’s Thomas Smith explained in his own well-crafted piece that dropped in conjunction with this work’s global release:
On February 7, 1964, the United States – and subsequently, the whole world – was irrevocably changed. The Beatles touching down at John F. Kennedy airport, meeting thousands of adoring, screaming fans on the runway altered the brain chemistry of a country in need of something good, and lit the fuse for a cultural revolution. That is the premise which the Beatles ‘64, a new documentary released by the band’s Apple Corps Ltd., presents to its viewers. In November 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed during a motorcade in Dallas, and the shocking moment instigated a period of mourning across the nation. Some would never recover from the trauma of seeing such a violent death, beamed into their homes on television. Months later, a new generation couldn’t tear themselves away from the television as The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched an estimated 73 million people. As interviewee Joe Queenan says, teary-eyed, it was like “the light went on,” and the world was bright and full of colour for the first time.
Think about what February in New York City was like that year, and when I do my own dim memories become much clearer. In addition to still dealing with the afterwath of the death of Camelot, which my aunt’s massive collection of LIFE, LOOK and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST weeklies did with every ensuing article about anything Kennedy, the weather was typically awful, days were dark, dank and cold and we were still months away from the opening of the World’s Fair and Shea Stadium. Both the Knicks and Rangers were in the middle of dull, mediocre seasons at the rapidly decaying “old” Madison Square Garden approximately three blocks south and a short block west from CBS Studio 50, aka the ED SULLIVAN THEATRE. That should explain in part why the demand for tickets to that far exceeded anything else going on in town at the time.
As BEATLES ’64’s producer Margaret Bodde explained to Smith:
The fact that they came to America so soon after the assassination of a beloved president and there was a country grieving and in a place of hopelessness, they came in with their personalities and their music. Maybe there’s always times like that – America right now is in a similar place of division where no one can agree on one thing. But when The Beatles came, they were the one thing people could coalesce around this ray of light and their humor and their hopefulness that they brought through their music and their humour and personality.
And at a time when it was most sorely needed, they took America, and particularly New York City, by storm. My mother was hardly alone amongst those that were coming down with a good case of “Beatlemania”, and as Butler detailed that spirit is well represented in this work:
The two-week trip would include appearances on the… Sullivan Show…the band’s first live performances in North America, and even some down time in Miami and it was all captured on camera by filmmakers Albert and David Mayles…The film shows the band doing their best to soak up the American culture while holed up in hotels, dressing rooms, night clubs, photo sessions and press conferences. A portable radio is permanently glued to McCartney’s ears as he tries to take in as much American music as possible, while Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes shows them the sights with a secret trip to a BBQ joint in Harlem. And while they had been used to passionate fans from their time playing in Hamburg, or the Cavern Club in Liverpool, and music halls across the UK, their US fans seemed to offer a new level of devotion.
Thankfully the Mayles brothers took the time to explore the fans’ reaction to the band on their first US visit. Having worked with producer Martin Scorsese on documentaries on George Harrison and the Rolling Stones, director David Tadeschi admits he was already familiar with the band’s story, but found the footage of the fans the most insightful.
“There are all these young women and young men, but mostly young women, who have a lot to say, and are in the middle of this incredibly emotional moment,” he says. “It was fascinating and entertaining, and also, we have this sense that — especially at the time, but even today — that ‘oh these girls are just screaming, they’re hysterical’ and the truth is they heard something that nobody else heard and everybody eventually caught up with them.”
And as Bodde further remarked to Smith, that devotion continues to remain, and indeed grow, to this day:
The interest in them feels unending. When The Beatles’ last single “Now and Then” came out, you had young people and teenagers on TikTok sobbing and talking about them so fondly, and these people weren’t even the grandchildren of the people who first discovered The Beatles in 1964 in America. They have a timeless appeal.
And the transcript of the NPR interview that MORNING EDITION’s Rob Schmitz conducted yesterday with his colleague Felix Contreras reveals even more about how broad that appeal and influence reached:
SCHMITZ: So Felix, it’s worth pointing out that all of this was happening as the United States was going through some major changes. We have to look at the historical perspective here. In 1964, the Civil Rights Movement was front and center in the nation’s consciousness, and these four Brits just get dropped in the middle of that. Did that have any impact on The Beatles at that time?
CONTRERAS: You know, this film deals with the Beatles and race in a way that I’ve never seen before. In fact, there’s a fascinating interview with Smokey Robinson of Motown fame. Let’s listen to a little bit of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “BEATLES ’64”)
SMOKEY ROBINSON: They were the first white group that I had ever heard in my life say, yeah, we grew up listening to Black music. We love Motown. No other the white artist had ever said that – not anyone of magnitude – until The Beatles said that.
Put against the lens of polarity that currently divides this country, the fact that of all things a rock band could unite people is both poignant and instructive. Maybe Taylor Swift or Jelly Roll can’t quite pull that off, but I’d like to believe that somewhere on this planet there might just be another quartet that could.
Until that happens, we’ll have to settle for this, At least now there’s a lot more people now who know darn well who Paul McCartney is.
Until next time…