The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  Laura Tarrish, fan

  I WAS GIVEN three copies of Meet the Beatles, their first album, for my tenth birthday, in February 1964. From the moment I saw footage of the Beatles, I was officially and obsessively in love with Paul.

  My father was very amused by my devotion. It was kind of a family affair. My mother let me order engraved stationery in the name of Mrs. Paul McCartney. On a business trip to L.A. my dad even went to Capitol Records just to see if he could get me Beatles posters, which he did. I’d make my father learn trivia about the Beatles and then grill him to make sure he was paying attention. I would interject unexpected questions into our conversations—“When is Paul’s birthday?”—to test his memory. He seemed entertained by all of this.

  For Christmas Dad bought me a share of stock in EMI [the Beatles’ UK record company] and for many years they sent me invitations to their stockholders’ meeting. I had a stock certificate for one share worth $4.75 and I would receive dividend checks for 32 cents. I never cashed them. After a certain period of time, they would reissue the check for 28 cents, then 22 cents, etc. I must have cost the company a fortune.

  We lived in Phoenix and on Saturday mornings I’d go to the library with my best friend and we’d do research on the Beatles. If they were going to be in a show, I’d cut out the listing. We wrote to magazines that featured articles on them and I wrote to Jane Asher [Paul’s girlfriend] and asked her for a photograph, telling her I was doing a report on English actresses! She sent us a signed photo, which my friend and I then had to share.

  I had a pen pal in England and we’d send each other news about the band. One letter very earnestly told me that she was sending me a surprise but was not at liberty to tell me how she got it. An autographed photo of the Beatles arrived soon after. In my fervor for the group, I chose to believe it was authentic.

  I saved the covers to their albums. You’d hold the covers while you listened to the Beatles and read the liner notes. I have a Beatles collection somewhere in the basement. I even have the “butcher” one of Introducing the Beatles that has become a collector’s item, which I got by steaming off the other cover. [The controversial original cover to this album (of the Beatles dressed as butchers and sitting amid decapitated baby dolls and chunks of meat) was covered by a more innocuous one before being replaced altogether.]

  I snuck an eight-track tape recorder into the theater when A Hard Day’s Night came out and to this day can recite most lines from the movie. I kept those tapes, too. Nothing takes me back to that time in my life more than watching A Hard Day’s Night. It fills me with such joy when I see it or see snippets of it. It was such an innocent time.

  For all my adoration and fervor, I never got to see them. They never came to Phoenix. That was one of the reasons I was so mad at my parents for moving me away from Los Angeles when I was two and a half.

  Years later, I lived in London for a time with my husband and children. Our flat looked out onto the Abbey Road crosswalk and we were just around the corner from Paul McCartney’s house in St. John’s Wood. We were there when George Harrison died and my then eight-year-old daughter (already a Beatles fan herself ) went to the front of the Abbey Road Studios and joined in the masses writing messages on the wall.

  As one of the youngest fans out there that day, she was interviewed by the BBC, telling them that she’d “grown up” with Beatles music and that George was her favorite Beatle. I was as touched by her devotion as my father had been by mine.

  Screening the Beatles

  by David Thomson

  IT WAS ALL happening so fast in a world that still moved slowly. “Love Me Do” went on sale in Britain in late 1962. “Please Please Me” was released in January 1963. In July 1962, Telstar, a communications satellite, had brought the first live instantaneous exchange between Britain and America—look at them, there they are! In 1963, in Britain, the Beatles did their first tour and the crowd went mad. The thing called “Beatlemania” was born. An American on vacation in Britain was there to witness it. His name was Ed Sullivan. He went to the boys’ manager, Brian Epstein, and he said he had to have them on his show. Shazam!

  ON APRIL 23, 1964, when I got home from work at Penguin Books in west London, my wife, Anne, had a story to tell. She had been walking our daughter Kate in a stroller over the railway bridge on the way to go shopping in Hounslow. It was an overcast morning—it still is, in the movie. Anne had seen what looked like a film being shot in the fields to her right. They were the Thornbury playing fields, in Isleworth, full of soccer at the weekends, but empty that day, except for what looked like a movie, with a crane and quite a lot of people. “Wonder what that was?” we said. We didn’t have long to wait. By July 6, the film had opened and a few days later we saw it, A Hard Day’s Night, and Anne could say, “That’s what that was.” Some people said it was the best bit of the film: “Can’t Buy Me Love,” with the boys running wild in the fields to that triumphant song.

  Everyone knew the Beatles had to do a movie—look at Elvis, he had become a factory for bad movies that nearly crushed his vitality. (The best thing in any Elvis picture could be Ann-Margret dancing in Viva Las Vegas.) But no one had any idea how to do a Beatles movie. Amazingly, the project was a sidebar. The album for the film was reckoned to be far more lucrative. The film itself would be shot in seven weeks for about $500,000—in black and white! (To date, its rentals are over $6 million.)

  The American company, United Artists, had thought of the movie in October 1963, just from the reports coming out of Britain. The boys took the deal but they were edgy about what the movie might be. “We didn’t want to make a fuckin’ shitty pop movie,” said John. United Artists assigned Walter Shenson as the producer, Richard Lester would direct, and Alun Owen was hired to do a script. The first two were Americans, with not much experience. Owen was the key guy: he was Welsh, but he’d been raised in Liverpool, and he’d written a television play, No Trams to Lime Street, which some of the Beatles had seen and enjoyed. Moreover, Lester had worked with Owen on another TV show and they’d got on. Owen knew Liverpool language, so he hung out with the Beatles, listening to the way they talked. The important thing, he felt, was to get their cheeky, snarky talk, the way any gang sounded—with much more familiarity than respect, needling, teasing, wisecracking, with the amazement of realizing that they were the Beatles and everyone wanted them.

  One reason why they had become a sensation in Britain was their chatty answering back, their irreverence and their mild insolence—taking the mickey, Brits called it, out of all the people from the media who wanted to interview them. Of course, mainly it was the songs that drove the enterprise, and the panache of the boys.

  Looking back now, it’s hard to miss the gay quality in the band. We know they were very heterosexual in life, but as a performing unit they were clean, tidy, and pals. They were a group, whereas Elvis and Jagger were full of sexual longing and aloneness. The Beatles had so little interest in or need for movie acting, and they would be shadows of themselves as individual performers. Their identity was as a group.

  Their characters had impacted. They’d grown together, like a gang—but a nonthreatening one. Their manager, Brian Epstein, and producer, George Martin, had enough commercial sense not to frighten mothers. So when the girls howled, their moms could say, “Oh, that Paul and George—they’re nice boys. And Ringo’s fun.” Of course, John wasn’t like the rest, with his cutthroat voice. He was itching to make that clear.

  Britain was a very different country in 1963 than what it is now, and pop singers were still well behaved and polite, like Cliff Richard and Adam Faith. But the Liverpool-Hamburg group offered so much more: true class hostility; generational rebellion; North Country contempt for soft Londoners; knowing the music was about sex; and realizing that they were getting so famous they were liberated and confined at the same time.

  Kids loved the Beatles because they identified an urge to fuck the system. Fuck was not said yet, of course, but it was there between the li
nes. Scriptwriter Alun Owen knew the film depended on catching that “fuck you” attitude with the boys, giving a sly wink so we wouldn’t really be offended. John especially found his artistic character (he’d have winced at that phrase—until he met Yoko) in press conferences. But there was another model for this unexpected directness: It was John Kennedy talking to the press, making jokes and seeming as if he was alive now and was scanning the crowd for the likeliest girls.

  As for the director Richard Lester (born in Philadelphia), he had been raised in television and commercials, but had made a surreal slapstick eleven-minute movie, The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film (with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan). In hindsight you can see how it was a prelude, or working title, for the “Can’t Buy Me Love” sequence. Lester liked short shots and plenty of cuts, knockout visuals, and a musicalized shooting style.

  The Beatles were fans of the Running, Jumping film. That was important because the world was falling in place to do just about anything they suggested. Owen and Lester were both of the moment, hip, cool and subversive. London and Britain were not quite “swinging” yet, but you could feel the energy building.

  So Lester called for several cameras and told their operators to keep shooting, to gather up accidents, improvs, and things that were way outside conventionally made movies. That air of cinema verité owed something to the French New Wave, and especially to Jean-Luc Godard, which was altering notions about film narrative. In addition, A Hard Day’s Night established the iconography of the mopheads being chased through the streets by crazed girls who just wanted a touch. The boys’ lack of privacy, something significant in their eventual breakup, was there in that first film. It was a showcase for the lads and their songs, but it was about celebrity.

  There was an immediate follow-up, Help! It had Lester still, but no Alun Owen. Instead there were two ill-matched writers: the playwright Charles Wood and the crime novelist Marc Behm. Help! also had more input from John and Paul, who were wondering whether they might act and talk like artists, instead of Scouse* rascals. The film was in color, had many exotic locations, and was three times as expensive as A Hard Day’s Night. It was more stylized than the first film—or was it more arty? It did as much business as the original, but now London was swinging and sophisticated, and drugs were part of that momentum.

  By the time of Magical Mystery Tour, the four boys had become directors (along with a veteran cameraman, Bernard Knowles). Mystery Tour was made for television and done in color, but in 1967 few homes in Britain had color yet. So the picture hardly found an audience and, in hindsight, seems overloaded with the sweet, vapid pretentiousness of Paul (who was the chief intelligence on the picture). Yellow Submarine was still to come, but that was the vision of a Canadian animator, George Dunning. The Beatles were losing interest in movies and faith in themselves.

  So it’s worth asking the question: Could any of the boys have done movies on their own? The only one who seemed to have anything like a dramatic personality—abrasive but vulnerable—was John. He might have begun to play characters that resembled himself, in the way Mick Jagger became the recluse rock star, Turner, in Performance, which is a real and startling movie. Soon enough, Jagger proved he was no actor, and in all likelihood John had too much money, too many drugs, too much adulation, and too much Yoko to summon the spirit and energy for a whole movie. But it’s just possible that he could have played Harold Pinter or even Joe Orton material. He was the only one of the four with a sufficiently interesting and unresolved personality.

  By the end of the sixties, the business plan (let alone the artistic resolve) in rock had broken down and the concert film was taking control. Woodstock was vital in that process (budget $600,000; gross $13 million); while Gimme Shelter, in the best and worst ways, was a rock movie as a public event, culminating in murder at the Altamont concert. To this day, on stage and on camera, Jagger is one of the most fascinating, androgynous performers in the movie musical. You can’t think of Paul in the same light, and the 208-minute documentary on George Harrison, Living in the Material World, made by Martin Scorsese, is too much of a dull thing.

  Nothing matches the sound of the Beatles in those first few years, with the jarring, harsh-sweet interplay of John and Paul, and the serene cascade of their songs. The real moment of A Hard Day’s Night is the odd, accidental way it captured the Beatles’ cinema verité brusqueness in interviews, presaging the downfall of many humbug clichés in British life. But if the movie is about its moment, the “now” experience, and profound problems with satisfaction, then Jagger on stage on screen is everything that Elvis and the moptops failed to be.

  The Ed Sullivan Show was February 9, 1964—73 million viewers were reported. A Hard Day’s Night opened in New York on August 11, 1964. By then, every possible Liverpool gang was being signed up and touring the States. Next year, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider were putting together the Monkees. No one could keep up, least of all John, Paul, George, and Ringo. A Hard Day’s Night was not a “fuckin’ shitty pop movie,” but it was almost a new kind of musical to rival what Jacques Demy was doing in France with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (it opened at Cannes in May 1964). But that was pretty and the Beatles were gritty. The influences flew in all directions, and the Dick Lester style would take root in American television in 1967 with the pilot of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. A couple of years into the success of that show and the Beatles broke up.

  So that’s what that was.

  * Scouse = the accent and dialect associated with Liverpool and Merseyside.

  Gabriel Kahane, composer and songwriter

  MY FATHER, JEFFREY Kahane, is a concert pianist and conductor, but he grew up very much entrenched in the pop music of his era. My parents are too young to have truly been hippies, but they had older siblings. They wanted to emulate their adored elders and, as such, were listening to the Beatles at a relatively young age, when they were ten or eleven.

  When I was growing up my father would practice a Mozart concerto, then put on Abbey Road or Sgt. Pepper. The Beatles, along with Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, are the artists I grew up with and from whom I soaked up notions of craftsmanship in songwriting.

  I got to know the Beatles more or less in reverse order of their discography. I grew up listening to Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, “the White Album”; everything before that came for me much later. Although I didn’t start writing songs until I was in my early twenties, having grown up with that music had a profound effect on how I understood the DNA of songs.

  There is this alchemical, sort of ineffable thing in Lennon-McCartney compositions: as much as they may have been writing independently, the ten percent of influence that one of them may have had on the other makes their collaboration greater than the sum of its parts.

  A lot of today’s pop music—even that branded as art rock, independent, or highbrow—has become extraordinarily lazy with respect to craftsmanship in songwriting. There’s this peculiar double standard, particularly around lyrics. A lot of independent pop music being made is really satisfying on a musical level—it can be compositionally rich, sophisticated, and moving—but not so in its lyrics.

  The craft of writing them has really fallen off.

  I think of Paul McCartney as a true craftsman. Some may view him as a cheeseball English music hall songwriter, but there’s such incredible craft in his lyric writing and in his work as a storyteller. John Lennon, too. His approach to lyric writing was probably more intuitive than McCartney’s; nevertheless, many of his lyrics have a really satisfying shape and structure.

  “She’s Leaving Home” comes to mind because the harmonic notes are so beautifully controlled; there’s this kind of Schubertian quality to it. It was a favorite of Leonard Bernstein’s in his quest to draw a connection between the German lied tradition and Lennon-McCartney. There’s a perfect economy between melody and harmony. The harmony is relatively simple and the way that it supports the melody is as perfect as a Schubert song.

  I can’t
assess a song like “She’s Leaving Home” critically with any kind of objectivity because I listened to it from such an early age. It’s wrapped up in the sonic equivalent of Proust’s madeleine; it’s evocative of so much from another time period. I think of that song as a prototype, or archetype, of a certain kind of story song. Certainly a lot of my work as a songwriter—in my pop music writing probably less than in [his musical] February House—has been story songs. The two albums I’ve released as a songwriter, Gabriel Kahane and Where are the Arms? largely include these, as opposed to songs that are abstract and imagistic.

  THE BEATLES STARTED more or less as a cover band. They had a repertoire of hundreds of cover songs that they played during their years in Germany. Many of these were American pop songs. McCartney has spoken explicitly about having a sort of apprenticeship to that songbook, and the huge impact it had on how he wrote songs.

  Whether you’re painting, writing symphonic music, or doing any other art form, you learn initially by imitation. By soaking up that material, the Beatles set themselves up to create a catalog of songs that were in conversation with an earlier body of work. You can draw a connection from the Tin Pan Alley songwriting tradition right up to McCartney. There are instances when he can be kind of cloying, or simultaneously amusing and cloying; those are most often in the songs that relate to that earlier tradition. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” for example, has its charms, but it feels like a pastiche of an earlier song, perhaps one by Jerome Kern, one of the more explicitly Hebraic 1930s New York songwriters, with their chromatic melodies. (It’s a little too chromatic to be in the Richard Rodgers vein.) That clarinet obbligato drives the pastiche home even further.