The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  August 15, 1966—Mon. Paul has a black kitten with white whiskers, with a real cool name, which I couldn’t understand. He is so funny. I wish I could sit around all week in solitude listening to Jerry G interviewing him. They left at 2 PM.

  I failed to note that August 15 was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. It did not escape my notice that Paul McCartney had been hustled out of town before dinnertime.

  A FEW DAYS later, I got a letter from Sister Andrew. She had been transferred, and Mary Jo and I made plans to visit her at the new convent. Paul got his tooth capped. My pictures didn’t come out—all I got was the backs of people’s heads.

  In January, Jerry G, my favorite disc jockey, left town. “I don’t understand how anyone can call a city the best location in the nation & say its people are fantastic & they love it & it has captured them & then move to Chicago,” I wrote, bitterly.

  That year, Paul’s Birthday, which I had given special holiday status in my diary, coincided with Father’s Day.

  June 18, 1967—Sun. Ed Sullivan wished Paul a happy birthday, but today ended rather strangely. Paul revealed that he has taken LSD four times this past year. He said it has brought him closer to God and made him a more honest man, but still I wish I were dreaming.

  It was not the outcome I had been hoping for.

  June 19, 1967—Mon. There was an article in the paper about Paul and LSD today. I think God has answered my prayers. Or at least started to. LSD was the means by which Paul has come close to God.

  Psychedelic drugs were not the only development that took time to sink in. When I went back to school in the fall, the nuns were different. They had changed out of their habits and reverted to their baptismal names. Sister Mary Abram, my French teacher, became Sister Diane Branski, of the dimpled elbows; a few years later, she left the convent and started smoking and using hair spray and wearing makeup. Sister Mary Peyton, a.k.a. Pat Gaski, who had wide-spaced pale-blue eyes and was very athletic for a nun, whipping the long blue skirts of her robe around when she perched on a desktop, held out until the following spring, when we were aghast to see her in a sailor suit.

  By the time I read about Paul McCartney’s breakup with Jane Asher, his role in my life was greatly diminished. “I took all my Beatle magazines & Trixie Belden books downstairs,” I recorded (August 31, 1968). “I’m going to save them for my posterity.” One day, while I was away at college, my father cleaned the garage, where he had stashed the two big boxes that contained my archive, and threw them out. It made me sad.

  It was over, of course. My determination to convert my idol had been absurd, misguided, laughable, naïve . . . but at the time it had served its purpose. You might even say that it was my salvation.

  Anyway, that was the end of Sister Mary Paul McCartney.

  Peter Duchin, bandleader

  I WAS PLAYING at the Maisonette in New York City in 1964 when the Beatles arrived on the scene. It was at the St. Regis Hotel and it was a very ritzy but wonderful place and all sorts of people came from all walks of life. People would dine, dance, and hopefully have a good time.

  Whenever we would play a Beatles song, which we did often, old guys would come up and say “Good lord! What’s that longhair music you’re playing?” Because of the Beatles’ hairdos they considered the music to be “longhair.” It was really amusing.

  I thought the Beatles sounded great, especially lyrically. Rhythmically they were up and down. It wasn’t a group you necessarily looked at technically, perhaps because of the drummer, but they were really interesting lyrically. Many of the tunes were totally unlike the American songbook tunes we had been used to playing. Just look at a lyric like “Eleanor Rigby” or “Fool on the Hill”! People were not necessarily writing tunes about that kind of thing. It was all quite poetic and whimsical.

  I began playing their music as soon as I started hearing it. Since we had to play every night, we not only played all the show tunes and old tunes and Cole Porter and all of that, but whatever was out there—Little Richard, the Beatles, et cetera. I played whatever I felt like playing, same as today.

  There was other stuff, like Bo Diddley, that we played but that was not yet really accepted by society. The Beatles slowly became acceptable but it took a while for middle-aged people to actually let go and dance to that kind of music. The parents of a lot of the kids who really loved the Beatles couldn’t understand the craze. They’d ask, “God, how can you listen to that stuff?”

  It was the sixties and American culture was in for a rude shock. I well remember chuckling with the band as we watched older people trying to emulate the way their kids were dancing on the floor. They gave new meaning to the term self-conscious!

  The Beatles were in Hamburg for what, two or three years? They had all that time there, playing with and listening to other groups, and they noticed that everybody played the same thing. They had to work out their own style. They started doing their own thing. They were so talented that they totally changed the face of popular music.

  Their music is still wonderful. It allowed other things to happen that might not have happened. It certainly changed the face of the American songbook. And it allowed all sorts of groups—the Who, the Doors, endless other rock and roll groups that might not have been as adventurous—to happen. And that’s important.

  I think their lyrics tapped into feelings that were as yet unexpressed by the kids who were their fans. They represented the rebellion that was in the air back then.

  Anne Brown, fan

  WHEN I WAS going into about the eighth grade, we went and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where all the rest of our family lived. Charleston was a very, very kept-back little town. It was a repressed little town to be a teenager in. It sure felt that way. Of course, probably all of America was then.

  Charleston had its heyday and then it was very much in decline for many years—which is probably why it’s so well preserved at this point. It didn’t keep growing and bustling.

  The whole Beatles thing that came washing over America barely touched South Carolina. The scene in Charleston was pretty calcified. Fresh new things, new thinking, anything like that was threatening and not welcome and not enjoyed. It was such an impenetrable place.

  I first learned of the Beatles when I heard some of their songs on the radio. Their music was totally unusual down there. What played on local radio was something called “beach music,” a kind of regional form of Motown. These were black singing groups—the Tams were one example—that were often made up of four guys, four women, that kind of thing. A dance called the shag, of all things, often went with beach music.

  I saw all of the Ed Sullivan stuff from the very beginning. I wasn’t just flipping through the channels: I knew about the band, I knew some of their music. I don’t know if I had a Beatles album at that point, I probably just got 45s for a while. At any rate, I was very primed to go down that road when they came on the show.

  I must have been in the ninth grade when they came. I attended an all-girls school called Ashley Hall—it’s still there. An all-girls school was wonderful for me. I liked hanging around with the smart, smart, smart girls.

  In Charleston, you didn’t have to be very risk taking to be rebellious. Walking around barefoot in public or having a little bit of a short skirt would do it. It wasn’t hard to get a maverick sort of reputation.

  By liking the Beatles we were definitely odd ducks. It was not as if their music ever became popular there. Just a handful of girls in my school—eight or nine of us—were what I would call Beatlemaniacs. I had a few friends, and we were not girls who were popular with boys, and we just all swerved off into this lane and had a great time for a few years, just being swept up and carried away and living in our own little club of a world.

  Between the Beatles and the all-girls school, I didn’t have to bother with boys at all. There wasn’t a population of boys around me every day who could hurt my feelings by ignoring me. So that was gone. Plus,
I was totally fascinated and wrapped up in these four other young men who were totally undangerous, so that was great.

  From the point of view of conventional parents, conventional people, the Beatles were dangerous boys. They were nowhere near as nasty as Elvis was, though, not even close. I wasn’t into Elvis, I was a little too young for that, but it was all that again—teen sex and teens running wild, all those fantasies of adults that were never really true.

  THERE WERE SIXTY girls in my graduating class and, of those, about twenty were my cousins, second or third cousins. After the Beatles came to America, the parents of a third cousin in my grade were kind enough to take us to see them in concert, two years in a row. The first one was in Jacksonville, Florida, at the Gator Bowl; the second at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta.

  They took about five of us and we had just a wonderful time. They let us just be crazy. They weren’t worried about us, they pretty much gave us free rein.

  The Gator Bowl was a lousy little stadium compared to what it must be now—it’s been replaced, I’m sure. I guess we got there a day early. Our little motel was right next to the stadium and we crept around it that whole first day, scoping everything out. We were circling around underneath the bleachers when we came across a chain-link fence—I don’t know if it was a permanent installation or not. And there was the Beatles’ trailer just beyond it. It was so amazing!

  We were the only girls down there, me and my friends, and we leaned on the fence and watched people come and go. We could just catch a glimpse of the Beatles, who must have been hanging out, drinking, and having a big old time.

  There was a security guard there and we asked him to get us an autograph. He knocked on the door and came back with something that he said was Paul McCartney’s autograph and gave it to me. That night I didn’t have anything to compare it with so I thought it was authentic. Over time, as I saw more and more of Paul’s signature, I thought, “You know what? I don’t think so.” I think that security guard or somebody in the trailer just wanted to get rid of us.

  Still, it was a wonderful concert. I think Dusty Springfield was the opening act and she was wonderful. But I was a screamer, a big screamer, and, between the screaming around me and the screaming that I was doing, I couldn’t hear any of the music very well.

  After the concert was over and the Beatles were swept off in a limo to their hotel, we girls stayed in the stadium and just crawled all over everything, investigating. I took handfuls of gravel from below the bottom step, where you’d get down from the stage—they had to have all stepped down there. I kept handfuls of that gravel in a Baggie for years. Then I went on the stage and pried up splinters from where each one of the Beatles had been standing and singing. I was careful to document which splinter belonged to which Beatle.

  I got other funky things at the Gator Bowl concert, too. People still had flash cameras then and there were light bulbs around that trailer. I picked up a lot of them—they might been involved in taking a picture of one of them, you know. I was just scavenging, pawing at everything I could get. The gravel and the splinters were particularly exciting because they certainly had had contact with Beatle feet.

  It was sweet, it really was, when I think back about it now. I just can’t believe how sweet it was, really, to be so innocently occupied.

  There seemed to be an innocence about the Beatles themselves, too, but that wasn’t the case at all. The stuff that you hear now about what was going on with them when they were riding that highway was amazing. They were quite promiscuous and quite experimental and ingesting everything and they were not what they appeared to be. They did not want to hold your hand.

  THE NEXT CONCERT, the one in Atlanta, was in a great big modern stadium for back then—bigger seats, bigger everything. Our seats weren’t in the front row but close to it. There was a drop-off between them and the stage. I’m not sure how high it would have been.

  I was so excited at that concert, but then I had a moment of thinking I couldn’t hear them. I don’t know what came over me. I got mad—and I just made the decision that I was going to charge the stage. Which is really not like me. At any rate, I made that decision.

  I made my way down to the railing between the seating area and the stage and I just went over it. I hung on the rail, then I dropped, dropped down to the ground, maybe eight or ten feet. And then I got up and started running toward the stage.

  This is the best moment of Beatlemania for me. There was this din going on all the time and, when the screaming girls saw somebody going across the field, it just went up. Way up. It got louder—I don’t know how many decibels—and it gave me such a rush as I ran. I was just carried by that.

  And then there were two policeman or security guards running toward me, running toward me, running toward me, and I managed to scoot right in between them and get away from them and there was even more screaming from the crowd. I managed to get to the stage—a kind of platform they’d put up—and throw myself up onto it. It was low, probably chest high. I dove onto the corner where John Lennon was, but the two security guys grabbed my feet and yanked me off right away.

  They pulled me off and knocked the breath out of me so they had to give me some smelling salts. The show went on. The guards sort of pulled me around the back or something to give the smelling salts to me. I had waited until the end to make the run and it was the last song. The guards then escorted me out of the stadium, took me outside, and seemed to feel that I could find my parents and my ride on my own, which I could.

  That was a big, big moment for me. I was as un-well-behaved as I could be without pushing things too far. It was great.

  There was a little paragraph about it in one of the local papers that read, “Oh, and one girl, dah, dah, dah.” It was a thrill, it really was.

  When I threw myself on the stage I was closest to John at that point. It happened too fast. I was diving onto the stage, so my head was down. I wasn’t able to look up and see the love in John’s eyes. [Laughs] That didn’t happen.

  SHORTLY AFTER THAT the Beatles’ music changed and I minded it a lot. It was probably Revolver. Wasn’t that the first one that was a little different? A lot different. It was political, it was druggy, it was not hand-holding music. I got to like that music when I was older but I felt somewhat abandoned when I was younger, when I was at that age.

  In the course of that two-year Beatlemaniac period, a friend of mine and I wrote a book about how we stowed away in some kind of shipping boat and ran away to England and met the Beatles and all fell in love with each other, and they married us, of course. We each wrote alternate chapters.

  It’s so funny, I came across it a few years ago and I just felt so tender for these little girls writing this book. I’m sure it’s different now because we’ve all got the Internet and nobody can hold anybody back.

  I do look back on it all in amazement and I remember that moment of being mad. That was funny, you know. It just seemed so pointless to be standing there, screaming with a bunch of girls. It sort of galvanized me to take action.

  We were growing up. We were growing up.

  A Diary Entry

  by Anne Brown, age 15

  Springsteen’s Hair Stands on End

  by Peter Ames Carlin

  IN EARLY 1964 Bruce was riding in the front seat of his mother’s car when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” beamed out of the radio. “It’s those old stories, like when you hear something and your hair stands on end,” Bruce reminisced to [Steve] Van Zandt. “It’s having some strange and voodoolike effect on you.” Leaping out of the car, Bruce sprinted to a nearby bowling alley that he knew had a telephone booth, slammed his way into the box, and spun the number of the girl he was dating. “Have you heard of the Beatles? Have you heard this song?”

  “It stopped your day when it hit,” he said on Van Zandt’s syndicated Underground Garage radio show in 2011. “Just the sound of it. And you didn’t even know what they looked like.” Then the Beatles were shaking their astonishing mops on
The Ed Sullivan Show, and then they were dominating the radio dial, with a wave of similarly tressed countrymen marching on their Cuban boot heels. When summer came, Bruce invested a few weeks painting his aunt Dora’s house, then used $18 of his proceeds to buy an acoustic guitar he’d seen in the window of the Western Auto store on Main Street. Next he bought himself a copy of the 100 Greatest American Folk Songs songbook and committed himself to mastering the instrument.

  FUN

  by Véronique Vienne

  I WAS ON my way out the door when someone turned up the volume on the TV and I spun around. I couldn’t see the screen—but there was this incredible sound coming from the tube. I can only compare it to the jingle of hundreds of slot machines splashing tokens into metal pans. Psychedelic tinnitus. Audible dopamine. The acoustical equivalent of vibrating synapses.

  Fun.

  Fun?

  The deafening shrieks of teenage girls cheering the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show was a sound I couldn’t identify or name. There is no equivalent for the word fun in my native language. I am French.

  In February 1964, American women were flushing French perfume down the toilet because Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, had established diplomatic relations with communist China. I was new to Francophobia. I had come to New York to be with my boyfriend, a brilliant Yale graduate who, among other accomplishments, spoke French fluently. His mother was also a Francophile but her husband refused to acknowledge me or talk to me because he thought that I was a communist. As a student in a French Beaux Arts school, I had found an intern position with the legendary French designer Raymond Loewy, whose offices were in New York. My accent in English was atrocious. People only pretended to understand what I was talking about.

  That spring, my boyfriend took me to visit a college friend of his, a trust-fund brat who lived in Greenwich Village and had perfected the raffish bohemian look of the moment. He showed us his most recent acquisition, a brand new Seeburg jukebox, and proposed to demonstrate how it worked by playing a couple of Beatles songs on it. But he didn’t have the proper coins and neither did we. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll go down to the corner deli and get some change.” I was puzzled. He owned the instrument, so why did he have to pay to use it? Surely he could have tampered with the mechanism to avoid this inconvenience?