These stores had listening booths, too. You’d go into the booth and listen before deciding what to buy. Record players, too—everyone had one in their room and they must not have cost anything.
It was such a totally different time.
The performance venues then were tiny and if a rock ’n’ roll band or someone came into town, they were always on the local radio station, you could call in and talk to them. It was very personal and accessible.
When the Beatles and the Stones came to Kansas City they played the ballpark, which now would be considered a really small venue. I think the Beatles were the first to play there. Other groups, like the Doors, played in this place in Kansas City, Kansas, that had only about three hundred seats. And all the jazz and blues musicians played in very small clubs.
The first time the Beatles came to Kansas City, I was probably thirteen. Our seats at the ballpark were in the first balcony and we had a great view. They played all the songs we all knew and we all sang along and screamed. I don’t think anybody was listening.
If we wanted to hear them, why were we screaming all the time? But we were, screaming and leaping up and down. The day after the concert was just de facto that you couldn’t speak because you’d been screaming so much. It was a badge of honor because it meant that you’d been there.
You defined yourself by which Beatle you liked. And you sort of knew about people depending on the Beatle they liked. My sister liked Ringo, which was really strange, and I liked Paul and we shared a room so her side of the room was Ringo and mine was Paul. We weren’t allowed to put anything on the walls so we took pictures out of the fan magazines and taped them together in long strips that we hung on the molding. My sister was actually more advanced—she liked the Stones and I thought they were creepy and that Paul was cute.
I was sent to a boarding school that was run by nuns when I was only seven. It was in Kansas City—I’d return home for weekends—and all the classes were in French, including science and math. The school was all girls and there was probably much more focus on the Beatles than there would have been at a coed school. I don’t think boys liked the Beatles as much. They all started growing their hair, but they weren’t out there screaming, that’s for sure.
There was a huge radio tower in Kansas City that I always thought, since I was just a kid, looked like the Eiffel Tower. I’d sneak down sometimes into one of the classrooms and there it would be through the window, this big beautiful, lighted tower. I was so unhappy at the school that it seemed like a beacon of another world.
I don’t know if I made the connection then but, like the radio—and the music it played, especially the Beatles—it was offering me a vision of something beyond the Midwest.
Billy Joel, musician
THE SINGLE BIGGEST moment that I can remember of being galvanized into wanting to be a musician for life was seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Now, I didn’t have a television when I was growing up, which is funny because my father actually worked for a television company: DuMont.
I don’t know if anybody ever heard of DuMont? We had a little Levitt house and the DuMont was on the rack and you pulled it out of the wall. It broke when I was about five and my mother and my father split up and nobody fixed the TV so that was the end of TV. It was this big glass thing on the wall.
I listened to classical music. I always loved it. I was enchanted by music. I would have to say that Beethoven would be my favorite classical composer. Beethoven was titanic. He lived, he breathed, he ate music. Everything was music with this guy! I understand he didn’t even leave his house a lot of the times. It was like [imitates Beethoven and friends]:
Don’t bother me.
But it’s a nice day.
Fuck a nice day!
Come on out?
Can Ludwig come out?
So Beethoven was a big influence on me. Mozart. Chopin. Debussy. I mean, that’s in classical music.
But the Beatles? I’m over at this guy’s house. This guy I was going to say was a friend of mine. He really wasn’t a friend of mine. I hung out with him ’cause he had a TV. I was a Machiavellian little kid, you know: Yeah, I really like you. Let’s watch TV! So I’m over at his house and the Beatles come on TV.
Now you gotta understand this is in something like February 1964. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in November of 1963. The country was in a funk, we had the blues. I mean, for this man to be taken away. . . . This young, vigorous, vital man who represented youth and progress and the future—he was snatched from us. And the country really had the blues. And who became president? Lyndon Johnson, you know, politics as usual [imitating LBJ]: I’m speaking to you tonight with a heavy heart and big ears. And it was like this man didn’t capture anyone’s imagination the way Kennedy did.
Now, this is also in an era when Hollywood tried to take control of rock ’n’ roll. They understood that young people liked rock ’n’ roll [imitates a producer]: Hey, the young kids like the rock ’n’ roll stuff, why don’t we cook up a couple of rock stars right here in Hollywood, we’ll find a nice-looking boy with a great big pompadour and we’ll put him out there, and we’ll get some snappy tunes and he’ll be a big hit, a rock star.
And, you know, you had Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Annette Funicello. And they were putting Elvis in these awful movies! [sings] “Clambake! Clambake!” Everybody who liked Elvis was like “What the hell happened to this guy?”
Also, this was during the Civil Rights Movement, and a lot of radio would not play really good rhythm and blues. There was Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett. James Brown. But they weren’t playing this stuff on white radio. Why? [imitates a producer]: It got the kids all sexed up, got them all to get excited, they’re going to want to do this grind dance! So they tried to pretty it up, they tried to sanitize it. They came out with Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell. All these boring bullshit guys.
Then all of a sudden there’s this band with hair like girls’. It really wasn’t, but to us the hair looked hugely long. You know, 1964. They played their own instruments and they wrote their own songs and they didn’t look like Fabian. They looked like these working-class kids, like kids like we all knew. And John Lennon had this look when he was on Ed Sullivan like: Fuck all of you. This is such total bullshit to me.
And we knew. You could tell.
And I said at that moment, “That’s what I want to do. I want to do that. I want to be like those guys.”
Swimming to John
by Noelle Oxenhandler
IT’S STRANGE THE day you realize you’re older than the Beatle you love. But as the years go by and your Beatle grows younger and younger than you, time does even stranger things to your mind.
I was twelve when I fell in love with John. Back then, childhood lasted longer than it does now, and in real life—as in so many fairy tales—twelve was a threshold year. For me John was the threshold god, the magical ferryman who arrived precisely on time to lead me from a relatively placid girlhood into the dark, throbbing heart of adolescence.
Looking back, I can see that I was always drawn to older men who came from different backgrounds than my own. In my California elementary school, I had a crush on Mr. Red, the black custodian. Whenever someone threw up in class, he arrived with such dignity carrying his broom and a bucket of sawdust that my best friend and I were both convinced we would marry him when we grew up. When I was a little older, I attended the American School of Paris for a year and fell in love with my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Sang. He was a British man of Chinese descent, with a shock of black hair that bounced when he laughed. Once, when I missed the bus after school, he took me home on the back of his motor-scooter. There I was, holding on to Mr. Sang in his black leather jacket as we zipped through the streets of Paris. It was paradise.
After my family returned to the States, I entered a long limbo period. During this time, I might have had a mild, junior-high crush on this boy or that, but there was no one to really capture my heart, no de
finite Object for the quiet but inexorably gathering force of my romantic longings. Then, over the course of a single evening, that vague limbo was suddenly transformed into a state of absolute, diamond-sharp focus.
John, John, John.
It was February 9, 1964, and I was lying on a shag rug in Santa Monica, with my parents and my little brother sitting on the living-room sofa behind me. In the next moment, Ed Sullivan waved his hand, the Beatles sprang onto the stage—and I was instantly transported through the television screen into another realm. In that realm, John had been waiting for me forever.
The predominant emotion for me that night was intense recognition. It was as though, on some altar in primordial space and time, I’d left a request for just this man and now at last he had been given unto me, with his mop of dark hair and his wire-rimmed glasses. In the aftermath of that night, the pure shock of recognition gradually gave way to a more comfortable familiarity, and I could begin to articulate why John was my chosen one. I loved that he wasn’t handsome in the pretty boy way of Paul, but in a quirky, ironic way that was visible in his quizzical eyebrows and his wry, slightly crooked smile. I loved the edgy tenderness of his songs. When I listened to them, I could let my heart be swept by giant tides of emotion without a twinge of feeling corny. And when John’s books came out, I loved that he was not only a singer but also an author. Since I had already decided that I was a writer, this was another powerful bond between us.
There were so many. At the time, my mother—whom I’d heard people describe as “a handsome woman”—had short brown hair. She also had a somewhat long face, lively brown eyes, a strong nose, and a narrow mouth. In sum: She looked quite a bit like John Lennon. Since she had been adopted at birth, and we only knew that she was of English ancestry, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my mother was actually John’s older sister. This, of course, made him my uncle: an absolutely thrilling discovery. Yet somehow—through a logic that is quite mysterious to me now—this familial connection didn’t diminish by one iota the romantic connection between me and John. Above all, John was my predestined lover, husband, father of my future children.
Prior to The Ed Sullivan Show, the most notable feature of my bedroom had been its wallpaper, with a pattern of smiling pig-tailed girls holding bunches of pink balloons. In the weeks and months that followed the show, the wallpaper gradually disappeared under giant posters of John: John in profile holding his guitar, John in a leather jacket standing in front of the brick wall of a Liverpool pub, John making the peace sign in front of the Statue of Liberty . . .
At night before I went to sleep, I would lie for quite a while, gazing up at him, studying every feature of his face, every nuance of his expression. Then I would shuffle through the ever-growing stack of Beatle cards that I kept in a drawer beside my bed. The cards came in square packs of dusty-pink bubble-gum; eventually I had hundreds of them. Each card had a Beatles photograph on one side, with some factual information about one or more of them on the other. Before falling asleep, I would shuffle through the cards, memorizing the information as if studying for some wonderful exam. To this day, I could still probably give the correct answer if someone were to ask: “What is John’s shirt size?” “How does he like to take his eggs and tea?” “How old was he when he went to live with his Aunt Minnie?”
I would never have spoken these answers aloud, however. Though I knew that these were very public facts, available to any girl who had the dimes to buy the gum, I’d gleaned them through a kind of pillow-talk. They were treasures that John himself had buried in my ear, as we lay in my bed on the brink of sleep—and I had to protect them. Beyond the boundaries of my bedroom, I didn’t broadcast my love for John. And I told no one that he was my uncle. I kept all this secret, inward.
For me, this secretness made my connection to John more real, intimate and special. But there was also another reason that I didn’t broadcast my love. A more excruciating reason. The truth is, I could never bear to be identified as belonging to any group to which I actually belonged. Even as a small child, I hated to be seen as a child: to be glimpsed in pajamas by my parents’ friends, to visit homes where children ate weenies and Twinkies at kiddie tables.
I always shut doors, so grown-ups—even my own parents—couldn’t overhear me playing. Once I woke in the middle of the night to see my parents’ glowing faces: they were bending over me, holding a flashlight for two dinner guests to see. I was mortified. For me, the worst thing was to be caught seeming to be the thing I was. As I got older this only intensified. If I could not bear to be seen as a sleeping child, how could I bear to be seen as a lovesick teenager?
When the Beatles came to the Hollywood Bowl, I didn’t go with the rest of my Girl Scout troop. I didn’t agonize over the decision. When our scout leader first proposed the idea, I looked down at the ground as the other girls jumped in the air, giggling with excitement and clapping their hands. I knew in every fiber of my being that it would not be possible for me to carry the passionate intensity of my love into such a public place—much less to see it mirrored in the faces of a thousand screaming teenage girls.
On the day of the concert, I was edgy, jumpy. Although I knew that I absolutely could not be at the concert, it felt impossible to be anywhere else. At first I planned to stay in my room all day, holding a kind of solitary vigil. With a Beatles record playing in the background, I tried to concentrate on an activity that usually soothed me: drawing a portrait of John in a large sketchbook that already teemed with portraits of him in every conceivable pose, and in every available medium: pencil, ink, chalk, Magic Marker, crayon . . . Perhaps, on this day of all days, I’d ask to borrow my mother’s precious Winsor & Newton watercolors?
It was quickly clear that I couldn’t muster the patience or focus. My nerves were tingling and I felt like a racehorse, stuck in a pen. I tried riding my bike around the neighborhood, but it felt like a dumb thing to be doing when John was in town. Finally I decided to walk to the beach. In those days, parents weren’t so fearful about letting their children roam; it wasn’t unusual for me to make the mile-long trek from our house to the beach by myself—even though the trek ended in a dark, urine-scented tunnel.
As I walked through the winding streets of our neighborhood, it occurred to me that the Beatles were breathing the same Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan air as I was. The thought was dizzying. The day appeared to be an ordinary day—people were clipping their hedges, walking their dogs, washing their cars—and yet, as I looked around, it seemed as though everything was vibrating with the evening’s momentous, imminent event.
When I came to the tunnel, I held my breath as I always did and tried to zoom as fast as I could over the bits of broken glass, the beach rocks and empty soda cans, without hurting my feet in their flip-flops. Back in the light of day, I rushed down through the sand, pulled off my shift and ran into the sea in my paisley bikini. Finally, I had found something equal to my restless, overpowering excitement. I hurled my body into wave after wave, until finally my fingers and toes grew white and I threw myself down into a dip of warm sand and slept as if sleeping off a spell.
After the night of the concert, several days passed before the rumor reached me: during the performance, a girl I knew from my neighborhood had made a frenzied leap into the moat that surrounds the stage at the Hollywood Bowl. Carol Partridge. I’d always thought of her as a rather shy girl—not someone who, in the most literal way, would stand out from the crowd. Once I heard the rumor, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Though my official reaction was one of hilarious disbelief, I actually felt a kind of awe. And since I had known that I myself would not be able to bear the intensity of the Beatles’ actual presence, I had no trouble understanding how it was that Carol had simply broken out of her skin. . . .
I could so vividly see how she, rising from her seat, had been compelled toward the circle of light where they sang. I could see her pale face transfigured, her thin body borne over the roaring heads and waving arms and
into the moat. I could see her thrashing toward them like some brave wild creature—until the security guards leaped in and fished her out. Like Paul Revere’s ride, Carol Partridge’s swim took on a kind of mythical, archetypal status in my mind.
From junior high all the way through high school, I remained faithful to my secret love. When I came home from school each day, I’d stack every Beatles record I had on my phonograph and enter a kind of musical swoon that would carry me all the way to suppertime, often while simultaneously reading John’s books. Once, when my father came to my bedroom door to rouse me, he said, “The day will come when you don’t do this anymore.” I looked at him as if he was crazy.
It’s strange to me now that I don’t remember when, or even how, my father’s words came true. Was there a single day when I suddenly stopped listening to the Beatles? Or did the habit taper off gradually, so that I piled fewer and fewer records on the turntable until finally I listened to none? With almost religious devotion, I’d repeated a certain behavior day after day, year after year—yet the demise of this behavior left absolutely no trace in my mind.
What has stayed, however, is the image of Carol at the Hollywood Bowl. And here’s the truly strange thing that time has done: In my memory, the scrawny wet Girl Scout swimming so frantically, yet bravely, in the moat is not Carol Partridge. It is I.
I’m sixty now, and after all these years it’s as though I have finally released myself to reveal to the world what I was: a teenage girl, madly in love—like all the other millions and millions of girls—with the Beatle who, in her mind, exists only and forever for her alone.
Gay Talese, reporter
I BECAME A staff writer at the New York Times when I was twenty-three, and I was there for nearly eight years when I first reported upon the Beatles in 1964. I was covering entertainment: writing about the Beatles was one of perhaps five assignments I did that week—it could be on opera, ballet, Baryshnikov, the Yankees, whatever. It was all a story.
The Beatles Are Here! Page 5
