A couple of months ago, MSN put out a list of “The 25 greatest covers of Beatles songs.” A couple of months before that, it was the New York Times publishing “13 Transcendent Beatles Covers by Black Musicians.”1 This musical parlor game of Beatles covers is a long running pastime — it’s played regularly not just in major media outlets but in countless social forums and a gajillion home playlists.

Since only a small percentage of the thousands of Beatles interpretations can be known to most who compile such lists, there is both a heavy usual-suspects overlap among them and enough expanse and variability to ensure passionate agreement and vehement disagreement (which is always half the fun).

Actually the topic of cover versions is an endlessly enticing rabbit hole for any music fan. Despite the fact that, even allowing for different tastes, most covers are disappointing if not pointless, those that do work can be among the most interesting and rewarding listens. A great cover version is worth ten mediocre ones.

Successful covers can work on a variety of levels. Some might be faithful to the original recordings and work simply because of the sound and the quality in the playing and singing. (The Beatles themselves fall into this category.2)

More often, though — really, ever since rock music matured in the late 1960s — covers succeed by reimagining the original and radically changing its arrangement.

Think of The Boxtops’ “The Letter,” epically transformed by Joe Cocker . . .

Or Badfinger’s “Without You,” melodramatically re-vocalized by Harry Nilsson . . .

Or Roberta Flack’s astonishing metamorphosing of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (originally recorded by MacColl’s muse, Peggy Seeger) — for my money perhaps the greatest-ever realization of a song’s hidden potential . . .

We all have our favorites, across the gamut of artists and styles. (Feel free to mention some in the comments!)

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But there’s an entirely separate category of covers which tend to get forgotten in best-of compilations, possibly because few become “hits”: those which take a piece of music created in one genre, and adapt it to another. When they succeed, these cross-over treatments can lead to real epiphanies about the original composition.

Naturally, “when they succeed” is a major caveat. For one thing, putting a song by a rock group into the hands of jazz or classical artists can be an embarrassing exercise, either because the differences in style are irreconcilable or because many pop songs simply aren’t equipped melodically or harmonically to survive more sophisticated settings.

In fact, cross-over versions might almost serve as a lab test for compositional quality. For example, certain Beatles songs — even great or iconic ones — just don’t seem to make the transfer. One example is “Yesterday,” ironically the single most covered song in history. It’s only an opinion, but to my ears most covers of “Yesterday” sound corny and square. They have the effect of making me think less of the song in the first place.

*Actually the problem with “Yesterday” is with all covers, not just cross-over versions. The details don’t even seem to matter. With very few exceptions — Marvin Gaye’s is one that comes to mind — and regardless of the artist, musical style, whether it’s vocal or instrumental, or when it was recorded or performed — other recordings of “Yesterday” sound as banal as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” (Of course, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” is itself a melody covered by some hack named Mozart . . . )

The same is true for another iconic and oft-covered song, “Imagine.” The solo Lennon classic seems to be the poster child for a song that is sublime in the hands of its creator but almost unlistenable in the hands of anyone else.3

Does that mean songs like “Yesterday” and “Imagine” really aren’t very good? (There are those who would say yes, loudly.) Of course not. “Yesterday” may be overplayed and it may suffer from attempts to turn it into something more than it is, but the overwhelming consensus even among other musicians and writers is that it’s great. And anyway, particularly in the world of pop music, what makes a good song can depend on many variables, not least the sound and performance of the artist delivering it.

Still, given its lofty status in songwriting annals, maybe we can use “Yesterday” as a totem of sorts, a benchmark against which, by certain standards at least, to measure others. And comparing the venerated “Yesterday” to other Beatles songs that are taken out of their pop or rock context leads to some interesting surprises. The Beatles catalogue is in fact filled with songs that not only succeed in cross-over marriages but are even enhanced — songs that are practically indestructible, that sound great no matter who does them and, most rewardingly, when performed by serious jazz or classical players don’t wilt but bloom. And with that flowering comes the delightful bonus: being able to marvel anew at the beauty of something you’ve heard a thousand times.

There is no metric for beauty, no data that can identify it. But great masters, in any field, understand the workings of their art in a way that lay people may intuitively appreciate but can’t articulate, and certainly in a way that “haters” could never understand. This is as true for rock and roll as it is for anything else; it’s completely irrelevant to a great rock song whether or not it would work in a chamber setting or a jazz trio. Some would; most wouldn’t. (Many would argue they shouldn’t.) But when Leonard Bernstein studies the Beatles music and calls them the greatest songwriters since Gershwin, when Ned Rorem does the same and compares them to Monteverdi and Schubert, and when Peter Schickele says, “Without irony, I regard Lennon and McCartney with Schumann and Brahms as the greatest songwriters of all time,” they are applying not a rock and roll standard, but an historical standard that encompasses the entirety of the western musical canon. To them, and to many others in their fields, much of the Beatles’ music, however different its original presentation and intention, however anathema it may be to legacy gatekeepers, is of a quality that can withstand placement into a classical or jazz-oriented milieu.

There are all sorts of examples for which there is voluminous, wonderful evidence: “She’s Leaving Home,” “Michelle,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Julia,” “Something,” the list goes on. But here we’ll focus on one song in particular — one that incorporates neither musical complexity nor virtuosity, one which might seem surprising as a subject of the accolades above but which embodies that most intangible and elusive musical achievement: a sublime melody. It’s the simple, almost threadbare McCartney ballad from 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night.

As with a fairly astounding number of the Beatles’ most famous songs, “And I Love Her” was not released as a single in most countries and thus not a “hit” anywhere except in the U.S. (As a rock group, the Beatles felt soft numbers were diversions best suited for LPs.) As a song, it defines simplicity:

• Sparse, even trite lyrics.

• Thin construction: compositionally, almost the entire song is built around one ten-bar verse, with only a single deviation to a bridge or “middle eight” (i.e. there is no C section)

• Spare, bare-bones backing: no drums (only bongos and claves), no electric guitars, no vocal harmonies, no background singing.

What it does have is a stealthily gorgeous tune and a couple of memorable musical signatures that were new to Beatles music and which are indispensable to the track’s appeal: a classical nylon-string guitar (Harrison’s 1950 Jose Ramirez Guitarra De Estudio), and a striking half-step modulation, from F# minor to G minor, at the start of the classical-guitar solo.

Let’s join the scene from A Hard Day’s Night in which the song is introduced, starting just prior to being lifted into that sudden, dramatic key change of George’s recapitulation of the melody.

“And I Love Her” was a popular track right away, even recognized as evidence by the older (read: stuffier) generation that the Beatles were capable of “better” music. The Beatles themselves knew it was good: Paul has described it as “the first ballad I impressed myself with,” and John later called it Paul’s “first ‘Yesterday’.” But over time its profile took a back seat to the Beatles’ increasingly mature, and more famously innovative, material.

Cut to the 1980s. New York’s WQXR — the oldest classical music radio station in the country — featured an evening program called This Is My Music, a forum for guest composers and musicians to discuss and play classical music of special meaning to them. The program’s theme music in its later years, a recording by cellist Ofra Harnoy with the Orford String Quartet, was not, however, a famous classical piece. It was a stark arrangement of “And I Love Her.”

The Harnoy/Orford arrangement takes the intrinsic simplicity of the song to an extreme — it quiets things to a whisper, slows the tempo to a crawl and strips everything away so all that is left are the naked essentials: a bare melody and a pizzicato accompaniment. The delicate, gossamer styling actually reveals the strength of the composition in its purest form. It’s an inspired interpretation.

Ofra Harnoy and The Orford String Quartet

Fast-forwarding another several decades, two of our greatest jazz musicians — guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Brad Mehldau — have provided their own demonstrations of the renewable beauty of “And I Love Her.” Each has recorded the song and performed it live numerous times.

Here is Metheny, discussing the song and why he plays it . . .

“‘And I Love Her’ is to me one of the most perfect melodies ever . . . it’s like infinity. I could just play on the chords for 5 hours.”

. . . and in one of his beautifully arranged solo performances:

As for Brad Mehldau, it’s as if he took Metheny’s line about being able to “play on those chords for 5 hours” as a literal suggestion: on the album Blues and Ballads, Mehldau and his jazz trio extend the originally two-and-a-half-minute song to what AllMusic.com described as a “sweeping and operatic” rumination lasting nearly ten minutes. In live performance Mehldau has taken even further liberties, sometimes losing himself in the chords for as long as sixteen minutes. This approach is rooted not only in the improvisational ethos of jazz, but also — along with the idea of adapting orchestrated pieces to solo piano — in an even older tradition: the classical world of the 18th and 19th centuries which, as a formally trained musician, Mehldau would be deeply familiar with.

Also deeply familiar with that world is another classically educated pianist, Rick Wakeman, the famed keyboard wizard for Yes. Wakeman has done many Beatles covers himself, notably on his Piano Portraits album and an entire album of Beatles “variations.” He explains:

“If you’ve got a great melody, you can really adapt, you can really play variations on them. It’s something that composers have been doing for centuries with their peers. Haydn did it with Mozart: ‘Oh, I’m going to play around with this!’ I always loved doing it, it was something that I was encouraged to do at The Royal College [of Music]. And you can’t pick better composers than the Beatles to do that to.”

Wakeman could easily be talking about Mehldau here. And Mehldau himself takes the analogy even further.

“Something that I love in classical music, for instance: the composer Liszt was a piano virtuoso, so he loved to play big piano pieces. And one thing he did was he took songs from Schubert and he took pieces of Wagner operas, Beethoven symphonies . . . and he put them on the piano. I was thinking about that a little, I was influenced by that.”

So where Metheny the jazz guitarist might represent the faithful or “straight” cover, Mehldau the jazz pianist could be a transplant into the salons of Romantic-era Europe.

But despite the filigrees and clusters of Mehldau’s variations, the magic of the essential melody/harmony relationship never disappears. From the seduction of his contemplative opening-chord vamp, to the smooth-as-butter spread into the B section, through the extended, almost possessed deep-dive into the chordal possibilities, everything reaffirms the perfection of the song’s foundation — or, in Metheny’s words, “inevitably that set of notes, that inevitably leads to that harmonic result.” If Metheny’s treatment is a demand that you stop everything and listen, really listen to the intrinsic beauty in McCartney’s small composition, Mehldau’s is an exploration, an accelerating trip around the world(s!) of “And I Love Her” that eventually drops you back home into the comfort — but also the melancholia — of “one of the most perfect melodies ever.” Stay with it.

Finally, another giant in yet another musical genre — the Latin/flamenco guitar stylist and electric jazz-fusion icon Al Di Meola — is, underneath his jaw-dropping technique and famous performance pyrotechnics, a devoted Beatles aficionado who decided in 2012 to indulge in his passion for the Fab Four. He embarked on a series of world tours performing his own syncopated, Latin-tinged arrangements of Beatles songs and put out not one but two Beatles-filled solo CDs. In 2013 he was in Moscow preparing for a show and cameras captured him sound-checking “And I Love Her.” It’s a casual, un-precious, free-flowing moment; the clip is incomplete and ends abruptly. Yet it provides still another example of how malleable and adaptable this piece of music is — how virtually every conceivable approach to the song succeeds, and how naturally it shines in every setting.

So what is the musical value of “And I Love Her”?

Ultimately, the eye or ear of the beholder is the only relevant arbiter. One person’s bete noire is someone else’s slice of heaven, and vice versa. A brilliant reinterpretation can even turn the former into the latter, as Roberta Flack’s holy version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” did for me. But exercises like this can also lift things out of a large “good” pile and into a much more exclusive “great” pile; it can reveal that something you’re already fond of is actually even better. This is the power of a truly great cover version, the light bulb that can get turned on by what a musical master does with someone else’s raw material. It’s not only a way of hearing that material anew; it’s instructive in how underrated that original material might be. (Or how overrated it might be!)

And personally, if this were a courtroom and all these performances evidence, I think Miss Harnoy and Messrs. Metheny, Mehldau and Di Meola have made a powerful case that, musically, “And I Love Her” is one of the most underrated songs in the entire Beatles catalogue.

John Lennon once said that the whole point of the Beatles was to set an example, as an exhortation to throw off convention, to find your own voice and express it. In their own way, these different but compelling interpretations of a seemingly simple piece of music suggest a twist on Lennon’s challenge: “Here’s this little song, this raw gem that contains multitudes. Now go forth and multiply!”

An alternate image from the Sgt. Pepper photo shoot

When the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the first week of June, 1967,1 its impact, as Todd Rundgren put it, was like someone “dropped an atom bomb in the middle of town.”  Aside from the record’s immediate influence on songwriting and record production, the entire music industry itself — its economics, its packaging, the attitudes and ambitions of its creators and the listening habits of its consumers — was changed forever. 

That was more than 58 years ago. In the decades since, Sgt. Pepper has become the subject of much argument and revisionism. Everything from the quality of its songs to the authenticity of its innovations to whether its impact and influence was in fact constructive or destructive has been reexamined and reevaluated.  A popular choice both for the greatest album in rock history and the most overrated album in rock history, one thing is indisputable: Sgt. Pepper is surely the most debated album in rock history.

Debate is fun.  It’s engaging, inspiring, infuriating, animating; it fuels passions and interest, sells magazines, compels digital clicks, keeps bars in business.  It can also, when sufficiently divorced from its subject by time and collective experience, yield shifts in received wisdom and even historiography that drift further and further away from reality as it actually unfolded.  

We see this over and over.  Even outliers in statistically measurable activities like sports — athletes and their achievements which remain objectively the greatest compared to their contemporaries of any ever recorded (think Jesse Owens in track or Babe Ruth in baseball) — become diminished over time. Debate, like waves constantly eating away at shorelines, creates new “goalposts” and even new realities which obscure the old.

The same thing happens, perhaps more inevitably, in the popular arts.  I recently had a discussion about old movies with a friend who had never seen Citizen Kane.  He expressed bewilderment over its iconic standing as an influential game changer in film direction.  Not that he didn’t enjoy the movie; he just didn’t see anything through his 21st century eyes to justify its top-of-the-food-chain status.  Such is the natural effect of distance and time: records are broken, art forms progress, standards improve. What was once acclaimed as best is not simply reassessed; it is extracted from its time and place and dropped into another, shorn of context.

Such is the case with the modern perception of Sgt. Pepper.

As near-universal as the rapturous contemporary reception of Sgt. Pepper was,2 there has been an increasing tendency over the years, especially among critics and hipsters, to dismiss the album and play down its merits and innovations. The book Kill Your Idols — an overtly revisionist take on numerous rock standard-bearers — devotes its opening chapter to tearing down Sgt. Pepper. A poll on UltimateClassicRock.com, a website that caters to a largely younger audience, recently named Sgt. Pepper one of rock’s most overrated LPs. British painter and musician Billy Childish says simply, “Sgt. Pepper signaled the death of rock ‘n’ roll.” The main grievances are apparently that Pepper a) did not lead but merely appropriated developments of the counterculture; b) has been revealed by the passage of time as musically inferior to any number of other great rock records (including other Beatles records); c) is not even rock music at all, but dilettantish dabbling in retrograde music styles; and, perhaps worst of all, d) is to blame for years of pretentious attempts by other groups to produce bloated, “conceptual” works that rock ‘n’ roll was never suited for, a trend that only the arrival of punk rock in the mid-1970s reversed.

There is some validity to these arguments, though each can be rebutted thoroughly. But the main problem is that they completely miss the point; they ignore the album’s nuclear impact, its gigantic influence and its absolutely unique historical significance. Sgt. Pepper was the most culturally dominant musical recording of all time. Whether or not its songs match the reputation, whether or not its influence encouraged a parade of lesser talents to send rock music into increasingly irrelevant directions, the fact is that no album before or since so transfixed so many people under so broad and popular a consensus.

It is exactly this cultural dominance and status as rock’s greatest recorded event that most likely accounts for the dismissive iconoclasm that has increasingly followed Sgt. Pepper. Knocking down established standards, after all, is built into the rock ethos, and there is hardly a more established standard than the once-unimpeachable Sgt. Pepper.3 Complaining about its iconic status has become a mini cottage industry.

But this is little more than iconoclasm for iconoclasm’s sake.

Let’s look at one example of how this feeds into widely held ahistoricism, namely the pretense — or, for many, an honest misperception — that Sgt. Pepper was merely one Beatles album among many, and should therefore be assessed simply on that basis. Predictably one misperception begets others, as the removal of historical context from one event distorts the context of surrounding events. In 2022, Rock Cellar Magazine unwittingly illustrated this phenomenon when interviewing Giles Martin, who had just overseen the remix of Sgt. Pepper’s predecessor, Revolver.

Sgt. Pepper is the one that people often point to but for me, Revolver brought the Beatles into vibrant, full-bodied Technicolor. Can you discuss the landmark nature of the record?

The phrasing of this question is a classic exercise in rear-view projection. In hindsight, yes, Revolver may well be a superior record to Sgt. Pepper. There are many who now consider it the Beatles’ finest work,4 for a number of reasons we won’t get into here. (I happen to agree.) The problem, though, is that Revolver was not a “landmark” record. Despite being crammed from start to finish with innovation, beauty and brilliance, it did not impact the mainstream at the time in a way that the Beatles hadn’t already done with prior releases.

There was also little about the Beatles to suggest radical change — they were still touring and performing as they always had, still wearing matching suits (cooler suits, but still suits), still clean cut and sporting their moptop haircuts (longer and, again, cooler, but still moptops), still for all outward appearances the same recognizable Fab Four.

Certainly many musicians and critics noticed the huge evolutionary leaps which the Beatles had made on Revolver, but the general public was as likely to be confused as seduced by it.5 In fact, Revolver actually underperformed commercially by comparison with previous Beatles albums, especially in the U.S. where it sold fewer copies in its release year than any of their previous studio LPs.

Some of this less-than-earth-shattering reception was due to Capitol Records butchering the record.6 But also, the Beatles immediately after Revolver’s release were buffeted left and right by an entire summer’s worth of bad news, the first time Beatlemania had hit an extended sour patch, which undoubtedly affected the album’s commercial performance.7 Finally, there was a seeming lack of promotional attention even from the Beatles themselves: despite completing Revolver just before embarking on a world tour, they didn’t include a single song from the new album in their set.

Revolver contained a cornucopia of dazzling music and duly ascended to the top of the charts, but nothing about its public reception was unusually ecstatic. We may now recognize its stunning innovations, the quantum leap in musicianship and modernity of sound, the near-perfection of its songwriting. But it distorts the historical record to photoshop our current perception of Revolver onto the general perception of 1966.

This is why suggesting that Revolver (or, really, any album) can compete with Sgt. Pepper as a musical landmark is nonsensical — and why it typifies Pepper’s fall from grace in recent years. It’s not simply ahistorical, it’s anti-historical.

The inarguable truth: Sgt. Pepper was the single greatest recording event not only in the history of rock, but in the entire history of recorded sound.

To appreciate this, we have to rewind a little bit. We’ll get a lot of help from other artists and historians along the way . . .

In the early 1960s, both Top 40 radio and the Billboard Hot 100 were melting pots of popular music. Rock and roll sat next to Broadway show tunes, country and western music, the black pop of Philadelphia and Motown, teen idols, novelty songs, even comedy and spoken-word recordings.8 There was no SiriusXM or Spotify or internet radio splitting formats and listening habits into hundreds of genres. A national hit record meant being in every car, every living room. Into this simpler world the Beatles exploded, saturating not only the airwaves but the very lives of those listening. Beatlemania was a contagion so potent that barely a year after releasing their debut LP, the Beatles dominated virtually every aspect of youth culture throughout the Western world. (Even the Far East and the stifled youth movements of Communist Eastern Europe found ways to embrace the Beatles, with sweeping historical implications.9) In doing so, the Beatles became avatars for an entire generation — the largest generation, in fact, in history. The power and cultural primacy which the Beatles enjoyed in the mid-1960s is almost impossible to convey to anyone who has only known today’s fractured and over-focus-grouped media climate.

As the Beatles changed the trajectory of pop and rock music and opened the gates to the British Invasion, other artists rose to periodically challenge their dominance. But in terms of mass appeal, critical acclaim, and peer influence — and especially the rare trifecta of all three — the Beatles stood apart.  On top of this, the innovations and sophistication that increasingly characterized their records (and, in turn, the records of others) were directly responsible for rock and roll music gaining a wider audience and being taken seriously by those outside its primary youth demographic. 

One effect of all this is that by late 1966 the popular music dynamic was shifting. Rock and roll — especially the new rock — was beginning to catch up to the Beatles. Part of this was the ripple effect that follows any leader: others raise their game.10 But something else was happening too.  What we now recognize as the ‘60s ethos — individual expression, artistic experimentation and sociopolitical awareness — was in full bloom.  Norms were being shattered in every field; each week seemed to bring new developments in film, literature, visual art, dance, theater, even comedy. Likewise in pop music: Bob Dylan went electric, immediately injecting rock songs with a greater topical relevance, other British bands were growing harder-edged and more lyrically direct, and new groups from the West Coast were having a major impact on youth culture and seemed to be competing for the generational banner.  The gap between the Beatles and the rest of pop, which had been so pronounced in 1964, had narrowed.

Meanwhile, after their nightmarish summer tour, the Fab Four had not only ceased giving public performances — an unheard-of decision, seen by some as potential career suicide — they had, for the first time since they signed a record contract, taken an extended break from recording (and from each other).

The break lasted for months. The Beatles did not reconvene in the studio until the end of November, and remained publicly invisible until well into the new year. Brian Epstein and EMI were concerned about the Beatles “slipping” and put pressure on George Martin to release something new as soon as possible. Martin reluctantly gave them the first fruits of the recent sessions, the gorgeous tapestry of “Penny Lane” and the astonishing soundscape of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The two songs were meant for an as-yet-untitled new album, but EMI rushed them out as a double A-sided single in February.11

By this time, though, the Beatles had been out of public sight for almost half a year, and they would remain out of sight for months more.  Without the traditional publicity generated by live appearances, and unmoored from any accompanying LP, the new single seemed bizarre and disconnected — a strange, exotic island in the familiar pop sea of current radio.  While “Strawberry Fields”/ “Penny Lane” is today often cited as the most stunning rock 45 ever released, it was actually the first Beatles single since their debut all the way back in 1962 not to hit number one.12 The Fab Four were no longer infallible chart toppers.

In an odd paradox then, the Beatles’ extended absence from the public eye* had put the band at risk of ceding their commercial dominance, even as they remained revered by a generation and the subject of intense speculation (what were they up to?). 

*A word here about this public “absence.” By today’s standards, such an absence wouldn’t even be noticed; the interval between new releases by a major act has long been measured in years, not months. But in the mid-1960s, popular artists were still expected to produce an album or two every year, and the Beatles were so prolific that they seemed to put something out practically every other month. (In the United States, this was exaggerated to an almost absurd degree: in the two and a half years between the Beatles’ American explosion in winter 1964 and the summer of 1966, Capitol Records released no less than 15 singles and an almost incomprehensible 10 full-length Beatles albums.)13 And then the spigot was inexplicably shut off. For nearly a full year after the summer of 1966 the Beatles released zero albums and made no personal appearances. 

The extended silence was so conspicuous, rumors spread that the Beatles had broken up.  In interviews, other stars would drift, unprompted, into concern about the Fab Four . . .

Jimi Hendrix: “The Beatles, man, they were where it was all at.  They were the group who really kept the scene going. They were holding it up. When they dropped out altogether, things changed.” [Note Jimi’s use of the past tense!]

Pete Townshend: “I’m a bit disappointed the Beatles are not still making records. They are basically my main source of inspiration. And everyone else’s for that matter.” 

Ray Davies: “Everyone is asking, what’s wrong with the Beatles?”

Rock’s throne had been abdicated and no one had assumed it. “The bottom had fallen out” and “everyone’s main source of inspiration” was gone.

Consider then where rock music stood in the spring of 1967.

1. The previous year had seen the form advance considerably, maturing in tandem with the increasing artistic, social and political awareness of its audience;

2. The Beatles remained the putative standard-bearers for the state of the art;

3. At the very moment rock seemed poised to act as proxy for the coming of age and shifting attitudes of a generation, the Beatles essentially disappeared.

So when fresh rumors began circulating that the Beatles were not only still together but were in the studio working on new music, anticipation built . . .

Jack Bruce: “Everybody seems to sort of look to the Beatles when they make an album to really be ahead of everybody else. And I think that’s true. They’ve been ahead of everybody else in every album they’ve done.”

And built . . .

Rick Wakeman: “There was huge excitement. It was what everybody was waiting for.”

Justin Hayward: “All of London, and everybody, all the young people in Britain, were waiting for this new album. We knew it was going to happen . . . everybody’d heard the leaks and rumors about this record and we all knew that it was going to be brilliant.”

The rumors were circulating for good reason. To start with, the rock community had developed an especially collegial dynamic. By 1967, successful artists tended to mingle in the same circles and even sometimes play on each other’s records. Bands inspired one another, influences were acknowledged, relationships flourished. The Beatles, in the after-hours clubs which served as the social scene for British rock royalty, surely preened over what they were doing behind EMI’s studio doors. Moreover, in contrast to the previously sacrosanct privacy of Beatles sessions, there were now occasional visitors to the studio — members of the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the Moody Blues, the Hollies and Pink Floyd among them.14 Particularly as the album neared completion, the Beatles seemed to enjoy treating friends and colleagues to what they would soon drop on an expectant but clueless public . . .

David Crosby: “I think they were thrilled with what they had done. They knew what they had created. They sat me down in the middle of a room on a stool, and they were laughing about it: they rolled over two of those huge, coffin-sized speakers up on either side of me. By the time they got to that last piano chord [of A Day In The Life], I was just a dish rag. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that.”

Tony Clarke: “I was speechless . . . everything was just so dramatic and complete.  I felt so privileged to be there. I walked out of Abbey Road thinking ‘What am I going to do now?’  It really did affect me.”

Malcolm Davies, a long-time British recording engineer who worked at EMI studios for the entire duration of the Beatles recording career, recalls Ron Richards sitting in the corner of the control room with his head in his hands, saying ‘I just can’t believe it . . . I give up.’ “He was producing the Hollies,” says Davies, “and I think he knew that the Beatles were just uncatchable. It blew him away.”

Nick Mason of Pink Floyd — who were in EMI studios at the same time as the Beatles, in an adjacent studio, recording Piper At The Gates Of Dawn — remembers being invited to say hello and hear a little of what the Fabs were doing. “It was quite extraordinary. I think we sort of went back feeling somewhat chastened, I think that’s the word . . . they were so far beyond us that they were out of our league.”

Marty Balin: “I about died.”

Graham Nash, who had been given a rough recording after visiting the Beatles, was asked by EMI to host The Turtles visiting from America: “I said to them, ‘I want to play you something,’ and I threaded [the] reel of tape on the machine. I knew it would wipe the floor with them. Without telling them what I was going to play, I said, ‘Listen to this.’ It was obvious from the first few bars that it was the new Beatles, and the Turtles, Mark and Howard, duly shit their pants. They went directly from my place to Jimi [Hendrix]’s with news of what they’d heard.”

It was inevitable that word would spread.

By the time the finished album was ready for release, Western soil could not have been more fertile.  The combination of geopolitical upheaval (the war in Vietnam, Cold War paranoia, Middle East conflict, American racial unrest), and activism among a younger generation embracing newfound power and freedoms (sexual, economic, artistic, cultural, political), led to a massive generation gap and a passionate, if often naive, conviction among young people around the globe that the potential for positive change was in their hands. The counterculture was at its idealistic peak, about to be immortalized as 1967’s Summer of Love. And, unlike today, music and musicians played an enormous role in both shaping and reflecting cultural mores. Rock music was the currency of the under-30 population and the biggest stars in the music firmament were not mere celebrities, they were leaders, whose music and example had the power to affect thought, attitudes and behavior on a mass scale.

At the top of this pyramid of influence and expectation sat the Beatles. It’s instructive that even for someone like, say, George Thorogood, whose stylistic bent and future career was focused on blues rock and the American black artists who largely predated the Beatles, it was still the Beatles who affected everyone most deeply. “Our whole life was music. Music, music, music. We never discussed anything else. And the center of that universe was the Beatles. You see what I’m saying? There was just nothing else in the world that mattered to us, that made any sense to us. And the Beatles were leading the way.”

As Justin Hayward put it, “The Beatles were the leaders in everything. Whatever they did, people followed.”

It’s a cultural dynamic which is barely recognizable today. Writing in The Quietus, John Robb contrasts the primary role music played in society in the late 1960s with its more peripheral role in today’s world. “In the 1960s the world seemed to hold its breath with excitement when the Beatles brought out a new record. This was the state of the art moment. A communiqué from the gods . . . In these modern times, it’s not like that with U2 or Coldplay. They release stuff millions of people buy but no one else notices.”

This is an essential distinction in being able to appreciate how the 1960s differs from the 21st century — why a band like the Beatles and a record like Sgt. Pepper could impact the culture to a degree that, say, Drake or Taylor Swift and their recordings simply can’t, regardless of sales figures and chart positions. In an age before the 24/7 realities of social media, constant multi-tasking and limitless distractions, people of different ages were more consumed with music and ascribed — intentionally or not, warranted or not — a greater importance to the artists who made it. In turn, musicians embraced music’s role and potential in affecting and reflecting the times they lived in. Bob Geldof recalls that for people who came of age during the 1960s, it was understood that music “articulated” the time. “My time, the Sixties . . . was synonymous with radical change, and music was the driving force behind that change.”

Thus, for the second time in just a few years, a confluence of conditions conspired to confer almost impossible expectations onto the Beatles, implicitly if not explicitly — this time as an affirmation of progress and optimism rather than as a deliverance from gloom.

And for the second time, the Beatles met the moment. For people who were not around at the time, or who assume that other huge-selling artists and albums have replicated the impact of Sgt. Pepper, this is what a record that genuinely affects the wider culture looks like . . .

Langdon Winner: “The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week that the Sgt. Pepper album was released. At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80 and in each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while, the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was reunified, at least in the minds of the young.”

Kenneth Tynan: “A decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.”

Greil Marcus: “A one-record pop explosion, where a record appears and in an instant it can feel as if the whole world is listening, talking back, figuring it out, and playing with it as if it’s a cross between the Bible and Where’s Waldo.”

Kevin Godley: “I showed up to art college one morning and the whole school had ceased to work. Every single class from printing to photography to sculpture and painting was playing a different track from Sgt. Pepper and poring over the album cover. It was such an influential moment.”

Barry Miles recalls hearing the album playing from “every shop” along King’s Road in London. “It was an Event. It unified British pop culture. It had an impact unlike any record before — or since.”

Meat Loaf: “I was in Los Angeles. Sgt. Pepper was being released at midnight; that’s when they could start selling it. So there was lines of people, at midnight. All over L.A. at the record stores, everywhere you went: lines at midnight.”

Joe O’Brien, the No. 1 morning DJ in New York: “My youngest son was a freshman at Yale. He told me that the day the album was issued the entire student body of Yale went out and bought it, and the exact same thing happened at Harvard.”

Peter Fonda: “Everywhere I drove I could hear one of the songs from Sgt. Pepper’s album playing out of the window of a passing car, or an apartment that we were passing. It was . . . a mass tune-in.”

Russ Smith: “It was as if a massive listening party had appeared outside your window.”

Paul Williams, the founder of Crawdaddy magazine: “Listening to Sgt. Pepper was more constant and universal than the climate or any other aspect of the season.”

Mike Fornatale: “You literally could not walk more than two city blocks anywhere without hearing it drifting out of a window or some hand-held radio. That’s not hyperbole. I was there.”

Much of Top 40 radio upended its normal programming, playing music from the album despite there being no singles pulled from it. Political journalist John Heilemann, recognizable today from his frequent appearances on television newscasts, says that on the fledgling FM format this was taken to an extreme. “There were FM radio stations that did nothing but play Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band over and over because that was all anybody wanted to listen to.” Bill Flanagan confirms this, saying he didn’t even have to buy the album: “I didn’t own a copy of Sgt. Pepper until the next year because I could hear it all the time, just by turning on the radio.”

Almost more extraordinary than the public’s mass response to Sgt. Pepper is the mass anticipation and response within the rock world — the Beatles’ colleagues and peers, all of whom were presumably busy with their own careers. But as it turns out, if you were a musician when Sgt. Pepper was released . . .

1) You stopped everything you were doing to hear it.

• Roger Waters was touring the north of England with Pink Floyd in support of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. He recalls driving the band when the radio announced it was going to play the new Beatles album in its entirety. “I remember pulling the van into a layby [a cutout off the road] and we all sat and listened. I sat there with my mouth hanging open, just completely stunned.”

• Donovan recalls the biggest stars being caught up in the frenzy; he first heard Sgt. Pepper with Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of The Small Faces, and Marianne Faithfull. “Ronnie shouted, ‘I’ve got it,’ Steve said, ‘Let’s play it’ . . . and it was astounding.”

• The Bee Gees were in a meeting with their manager, the mogul Robert Stigwood. Sgt. Pepper was delivered to the office and Stigwood immediately put it on. Barry Gibb: “Nobody could believe it . . . it frightened us to death.” Maurice Gibb: “It was incredible. He just put it on his stereo and we went, ‘Jesus!’”

• Micky Dolenz: “I remember very clearly when Sgt. Pepper’s came out, we were filming the TV series. Someone ran down to the music store and got a copy, brought it back to the set, and we actually stopped production on the set to listen to the album.”

• Rick Wakeman: “I don’t think there was a car driving in the roads anywhere, or anybody on the street. BBC radio said they were going to play the whole album, which was unheard of on British radio. Everybody was inside. The post office, who used to own the telephone lines back then, must have made a fortune, ‘cause everybody was calling everybody else. We all wanted to hear this Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.”

2) Having heard it, you became obsessed.

• Jon Anderson, soon to co-found progressive rock pioneers Yes, was on the road in Germany with The Warriors. “Me and the band played that album endlessly for weeks. We’d do a show, then go back and listen to Sgt Pepper all night. It was like someone opening a door to revolutionary music.”

• Peter Frampton, then lead singer and guitarist for The Herd (and about to be named “The Face of 1968” by Rave magazine): “I didn’t come out of my room for about three days. I just played it nonstop. Sgt. Pepper’s was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life.”

• Joe Walsh had recently formed The James Gang and was living with other musicians in Ohio. “We plugged the record player into two Marshall amps, and we lied on the dining room table. We listened to Sgt. Pepper’s at maybe 800 decibels [laughs] — all night. About 10 times. From the first note of the album it changed my life.”

• Pete Townshend remembers being on tour with the Who in America and that “we touched down in almost every important town or city, and in quite a few places we’d never see again. We listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and not much else. The shockwave it caused challenged all comers. No one believed the Beatles would ever top it, or would even bother to try.”

• Mark Lindsay, lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders: “Like everybody who heard the album for the first time — or the 50^th time, or the 60^th time — we were just engrossed.”

• Billy Sheehan: “I must have listened to it several hundred times.”

• Todd Rundgren, already on his career path with Nazz, saw it all around him. “It was all anybody was listening to.”

3) You soon came to appreciate the enormity of the moment.

• Martin Barre: “When Sgt. Pepper came out, it changed everything. People were just dumbstruck. It was a sort of historic moment, I think. It changed fashion, it was more than music, it was a way of life almost. And the Beatles just became, again, the best thing ever.”

• Alice Cooper: “Sgt. Pepper changed the world.”

• Phil Collins: “Sgt. Pepper completely turned the world upside down.”

• Jon Anderson: “It was a revolution on every level.”

• Roger Waters: “It changed everything.”

• Karl Bartos: “Sgt. Pepper really changed everything.”

• Ian Anderson: “The big sea change was Sgt. Pepper. It was like a big signpost that the Beatles planted: ‘This Way To The Future’.”

• Eddie Brigati: “It’ll be in the world’s history. As long as there’s a world — and probably beyond.”

These are the voices of other prominent musicians, professionals in the same business as the Beatles and thus the most relevant witnesses to Sgt. Pepper’s impact and influence. That influence rippled out in all directions; as we’ll explore in a subsequent post, it profoundly affected black musicians, broke down barriers between rock music and cultural elites (academia and intelligentsia, jazz and classical music), revolutionized the economics of the music business and had powerful repercussions in foreign cultures.

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But we still have the question of why: Why was Sgt. Pepper received with such rapture? What was it about the album that so overwhelmed the public and other artists alike?

Leaving aside the actual songs for now,15 there are two essential answers.

The first has to do with imagination and ambition. Almost everything about Sgt. Pepper — from its length to its cover to its almost symphonic thematic construction and panoply of often shocking sounds and instrumentation to its role-playing “concept” — was a leap into a new realm, redrawing the map of where a rock album could go.

The concept was crucial. Contrary to revisionist wisdom, Sgt. Pepper was a concept album, the first such thing by a mainstream rock act16 — no small factor in the response that greeted its release. This is distinct from a thematic record, in which songs are loosely grouped by a common style or subject matter. (Many people mistake such themed records for concept records, a frequent example being Frank Sinatra’s recordings of the 1950s.) What the Beatles did, far more radically, was throw off the suffocating burden of being the Beatles and cast themselves into a new group identity — Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — which they represented in music, lyric and drastically altered appearance. After the trauma of the 1966 world tour and amidst the crushing pressures of their fame, this gambit was both a psychological escape hatch and a license to indulge (with the brilliant assistance of George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick) their most expansive ideas.17

Paul McCartney has described how assuming the Sgt. Pepper alter egos freed the Beatles to write in ways they otherwise might not have; George Martin said years later that once the Sgt. Pepper ethos took hold, the recording sessions seemed to take on a life of their own. In fact, the Beatles and those around them were inspired to innovate in every aspect of the record.

The cover, supervised by artist Peter Blake working off illustrations and ideas provided by McCartney, was unlike anything that appeared on a record sleeve before, a work of modern pop art full of detail, metaphor and symbolism. It announced even before any music was played that the listener should leave all expectations behind. Printed lyrics accompanied an album for the first time, in this case right on the back cover. Cardboard cutouts representing Sgt. Pepper’s visual trademarks (mustaches, military stripes, etc) were included inside the album. The record packed as much audio information as possible into its grooves, eliminating the bands of silence that usually separated songs on an album (thus enhancing the impression of Sgt. Pepper’s band giving a live performance) and going longer than almost any previous pop record (nearly 40 minutes). Virtually every track was steeped in sonic invention, with the Beatles’ production team and the recording studio itself pushed to their limits to accommodate the band’s auditory visions and insatiable appetite for new sounds. Playful touches were included, such as a 15 kHz tone at the end of the record which was at the outer limits of human hearing but would be picked up by dogs, and even a snippet of gibberish on the runout groove which, on many record players of the day, would loop over and over until the stylus was removed.

That it did all this while retaining the Beatles’ hallmark songwriting standards — that the music was not sacrificed on the altar of so much experimentation — ensured that most ears would devour the results.

The other ingredient, of course, is the historic moment — which the Beatles, whether by some supernatural instinct or by lucky happenstance, seemed to capture or even anticipate throughout their time together. Earlier we talked about the period’s violence and sociopolitical upheaval (Vietnam, assassinations, racial strife), and the concurrent belief among younger generations that change was in the air. This created a tension between fear and anger on one hand, and optimism and hope on the other, a tension that existed not just between people, but within people. Sgt. Pepper landed at a time when this tension was at a peak — but also when hope still seemed like it might tip the scale.

As the extraordinary mass response to Sgt. Pepper suggests, for a little while it did. The collective optimism of the ensuing weeks, represented most famously by the Monterey International Pop Festival and the historic Our World global satellite linkup, flowered largely under the sunlight of the Beatles.18 And if the dream of a better world was a naïve one, well, for a time Sgt. Pepper seemed to make everyone a naif.

“It was a moment of emergence, of a very hopeful time, a very idealistic time, when it seemed as though we might be on the edge of a new world,” says James Taylor. “The Sgt. Pepper’s album was so revolutionary, it was such a huge step.”

The great film director John Boorman uses the same language to describe that time in his 2003 memoir. “I got back to London from Hollywood in time to buy Sgt. Pepper on the day of its release. I listened to it with Tony Woollard, the designer. We sat staring at the cover, identifying the heroes. We felt on the brink of a brave new world.”

The brink of a brave new world. This is the Sgt. Pepper moment, the coalescing of that strange duality of trauma and hope. It’s a different dynamic from our current moment, in which, regardless of ideology or political allegiance, trauma and fear is accompanied by an absence of hope or optimism. Nobody today talks about the brink of a brave new world. But in 1967, Sgt. Pepper arrived as if to encapsulate, define and document, like a musical time capsule, the zeitgeist of an era in which anything seemed possible.

Allen Ginsberg: “After the apocalypse of Hitler and the apocalypse of the Bomb, there was here in Sgt. Pepper an exclamation of joy, the rediscovery of joy and of what it is to be alive. Remember, this was in the midst of the sixties, it was 1967 when some of the wilder and crazier radicals were saying ‘Kill the Pigs.’ The Beatles were saying the opposite about old Sgt. Pepper. They were giving an example around the world that guys can be friends. They had and conveyed a realization that the world and human consciousness had to change. It was actually a cheerful look round the world . . . for the first time, I would say, on a mass scale.”

Paul Kantner remembered years later how he and David Crosby played the LP all night in a Seattle hotel lobby to around a hundred entranced fans. “Something enveloped the whole world at that time and it just exploded into a renaissance. Sgt. Pepper was a huge statement of change — of the world turning around.”

David Crosby: “I would’ve thought Sgt. Pepper could’ve stopped the Vietnam War just by putting too many good vibes in the air for anybody to have a war around.”

Larry Kirwan: “If the Beatles hadn’t been kings of the world at the time, unleashing all these possibilities for everyone . . . Enoch Powell and the National Front would have become a much more powerful force. At that point in time, the Beatles had a huge effect. They did change the world.”

Lemmy on Sgt. Pepper: “The Beatles were massive because they changed the world. They really did. The generation that was with them, which includes me, we believed that we could make the world better.”

Peter Gabriel calls Sgt. Pepper the most important record in his life: “It was an extraordinary feeling that suddenly this group that we’d seen from very small beginnings were really holding the flame for the world.”

Ken Loach, English film and television director: “We were all working at a time when you did feel a lot of things were possible: there was a sense of optimism. Our group enjoyed the fact that these four kids from Liverpool were turning the world upside down.”

Steve Hackett: “You have to remember that this was more than just music. The Sgt. Pepper album is in our minds and burnt into our memory cells. It’s the music that we marveled to, the music that we made love to, the music that we took into our hearts and dreamt along with.”

Philip Norman: “I think it’s a story that gets more interesting every day. A story of a moment in contemporary history that, I think, is the last time we can remember believing that life got better every day rather than worse. And that’s inextricably bound up with what the Beatles did and what they played and how they were.”

Little Steven: “That music levitated the culture. It created enormous inspiration. We were sort of walking around on a foot or two of air: I can’t wait for tomorrow! It’s gonna be just better. I can’t wait for the next Beatles single, what’s it gonna be, what’s it gonna sound like, you know? We thought about those things. In other words, the inspiration of these things was a necessary part of our lives.”

Gene Pitney: “I got a letter the other day from a girl who is 18 and lives in Chicago. She said she wished she had had a chance to live in the 1960s, that she really felt she missed something seeing what she sees now and what happened then. And I started to think to myself, ‘What was it like?’ Well, I performed all the way through the ‘60s. There was a feeling of optimism. There was something about whatever the problems were in the world, or personally, you could make them work out. Everything was meant to be positive. And the Beatles were the catalysts.”

The Beatles at the launch event for Sgt. Pepper at Brian Epstein’s home in Belgravia.

Ultimately, what Sgt. Pepper represents is the apex of rock music as a unifying societal force. From rock and roll’s antecedents in the blues, country and big band music of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, to its formal birth in the 1950s, to its substantive flowering and global spread in the 1960s, the entire trajectory of rock as a socio-cultural movement can be seen as leading to the peak of Sgt. Pepper in 1967: the moment when rock achieved its most intimate marriage with its times.

If we’re to be brutally honest about this marriage, it’s been all downhill since.

1968 would destroy much of what 1967 promised in a crash-burning of hopes: escalation in Vietnam, the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring, the assassinations of RFK and MLK, race riots, campus chaos and the collapse of nonviolent protest . . . it all consigned the optimism of Flower Power and the Summer Of Love of just a year earlier to ancient, discredited history. Meanwhile, after the unifying phenomenon of Sgt. Pepper, the splintering of rock music into increasingly divergent styles and audiences began. Progressive rock, jazz rock, heavy metal and the singer-songwriter movement were born, and by the end of the decade were distinct musical silos, taking large chunks of the once-omnivorous rock fan base with them. The effect was the end of anything like the kind of social centrality that pop music held in 1967.

In the 1970s — the “Me Decade” — most of pop and rock music, even as sales rose higher and higher, continued to fade further from topical relevance as the idea of music as galvanizing societal force effectively died with the 1960s. Even the emergence of punk in the mid-1970s was essentially self-isolating, gaining religious devotion from disaffected youth but repelling most others and having little affect on the growth of rival trends such as the musical wallpaper of MOR or the dance culture of disco.

The 1980s and beyond — with the rise of new music genres (particularly rap and hip hop), ever further segmentation of the listening public, and the ubiquity of new cultural distractions — only confirmed popular music’s drift into irrelevance. (Recall John Robb’s formulation that today’s most popular artists “release stuff that millions of people buy but no one else notices.”)

Perhaps the best articulation of the singularity of the moment that birthed Sgt. Pepper comes from author and musicologist Allan Moore, in his 2016 book Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Moore makes the case that there is no single, linear history to the history of recorded music, that usually there are any number of scattered developments and themes, progressing independently with different and overlapping audiences — what Moore calls “peripheries.” However:

Sometimes, audiences gravitate towards a centre. The most prominent period when this happened was in the mid 1960s when it seems that almost everyone, irrespective of age, class or cultural background, listened to the Beatles.

This is why Sgt. Pepper is, and must remain, rock’s greatest album. It was the Mount Everest of rock’s climb as a musical and cultural force. The other side could only be the inevitable descent. In that sense, maybe Todd Rundgren’s formation was correct: with Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles indeed detonated a nuclear bomb. But the explosion ultimately left a hodgepodge of fragments where, at least for a brief while, a cultural Whole had existed.

We just completed a month full of anniversaries. Sixty years ago, in February of 1964, the Beatles’ arrival in America produced one historic moment after another. The most famous of these of course were the back-to-back earthquakes of the Beatles’ arrival at New York’s Kennedy Airport on February 7 and their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show two nights later.  But the entire month was bookended by momentous occasions which have passed into lore. A rundown:

• February 1:   “I Want To Hold Your Hand” hits #1 on the Billboard charts, making the Beatles the first British group to top the charts in the US and kicking off American Beatlemania.

• February 7:   The Beatles land at John F. Kennedy Airport to mass hysteria and saturation press coverage.

• February 9:   The Beatles make their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show to the largest viewing audience in American history, birthing thousands of bands and future rock stars.

• February 11:  The Beatles play their first full concert on American soil at the Washington Coliseum.  It is filmed for closed-circuit transmission at movie theaters across the country.

• February 12:  The Beatles perform two shows at Carnegie Hall (with extra seats on the actual stage to accommodate overflow crowds). They are the first rock act to play Carnegie.

• February 16 and 23:  Two more appearances on Ed Sullivan, to equivalent audiences as the first (confirmed by the Nielsen ratings system), cementing the Beatles’ dominance over American youth culture.

I posted on social media a recollection by Tom Wolfe of the bedlam at JFK the day the Beatles landed.   

I was there at Kennedy Airport when the Beatles arrived.  I’ll never forget the sight of hundreds of boys, high school students, running down a hallway at the international arrivals building with their combs out, converting their ducktail hairdos into bangs.  They’d just seen the Beatles.  They were packed on this balcony watching the Beatles arrive.  They saw these haircuts, and they started combing their hair forward so it would fall over their foreheads like the Beatles.  I never will forget that scene.  That was symbolic of a big change; the last semblance of adult control of music vanished at that moment.

What strikes me upon reading this is not so much Wolfe’s main point — that the Beatles’ arrival ushered in a cultural sea-change overnight — but a small detail in his description of the crowd.

Hundreds of boys.

To judge from the way early Beatlemania is usually described, the Fab Four’s fan base consisted almost entirely of young girls. This is a stereotype, even a myth, but like any good stereotype there is some basis for it.  Certainly it was mostly girls who created headlines with their ear-splitting screams and fainting spells.  In films of the period — of crowds gathered outside of hotels or inside concert arenas — teen girls often seem to predominate.  And the Beatles themselves knew that the female portion of their audience was crucial — it had been from the beginning of their local popularity in Liverpool1 — and deliberately cultivated it by emphasizing personal pronouns in their early song titles and lyrics. 

The public and press fixation on screaming girls fixed the stereotype in real time. In fact, for guys who resisted the Beatles bandwagon in the first flush of their American invasion, this perceived appeal to young girls was the primary objection. It didn’t help that Beatlemania triggered a tidal wave of merchandising — probably the most massive commercial exploitation of an entertainment phenomenon in American history2 — which flooded every conceivable adolescent product: dolls, jewelry, clothing, toys, wigs, trading cards, bedsheets, pillowcases, chewing gum, perfume, lunchboxes, buttons, board games, shampoo, etc.

Though the term didn’t exist, all these trappings conferred a boy-band element to the female frenzy around the Beatles.3 Don Brewer, the drummer of hard rock stalwarts Grand Funk Railroad, was part of the anti-Beatles brigade that couldn’t see past the mania and dismissed the Fab Four accordingly.

At first I was not a Beatles fan. I was looking at the hair and the girls screaming and going, “What’s up with that?” We were more into the Motown stuff and R&B and all that kind of stuff, and here was this poppy band out of England the girls were screaming about.

He had company. The collective shriek of Beatlemania alienated others as well.

Bob Geldof: I wasn’t a big Beatles fan.  It was too girly.  It was like One Direction or the Bay City Rollers or something, to me.

Ian Anderson: I was never a Beatles “fan” — the Beatles fan was, literally, the screaming girl, the teenybopper.

Jim Keltner: My wife Cynthia called me into the room and said, “Hey come and watch this. Look at this!” I came in, took one look, and ran out of the room again.  I thought they were just four white guys playing rock and roll to girls and that’s all I needed to know to stay away from them.

Another issue was that the Beatles didn’t just appeal to girls; to some, they looked like girls. They looked nothing like the early rock and rollers, or even the pop stars that preceded them. In an America still culturally stuck in the 1950s, some inevitably felt uncomfortable, even threatened, by what at the time seemed a radically androgynous style.

Carl Perkins: Them little boys look like girls, man.

Jimmy Webb: I remember guys saying, “Oh man, did you see these guys on Ed Sullivan last night? They had long hair like girls!” They were all hung up that they had hair like girls.

Gene Simmons: They were skinny little boys, kind of androgynous, with long hair. They looked like girls. 

Billy Joel: All of a sudden there’s this band with hair like girls.

Of course, the vast majority of America’s male youth were not only unfazed by the feminine aspects of Beatlemania, they were further seduced by them. Whether mesmerized by the band’s effect on girls en masse and wishing to exert the same appeal, or drawn to the alien, brand-new hipness of the Beatles’ exotic look, most guys simply fell further for a band whose exciting, joyous music had already captured their ears. Wolfe’s vivid description of “hundreds of boys” running through Kennedy Airport — not to mention voluminous filmic and photographic evidence, and, most persuasively, the countless personal recollections of famous male artists — demonstrates that the all-girl caricature of the Beatles’ early appeal was always a fiction.  Even the majority of the dissenting minority — whether their initial rebellion was to the screaming, the look, the merchandising, or the suffocating saturation of Beatles airplay — tended to find their defenses crumbling before long.  The flip side of the quotes above:

Brewer: …but then you realized that when you played their music at a sock hop or a dance everybody would go crazy. So you started playing their stuff just to stay with the trend and then you realized, my God, this is great music.

Geldof: …but of course what the Beatles did was move way beyond the narrow confines of what was possible with rock music, and make music for infinity.  My world wouldn’t have been possible without the Beatles.  I seriously doubt if I’d have been able to conduct my life as I’ve conducted it without them.

Anderson: …but we used to play the music of the Beatles ‘cause it was such great music.  They were the best songwriters, and the songs were so great to play.  They were just brilliant.

Keltner: …but that changed — obviously that changed. I began to realize all the amazing things about them. Their groove was just so compelling and they were beautiful to watch.

Perkins: …but them little girls turned my life around.

Webb: …but I don’t think a lot of their audience understood what they were doing musically. I really don’t. The things they were doing musically were much more important than the things they were doing in terms of mass appeal. They became a seminal influence of mine.

Simmons: …but they had talent, more than all of us put together. Seeing them changed my sense of being.  I mean, it was close to a religious experience. 

Joel: …but I tell you, if it wasn’t for me seeing them, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now.  I might not even be alive. 

Perhaps Aerosmith’s Joe Perry best articulates the dissonance experienced by millions of American guys who a) saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night and became instant Beatlemaniacs; and then b) saw the reaction of all the girls at school on Monday morning . . .

The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show was akin to a national holiday. Talk about an event. I never saw guys looking so cool. I wasn’t prepared by how powerful and totally mesmerizing they were to watch. It changed me completely. I knew something was different in the world that night.

Next day at school, the Beatles were all anybody could talk about. Us guys had to play it kind of cool, because the girls were so excited and were drawing little hearts on their notebooks — ‘I love Paul,’ that kind of thing. But the guys all dug the Beatles, too.

Fandom aside, what about the hysteria? Certainly Beatle-mania must indeed have been an entirely teenybopper phenomenon. As radically popular as the Beatles were among American youth, those screaming crowds at concerts and personal appearances had to have been the exclusive domain of the teen-aged girl.

Listen to this:

An entire book can be compiled from the testimonies of those who experienced the unrelenting jetscream of the crowd at Beatles concerts. There was no precedent for it; there has been no repeat of it. The deafening din of what Geldof has called “the banshee wailing of abandoned femininity”4 rendered all other sound in its vicinity inaudible. It had the effect of focusing media — and psychologists — on the way adolescent girls, to the practical exclusion of everyone else, reacted to the Beatles, and why. Boys were never part of this sociological (or tabloid) coverage; why would they be? Those screams clearly defined the crowds as overwhelmingly female.

But were they?

In fact, guys attended those Beatles concerts too . . .

. . . and in large numbers, and across multiple age groups. Emmy-winning director Paul Saltzman, who has been involved in more than 300 films, recalls what those Beatles crowds were like.

What I remember is that there were all the screaming teenagers, but there was also lots of guys like me and my friends, people in their 20s, so I didn’t feel like I was at a concert where everyone was 12 or 13.  I didn’t feel any kind of them-and-me kind of thing.

Greil Marcus, the legendary dean of American rock critics, has the same recollection. “People dove headlong into the Beatles. It wasn't just thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls that were part of the audience — it was also college students and other people.”

Any thoughts? Leave a comment!

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So far, none of this is or should be news. Each February we are treated to commemorations of the Beatles first visit to the States, replete with still-awestruck testimony from practically every future public figure who saw it in real time. At this point, any claim that the Beatles’ popularity in 1964 was a phenomenon driven by and limited mainly to adolescent puppy love is borne of historical ignorance — the Beatles army was male as well as female from the moment “I Want To Hold Your Hand” began to climb the charts. 

But here’s what may be news to a lot of people: guys weren’t just fans. They were often just as out of control as the girls.

We heard Joe Perry recall that he and his friends tried to play it cool when listening to the Beatles on the radio or hanging with their friends at school. But when it came to actually seeing the Beatles, playing it cool apparently went out the window. Listen again to that audio collage above: hard as it may be to imagine, those high-pitched screams included the guys.

Joe Walsh: I memorized every Beatles song and went to Shea Stadium and screamed along with all those chicks. I was a senior in high school . . . and I was screaming and crying.

Adrian Belew: I was one of the 21,000 screaming teenagers standing there just overflowing with love and passion for these guys.  It was a glorious experience, it was so fantastic. 

Rick Springfield: The Beatles walked on stage and they looked like they were from the future.  I screamed like a girl from the moment they walked on stage to the moment they left. It was like aliens had landed on the planet – they just looked so modern, with the hair and the clothes and the guitars. And then they opened their mouths and started to sing . . . [laughs] I just started screaming. It changed everything for me. It was the highlight of my youth.

Alice Cooper: I was right there in Beatlemania.  Screaming my head off.  [Years later] I went to see Paul in Las Vegas.  I sat there and they started out with “I Saw Her Standing There” . . . I was on my feet!  I was 16 years old and I was screaming! [laughs]  And I’m Alice Cooper, the shock rocker. I couldn’t help myself.  It just brought you to your feet.

Lou Gramm: What I remember was that I couldn’t sit still, that I was dying with anticipation, and totally euphoric when they took the stage.  I was shouting, I know that.  It was a world-changer for me.

Timothy B. Schmit: My bandmates and I went to see them at The Cow Palace. You couldn’t hear a thing; it was indoors and there was so much screaming. And [quietly, embarrassed] I screamed too . . .

Dan Scardino: I said I'm not going to scream like a teenage girl.  And then I was standing and shouting at the top of my lungs.  The Beatles, and that night, shaped me totally. There's been nothing like it since.

Ronnie Burns: I was 17 or 18 when I saw the Beatles in 1964. It was such a huge phenomenon. Ian Meldrum and I camped outside for a couple of nights to get tickets. We booked a whole row for all our friends, so about 25 seats. When they came onstage everyone stood up, and Ian was screaming like a girl at the Beatles. When they went into the next song he was even more hysterical. But we all shared in the whole experience. It really was genuine hysteria.

Greg Lake: They were just unbelievable live.  The Beatles had this property which was almost spiritual: they would push you to a point where you couldn’t stand it emotionally; you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  You’ve heard the term “Beatlemania” — and that is exactly what that is.  I saw it with my own eyes. They could drive an audience beyond the point where they just . . . lost it, really, and you started to scream. 

Phil Collins: We were all ushered into the theatre.5 Suddenly four guys came out on stage and started to play . . . we couldn’t believe it.  We were all screaming.  No one was told to scream during the filming—they just knew that it would happen.  Totally spontaneous.

Mikal Gilmore: It was the gestalt of an experience that genuinely felt like living revelation. At one point, I realized my own voice was screaming along with all the others. But I couldn't stop it — I felt so full of exhilaration and faith. Nothing has ever matched how overwhelming those moments were.

Mark Hudson, who first gained fame in the 1970s as one of the Hudson Brothers and went on to become one of rock’s most successful producers and songwriters in the ‘90s and ‘00s, put it this way about being in the audience at a Beatles concert: “It was probably my first and only homosexual experience. It was my lust for loving what they were doing — and wanting to be a part of it.”

For Hudson and others of his generation, that lust never really went away. Countless numbers of them pursued careers in the creative arts as a direct result, so that they might find themselves “a part of it” in some way, however small for the many, however more successful for the lucky fewer. To any dismissal of Beatlemania as being a boy band’s appeal to squealing young girls, the ultimate rebuttal is simply in the endless list of the male stars and public figures who recall being part of that mania — and who could have been part of that horde Tom Wolfe saw running through Kennedy Airport all those years ago.

There are some seriously spooky coincidences in Beatles history. 

• The classic Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home” — a composition which Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Ned Rorem called “equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote” — was written by Paul McCartney after he came across an article in The Daily Mail about a 17-year-old runaway.

  

  Incredibly — and completely unbeknownst to him — McCartney had briefly met the very girl in the article years before.  There is even film of that encounter: in 1963, 13-year-old Melanie Coe was a contestant in a miming contest on the British TV program “Ready, Steady, Go.” The judge who picked her as the winner and presented her with an autographed album, was 21-year-old Paul McCartney. To watch this clip with She’s Leaving Home in mind — Melanie Coe is the young girl dancing and miming on the far right and McCartney may as well be a lifetime away from who he would be in 1967 — is truly an exercise in the surreal.

• The backstory of “Eleanor Rigby” is at least as strange.  McCartney has said that Eleanor Rigby began as “Miss Daisy Hawkins.”  (Folk singer Donovan says Paul visited him once and played him the song-in-progress when the name was “Ola Na Tungee.”) Paul changed it to Eleanor because he liked the name of the actress, Eleanor Bron, who had just starred with the Beatles in Help!, their second movie. Wanting a more natural-sounding surname, he settled on Rigby after coming across a wine and spirits shop called “Rigby & Evans” in Bristol.  Yet, in a crazy historical twist, it was discovered — years later, in the 1980s — that a Liverpool cemetery contained a grave whose headstone actually bears the name Eleanor Rigby.1 Paul and John used to take shortcuts through this very cemetery as youths (it is situated in Woolton, near where John grew up, and was where John’s uncle George Smith was buried).  Perhaps craziest of all, given the song’s lyric, the real Eleanor Rigby toiled as a scullery maid, and is not even the principal honoree of the headstone, appearing a full 4 names below a “John Rigby.” (Buried along with her name, indeed.)

  

There are others too numerous to review here.  (Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In — the first volume of his mammoth in-progress Beatles biography — reveals, for example, that even before the Beatles became famous a dizzying array of previously unknown happy accidents, happenstances and luck conspired to save them from oblivion.)

But perhaps the most interesting and historically important convergence has to do with November 22.

The assassination of President Kennedy on this date in 1963 has long been a part of Beatles historiography. The murder of the youthful and charismatic president — carried out in broad daylight and captured on amateur film — traumatized the country.  Two and a half months later, with the national wound still fresh, an exotic, exuberant young rock and roll group from England landed in America amidst a frenzy of anticipation, record sales, and saturation radio coverage.  Beatlemania overtook the country practically overnight. 

There’s a chicken-and-egg element to this JFK-Beatles convergence: did The Fab Four rescue a sleepwalking America from a cloud of gloom, or was America simply hankering for something — anything — to get excited about?

Or was there no convergence at all — just a myth fashioned by coincidence and hindsight?

That a pall hung over the country after JFK’s assassination is clear from a glance at any benchmark of popular culture. In the week after Kennedy’s death so few people attended the movies that Variety didn’t even publish box office figures. When they returned, mindless froth — Under The Yum-Yum Tree, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Charade — monopolized the box office. 

Similarly — in what was perhaps the musical low point of the rock era — the biggest records in December 1963 and January 1964 were The Singing Nun’s “Dominique” and Bobby Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again.” There wasn’t much relief further down the charts either.  Save for a precious few exceptions, the two months between the Kennedy assassination and the arrival of the Beatles was a musical abyss of instrumentals, novelty records, and Hollywood teen idols.2

Coincidence or not, this cultural malaise was the perfect metaphor for the depression that gripped much of the country.

Listen to Emmylou Harris’s vivid recollection . . .

“When the Beatles came along, all of a sudden it was alright to feel joy”

There is, to be sure, a debate over how much one thing had to do with the other and whether connecting the Beatles’ impact to JFK’s assassination is a revisionist exercise.  Jay Jay French has long been fascinated with the story of Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath.  He suggests that while the event had a profound effect on the course of American history, the Beatles connection is an open question:

Had Kennedy not been assassinated, Lyndon Johnson would not have been able to pass The Civil Rights Act.  It’s a very important thing to keep that in mind. That never would have happened. And then of course the question of would the Beatles have been as big as they were, because they happened two months after Kennedy was assassinated.  And that’s always been a question that sociologists ask themselves.  I’m a huge Beatles fan and I’m not sure I know the answer to that, because the Kennedy assassination was so traumatic.

Iconic producer Joe Boyd is among those who dismiss the theory that the Beatles’ popularity in America was a product of the gloom following the Kennedy assassination:

I think it just comes down to the fact that it was so good.  You know, there were plenty of beat groups around in Britain, having the same influences, and they didn’t make music like that.  I think in music I subscribe to the “Great Man” theory of history, you know, that it’s not historical forces, it’s individuals who turn the course of history.  And I think that the Beatles were just brilliant individual musicians who imposed themselves on the world.

At the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival, Alec Baldwin and Don Was, discussing the impact of the Beatles in the context of the 50th anniversary of the movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” also downplayed the role of JFK’s death.

Baldwin: When we talked backstage you said that it even goes back to the Fifties — it wasn’t just, as some people think, oh, Kennedy’s assassination and people needed this release or what have you — you said things that were going on in this country even in the Fifties fed into the Beatles’ ascent.

Was: Oh, I think it was set up for decades really.  You had this postwar prosperity where young people were suddenly going to college and having time on their hands to think about philosophical issues; you had the predominance of TV, global TV for the first time, connecting the world.  And we’re aware of what’s going on in the world, we see the results of war, and suddenly there’s a kind of distrust of authority.  [There’s] an educated youth group, the baby boomers are the largest demographic group of the time.  And it was primed for a youth revolt against the conservative kind of complacency of the Fifties.

Slate magazine went even further and published an entire article debunking the JFK-Beatles connection. Some of the assertions in the piece are dubious, but hey, like Jay Jay French said, sociologists are divided over the issue.

The problem is that if the JFK-Beatles theory is a truly revisionist construct we have to disregard the very personal recollections of many artists and public figures who were around in 1963/1964 — or worse, ascribe revisionism to their own memories. And like Emmylou Harris’s, those memories are pretty compelling.

Tommy James: All of a sudden came the Kennedy assassination.  A lot of people said, and I believe it’s true, that the only thing that made 1964 bearable after what the assassination did to the country was the Beatles.  I happen to believe that’s accurate. Because everybody was so saddened and heartbroken when John Kennedy was killed.  For me, the Beatles and that event, the assassination of President Kennedy, always stays in my mind as almost one and the same.

Ed Begley, Jr: You know, the horrible assassination of JFK — part of the reason I and many of my friends were able to recover from that was the gift that the Beatles gave us: we started to feel good again, after that horrible thing with the loss of our president.  It was one of the joys that began to creep in our life, their music.  So they’ve been a very good friend to America in many ways.

Billy Joel: I remember the country had the blues.  My age group was kind of detached from the establishment stuff.  After Kennedy was shot, nobody believed that a flunky like Lee Oswald did it; everybody thought it was a conspiracy. The assassination of this young, vital president who represented us. We thought he was like us.  He was our guy, representing youth and progress.  So when the Beatles came, they filled that vacuum in a way: all of a sudden, they now represented us, instead of that president who was dead. It all kind of coalesced with the release of Meet The Beatles!, and then The Ed Sullivan Show.  We went crazy, my age group went insane.  The Beatles filled up the vacuum that was left when Kennedy was taken away.  And we were all kind of as one – we were a community now, again, because of the Beatles. 

Bill Clinton: I remember when the Beatles came in and went on the Ed Sullivan Show. Oh, do I remember that. You know we had some hard times, and it lifted us up.

Chris Hillman: The Beatles just totally came out of left field. I really credit them — now you may think I'm crazy — but the Beatles were a real healing force. They came out just after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. All of a sudden comes this fresh, energetic, just unbelievably exciting band . . . the Beatles lit up our lives with an energy and hope we all thought we had lost forever.

George Thorogood: I saw the Beatles on TV, and they were the first people I ever saw — ever — that looked happy.  Now this is a few months after Kennedy was assassinated. In those days, I never saw any happy people.  Guys hated their job.  Parents never got along, the brother’s always getting beat up, there were fights all the time.  Unless it was somebody in a movie, who was faking it — you know, an actor — I never saw anybody that was really happy.  I never saw anybody smiling, in my neighborhood.  And I looked at the Beatles and said, those guys are the first people I’ve ever seen happy! But they did that for everybody, I’m not the only one.  And anybody who says different, who was born after 1950, is lying to you.

Dom Famularo: We had just witnessed a U.S. president get assassinated the November before.  So the world was in mourning.  This band came by and had 73 million people watching a television show. They gave us hope, happiness, love and unity.

Tim Allen: The Beatles came and provided hope. Everything was different.  Every single thing was different.

Richie Sambora: They were the most incredible thing I ever saw. I couldn't put it into any kind of historical context at the time — I couldn't connect it with the Kennedy assassination — but I knew that I was witnessing something truly life-changing. Beyond that, they did something even more important: they gave people hope. They made people feel good. They brought people together. Don't they give out Nobel Prizes for that sort of thing, and how come the Beatles haven't gotten any?

Some of these artists put their memories into song. John Fogerty, “I Saw It On T.V.”:

We watched the dream dead end in Dallas / We gathered round to hear the sound comin’ on the little screen / The grief had passed, the old men laughed, and all the girls screamed / ’Cause four guys from England took us all by the hand / It was time to laugh, time to sing, time to join the band.

And in “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s epic ballad about the assassination of JFK:

Hush, little children. You’ll understand. The Beatles are comin’; they're gonna hold your hand.

Now, obviously, the assassination of John F. Kennedy didn’t cause American youth to embrace the Beatles. Nor did the Beatles single-handedly turn the United States from a mausoleum one day into a dance party the next (although some people — Little Steven van Zandt, Tom Wolfe and Allen Ginsberg among them — imply something very close). But one thing these recollections and the examination of contemporary music and film make clear is that the assassination’s lingering fallout acted as a lid on excitement. Think of the way a teenager at a somber gathering feels pressure to suppress laughter or horseplay. On a macro level, that’s what the national mood was for weeks after Kennedy’s assassination: one long somber gathering, as if the whole country would have shouted “too soon!” at anyone caught enjoying themselves.

That pressure, for whatever reason, seems to have been relieved by the arrival of the Beatles. Whether or not the assassination-Beatlemania theory is historical revisionism is almost beside the point. It’s enough that America was depressed for weeks after Kennedy’s death, that the Beatles were the first entertainment phenomenon after the assassination, and that American youth did unite around them in almost orgiastic excitement. The collected testimonies here by people who were all young when JFK was shot effectively confirm that their entire generation responded to the Beatles like a shaken bottle of champagne finally uncorked.

Tommy James, above, said something interesting: that for him the Beatles arrival and Kennedy’s assassination are “one and the same.” In another interview he puts it slightly differently, alluding to the dark/light, yin/yang duality of the two events. “The Beatles’ career beginning and the Kennedy assassination are in my mind at the same time. And it’s really a shame, isn’t it, in so many ways, to have those two linked. But that’s what’s in my mind.” In putting it this way, James unwittingly touches on something more than the simple chronology of JFK’s death and the Beatles’ arrival: that is, the assassination of John F. Kennedy signalled the end of an era, while the arrival of the Beatles heralded the beginning of another. Journalists who lived through these two events are particularly quick to recognize this.

Bob Herbert: Nineteen sixty-four was the year the 60s really began. For a decade known for its excitement, the 60's got off to a decidedly slow start. Doo-wop music was still around, and dreamy songs of widely varying quality — "Moon River," "Where the Boys Are" — were among the biggest hits. It was a quiet time. The average annual salary was $4,700, and a favorite pastime was bowling.  There was no reason to think that radical changes were brewing when 1964 debuted. The nation was still in shock and mourning over the murder of Jack Kennedy the previous November.

And then in February, suddenly and without warning, the Beatles were upon us. If you spend just a little time reflecting on the Beatles you come away astonished by the changes they wrought (or came to symbolize) in what seemed like a split second of real time. People dressed differently, wore their hair differently, danced differently . . . The Beatles blew in like a sudden storm and permanently altered the cultural landscape.

Mark Bowden: For those of us whose first impressions of the larger world — brought to us in dramatic images on television and in LIFE magazine — were the Cuban Missile Crisis, when civilization itself teetered on the brink of destruction, and then the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Beatles arrived as an affirmation of joy, youth, pleasure, creativity — and the future.

Barbara Charone: Kennedy had been assassinated, it was a really awful time in America, and the first terrible, terrible thing that I was aware of happening. My parents were really upset, the teachers at school were upset. And then a couple months later the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show and the whole world changed. It probably set the tone for everything that followed.

Steven D. Stark: When historians go back and look at the second half of the 20th century, they will recognize that the Beatles were historical forces in a way that artists and musicians had never been before and probably will never be again. There was something about them and the times in which they made their music that made the whole thing unique. That is important.

If there’s one aspect of the JFK-Beatlemania linkage that can only be made in hindsight, it’s this handing of the baton from one epoch to another. In 1964, the assumption could only have been that the Beatles were a temporary teenage distraction. No one could foresee the seismic changes in the band, popular music, the country and the world over the rest of the decade, much less that those changes would render the pre-1964 world ancient by comparison. Certainly no one would have dared suggest that the Beatles would be permanently fixed among the symbols of an altered Western society, still reverberating sixty years later.

All of which makes the Kennedy-Beatles synchronicity, whether random or causal, even more remarkable. Because now we come to the piece de resistance of this accident of historical timing — an irony that we can now look back at, wide-eyed, as one of those eerie examples of “fate” — and which lies hidden in plain sight.

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So far we’ve examined the Beatles’ American impact in general terms, using February, 1964 as shorthand for their arrival and effect on American youth. In actual fact, Beatlemania in the U.S. began to spread in late January. This is an important distinction, because Americans had not yet experienced the Beatles. With their momentous performances on The Ed Sullivan Show still a few weeks away, the craze was driven by their records, mainly their first Capitol releases: the single, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” and the album it led off, Meet The Beatles! 3 Each was a phenomenon. They exploded almost simultaneously and stayed atop the single and album charts for months. When people talk about the Beatles lifting the national mood after weeks of post-assassination trauma, it’s these records that lay the groundwork, feeding the mania that kept growing right up to the Beatles’ arrival at Kennedy (!) Airport on February 7, and through their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show two nights later.

The cherished place which Meet The Beatles! holds in the hearts and minds of American musicians will be the focus of a future Let Us Now Praise installment, but what’s relevant here is its role in the Beatles-in-the-wake-of-JFK story. That role, as will become clear, needs to be stressed.

Pat DiNizio: I came across a magazine, American Heritage I think, that said 1964 was the year that changed everything. It dealt largely with the Vietnam War, student protests, the assassination of JFK — but also with Beatlemania and the profound impact it had on the youth of America. I think the Beatles lifted the spirits of the entire world. . . and Meet The Beatles! is arguably the most historic rock ‘n roll album ever made.

Steve Lukather: Meet The Beatles! was the “on” switch to my life, and every song was magic. The sound was otherworldly to me, as if something from another place and time came to touch me.  And that feeling is still there for me and for everyone I know that was there in real time. Not “retro” but real time. You had to be there and live through it all, really, the way the Beatles changed everything. Kids today could never understand it. It was not like some teeny bop shit. It was real, and still is.

Ian McNabb: Americans were still in a bit of a Bobby Darin period — they were on a downer ‘cos of the Kennedy thing and the Cold War — and Meet The Beatles!, this explosion of energy from some place they’d never heard of, just really knocked them on their ass.

As we heard earlier from Billy Joel, American Beatlemania “all kind of coalesced with the release of Meet The Beatles!”

So, now: consider the historical linkage between the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963 along with its extended national trauma, and the arrival to national delirium two months later of the Beatles and the advent of a new era in popular culture.

Now consider that Meet The Beatles!, the album most closely associated with this new era, was essentially the American equivalent of the group’s British LP, With The Beatles.4

And finally, consider that the release date for With The Beatles was . . .

November 22, 1963.

It’s almost enough to make you want to accompany this whole story with the theme from The Twilight Zone.

Or at least “Revolution 9” — that frightening, disturbing collage of musique concrete on Side Four of The Beatles’ White Album, meant to capture in sound the chaos and turmoil of a year, 1968, that included, among myriad global spasms of violence and upheaval, another assassination of another Kennedy. It was released that year on . . .

November 22.

If someone were to ask you why the Beatles were so successful, what would you say?

It’s not as silly a question as it sounds, even though most of us would say their music without a nanosecond’s thought.  But while that may be the reason for the longevity of the Beatles’ success — and is at the core of why it’s assumed the Beatles will remain popular for generations to come — it is, if not incorrect, certainly incomplete. 

There were a great many things, deriving from a variety of factors, that contributed to the Beatles’ appeal and stamped the Beatles as different from other acts — from their restless inquisitiveness and obsession with progress, to the simple fact that their status and their place in the timeline of rock meant they were often the first to do things, musically and otherwise.1 In fact, there are so many aspects to the Beatles’ uniqueness that it doubles back on them: even the language other artists use to describe the Beatles is unique (spoiler alert!).

And yet — in what was simultaneously relatable and inspiring to their early fans, and utterly confounding to their elders and detractors — the Beatles came from a distinctly average background. There were no prodigies here. They were lower working class,2 had no higher education, no musical training, hailed from a depressed port city disdained by most of their country, and looked — as Billy Joel said — “like my friends, like a bunch of wise guys.” Derek Taylor, their publicist (whom we’ll hear more from later), said that in a way this was one of the great incongruities of the insanity that would greet the Fab Four wherever they went: “You know, they’re so ordinary. But that hasn’t softened the effect they have on people, it’s enhanced it.  Because the normality is so at odds with the fame.” But this apparent “normality” seems to have had another effect: exaggerating the singular language often used to describe the Beatles and their achievements.

Specifically: how could such ordinary, untrained kids from grimy Liverpool write and perform such sublime music, and so much of it, so quickly, with such an arc of growth, and with such lasting appeal to so many people around the world? How could they become The Beatles?

It's this incongruity, and the difficulty in reconciling it, which is surely a factor in the extraordinary rhetoric the Beatles inspired in other artists, musicians and public figures.  A striking theme that comes up again and again in this rhetoric is the invocation of a higher power, a reaching for some kind of spiritual explanation for the entire unlikely Beatles phenomenon — who they were, what they did, how the world responded, how it all unfolded.

This tendency reached its zenith around the time the Beatles achieved full demigod status with the release of Sgt. Pepper in 1967. Dr. Timothy Leary — psychologist, Harvard professor, and high priest of hallucinogenics — was among the first (and surely the most florid) to scale the full height of such hyperbole:

I declare that the Beatles are mutants.  Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new species, a young race of laughing freemen. 3

But he was far from the last. In fact the celestial metaphors about the Beatles continue to the current day . . .

• Rick Rubin: “For me the Beatles are proof of the existence of God. It’s much bigger than four kids from Liverpool. It’s so good and so far beyond everyone else that it’s not them.”

• Steve Harley: “I can't fathom it out at all. I'm a terrible romantic, and I like to think that God was at work here.”

• Slash: “The combination of characters in the Beatles was a chemistry that came from on high.”

• James Taylor: “My song 'Carolina in My Mind' says 'With a holy host of others standing round me', and that's how I thought of the Beatles. Everybody did.”

• Shirley Manson: “That combination of songwriters in one band and at one time is luck that will probably never happen again.  They were a collision of the stars.”

• Billy J. Kramer: “It was as if God had dropped them out of the sky.”

• Robyn Hitchcock: “If it was designed, if it was put there by a higher power or something from another planet, or the CIA, I could believe any of it.”

• Sinead O’Connor: “I have this theory that the Beatles were actually the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you know?  Insofar as they changed the entire face of the planet.”

• Sid Bernstein: “There was something about those four boys.  The magic they had is probably unequalled in modern times.”

• Ed O’Brien: “What the Beatles had in abundance was a kind of magic: magic in the music, magic in the characters, the timing of it was magic . . . in a way there’s something divine about them.”

• Lenny Kravitz: “The combination of those four players was one in a billion. It has changed the planet.  And I don’t know that it will ever be repeated.”

• Ozzy Osbourne: “It was a divine experience. The planets changed.”

• Colin Hay: “There’s something else going on. There was just — there was something divine about it, you know? I mean, I’m not a religious person, but there was something . . .”

• Dennis DeYoung: “What they did in just seven years — it doesn’t make sense.  It was a bolt of lightning that put John and Paul and George and Ringo in the same spot, close enough together that they could make that music.  It’s one of the mysteries of the universe.”

• Dave Koz: “I really wonder if there was some sort of divine thing coming through them.  I mean, that’s the only way that you can sort of consciously explain it. Those four guys, at that exact time, they were tapped to convey a message that I guess the world needed to hear.  I wonder if that will ever happen again.”

• Rickie Lee Jones: “There was something larger . . . and it changed the world.”

• Tom Petty: “This really starts to get into a spiritual level of perfection.”

Such things are simply not said about other rock musicians. They are unique to the Beatles. And they are mirrored by hundreds, even thousands of comments by other famous artists which are no less florid or eloquent, even if they don’t all attribute the Beatles to divine intervention.

A curious subset of these quotes demonstrates how perceptions of the Beatles reached hyperbolic extremes almost from the beginning of their fame. While the artists above feel compelled to suggest angelic hands behind the Beatles, others illustrate how extra-terrestrial the Beatles themselves sometimes seemed. Apparently it’s not that big a leap from expressions of mere wonder to . . .

• Elton John on going to London for a Beatles concert: “Like seeing God.”

• Director Richard Linklater, multiple Oscar nominee: “The Beatles are God.”

• The recently deceased Gary Rossington of Lynyrd Skynyrd: “This may sound naïve now, but the Beatles were like gods to me. It was like they were more than human in some way.”

• Emmylou Harris: “They were like gods. Really. You just couldn’t get any higher than the Beatles as far as what music meant.”

• Micky Dolenz: “I didn’t even want to meet the Beatles!  I mean, what do you say?  It’s like meeting God!  What if Jesus Christ walked in this room right now?”

• Chrissie Hynde: “I honestly didn’t think the Beatles were from this world.”

• Bill Graham, legendary promoter and impresario who never got to stage the Beatles: “I’d like to believe in God, but I know the Beatles exist.”

• Nick Mason of Pink Floyd: “They were God-like figures to us. They were in a strata so far beyond us that they were out of our league.”

• Scott Ian: “I got to meet Paul McCartney one time. [It was] like being in the presence of a god.  I didn't have a conversation, but I shook his hand, and that was like… [sticks his hand out and looks at in awe]. It's the closest I could compare to gods that are walking the earth with us.”

• Al Goldstein on being part of a dinner party with John at the Four Seasons: “I felt like a chosen person to be in his presence; I had touched the face of God.” 

• Ivor Sharp, dean of Canadian commercial photographers: “I remember often meeting John, telling my wife I thought I’d become a ‘Lennonite.’  He had almost a messiahlike quality about him. There’s no question about that.” 

Where does all this come from? Think of any number of other musicians that have risen to the pinnacle of worldwide success and lasting fame. They may have huge, devoted, even maniacal fan bases. But their fellow artists don’t ascribe ordained-by-the-heavens magic to their existence. Why so with the Beatles?

Again, the first impulse is to reflexively cite the music, the music, the music. And again, that is woefully inadequate.

First let’s take a step back and review some of the key non-musical ingredients that were indispensable to the Fab Four’s rise.

— Management. In Brian Epstein, they had a besotted and devoted manager who was convinced, contrary to all evidence, that these rough, unprofessional kids had world-domination potential (if he could only clean up their more unsavory and rebellious edges . . . )

— Hard work. The Beatles were probably the hardest-working band in the world — maybe ever. In the north of England, when they weren’t playing one of their hundreds of shows at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, they gigged relentlessly (playing three different towns in one day was not unheard of), while their notorious residencies in Hamburg had them working seven to eight hours a night, 7 nights a week, for months at a time. The formative Beatles practically defined Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” theory of success.4

— Personality. They were unusually engaging as people, together and separately, with irreverent attitudes, a comedian’s razor wit, seemingly inexhaustible good humor, a complete absence of pretension, and an apparent mission to puncture stuffiness.

— Luck. They were the beneficiaries of an incredible number of good breaks and happenstance, far too many to detail here. This by itself isn’t necessarily unusual — virtually all success stories require healthy doses of luck and good timing — but the number of what-ifs that could have and should have derailed the Beatles’ career before it ever took off is enough to make you wonder if Providence really did have a plan for them.

If any one of these factors had been removed from the equation . . . poof, no Beatles. Each, in addition to extraordinary music, was essential to their story.

So there’s really no wrong answer, and there certainly isn’t one answer.

But there is a missing one. An often forgotten ingredient, a cousin, so to speak, of Personality. An x-factor that, in keeping with the comments above, touches on intangible, almost spiritual qualities and was often the ingredient that convinced people that these Beatles were different from those around them.

Charisma. Above all, group charisma.

Those who encountered the Beatles repeatedly speak of a powerful presence, almost an otherness, that surrounded the group. They describe an aura that bordered on the mystical.

And just to be clear: we’re not talking about the fevered, fanatical fawning of obsessed fans who meet one of their heroes. We’re talking about the impressions of often jaded professionals, of people who were stars themselves. Most incredibly, much of their testimony is of the Beatles even before the Beatles were famous.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Graham Nash worked at a coffee bar in Manchester called the Two J’s, later to become known as The Oasis. He remembers the young Beatles coming in for a gig.

They came through the front door about three in the afternoon to set up their equipment, and every girl in there stopped dead in their tracks.  It was like four Marlon Brandos had walked in.  They had an innate, primordial swagger.  Aside from the raw energy they put out, they looked fantastic.  They were dressed in black leather and had that Beatle haircut.  A total coolness emanated off them.  They hadn’t even played a note, and the girls would swoon and faint.  Fuckin’ fantastic.

But that’s just a teaser. Nash, as a member of The Hollies, would cross paths with the Beatles frequently as both bands toured Britain, gigging incessantly. The more he saw of them, the more he was struck by their freakish chemistry.

They were very protected by a filtering system between the four of them.  They were always together, even if there was a room full of people and they were all separated.  I got to see it all unfolding before my eyes.  And I was aware that it was historical.  It was almost spiritual.  When you saw the Beatles and saw the effect they had on people, you knew something special was happening.

“It was almost spiritual . . . the effect they had on people.” Think about that for a moment: this is in reference to a group that had no hit records, no fame, and no hype. It might almost be tempting to dismiss Nash as delusional, but he was the same age as the Beatles, from the same part of England, playing the same clubs . . . and his recollections are echoed by others.  It begs for some kind of explanation, but it’s pointless to try and explain such an intangible thing in concrete terms. It’s enough that it was felt by many people in many circumstances, over and over again.

Motorhead founder Lemmy, for example. The future hard rock icon hitchhiked from North Wales to Liverpool to see the Beatles at the Cavern Club after some local girls had come back raving about them. The Cavern was a cramped, dank, sweaty cellar with no ventilation and condensation running down its walls. No real sound system, no lighting rig. Just a parade of local bands taking turns on its low-ceilinged stage.

The Beatles would come on stage and you were just awestruck.  They had a presence which was very rare . . . you’ve either got it or you haven’t.

Billy J. Kramer, who, with backing group The Dakotas, soon became a star himself, was one of the locals frequenting the Cavern and other Liverpool clubs.

I’ll be honest with you, I was in Litherland Town Hall and [compère] Bob Wooler said, “Next we have a band called The Beatles.” I’d never heard of them. I didn’t know anything about them. There was never anything in the newspapers. But the Beatles came on and I knew. I thought, These guys are going to be bigger than Elvis. They were phenomenal. It was the energy; they just had something. You know people say, “What is a star?” I can’t explain it. It was just magic.

One of the more fascinating personal testimonies comes from the man who would end up producing almost all the Beatles’ records, George Martin. Martin was of an earlier generation and a different station than the Beatles. He was 36 when he met them (they were all between 19 and 21); he was classically trained in piano, oboe and orchestration, whereas the Beatles were completely untutored musically; and he was the head of EMI’s Parlophone record label, a small label amongst EMI’s many holdings, but an industry giant compared to the Beatles’ parochial anonymity.5 Reluctantly — almost out of pity in the face of Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s desperation — he agreed to give the band a recording test.6

Martin was not exactly blown away by the Beatles’ music. He liked their voices well enough and found their self-contained lineup intriguing, but he did not hear any potential hits and he certainly didn’t suspect any genius. What he was blown away by was their presence.

It was a question of charisma — they had enormous charisma.  Sparks flew off them while they were playing or when you talked to them. They had this quality that when you’re with them you are all the better for being with them, and when they leave you, you feel a loss. Very few people have that. And I thought, well, if they have this effect on me, regardless of what they can do, they’ll probably have the same effect on an audience.  I knew that if that could be transmitted to the stage or the screen or sound, they would sweep everything before them.  I fell in love with them — it’s as simple as that.

The engineer for that first test at EMI was 39-year-old Norman Smith, a former jazz musician who would go on to produce Pink Floyd and have a string of international hits himself as “Hurricane” Smith.

Before they walked in, I thought to myself, “Well, here comes another nothing group.”  But the moment they walked in, I thought, Wowee, this ain’t the usual type of group.  There’s something different about these boys.  There was some kind of aura when they walked in. Let's be honest: they were signed without anybody realising their musical potential. It was just that they had so much personality, and so much magic about them, that they had to do something.

All too often, ascribing qualities such as charisma or an aura to people is an exercise in projection. It’s a function of starstruck fans meeting the famous, often in situations saturated by the trappings of celebrity: intangible, fleeting experiences, seen through highly personal lenses, rarely accreting into consensus. But in the case of the Beatles, there seems indeed to be genuine consensus: that their magnetism in person was a very real and rare thing, and that it was a major element, aside from any musical considerations, in the band’s appeal. Whatever you want to call it — charisma, presence, chemistry, aura, magic — the Beatles evidently had it to an almost supernatural degree.

Needless to say, when the Beatles did become famous, the aura around them inevitably multiplied. It didn’t change per se, but now it would be experienced en masse, by all kinds of different people.

Back to Derek Taylor. Taylor was a journalist and a decade older than the Beatles when he began working in late 1963 as a publicist for the group.7 He was himself entranced by the Beatles and observed how they entranced others on countless occasions, including on their first tour of North America in 1964. He recalled the wife of the mayor of Milwaukee showing up at the Beatles’ hotel at 9 am, demanding to see the Beatles so she could placate her daughter. “Personally, I think they’re disgusting,” she clarified. When eventually the young girl was granted an audience, it was the mother who “stammered and grunted and blushed and dropped her handbag.”

On the same tour, a lifelong friend of Taylor’s, a Canadian newspaperman, asked Taylor to call him when the tour hit Vancouver so they could get together at the hotel. He had no interest in the Beatles, he assured Taylor, and wouldn’t bother them. But spending the day together, Taylor noticed his friend getting more and more “agitated.” Finally, just before the Beatles were due to hit the stage for the evening’s concert, the newsman rushed to John Lennon, put his arm around him and signaled for a cameraman he’d hired specifically for the occasion to snap a quick picture. Flabbergasted, Taylor asked him why he, a veteran of hard news, would ever do such a thing. His friend replied, “I had to. I couldn’t not do it.”

Derek Taylor: “You know, that’s what we call Beatlemania.”

The examples are legion. Consider Richard Lester, the film director who was responsible for so many memorable pictures including “The Three Musketeers,” “Superman,” “The Ritz,” “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum,” “Petulia,” and others. United Artists had contracted him to make a quick cash-in movie with the Beatles in order to exploit their fame before it fizzled out. (This low-budget film of course turned out to be “A Hard Day’s Night,” one of the landmark films of the 1960s.) Decades later, Lester described meeting the Beatles in terms strikingly reminiscent of George Martin’s:

When the four of them came into a room, you felt good. You were enthralled. And it was over from that time on — that’s all I really wanted to do, was to make that film. Because I felt there really was something marvelous in them. Having met them, the die was automatically cast. 

The specific of “being in the room” with the Beatles seems to have acted as some kind of irresistible intoxicant. Just before the Beatles came to America for the first time in February of 1964 they spent two weeks playing the Olympia Theater in Paris, on the same bill as French star Johnny Hallyday. Playing guitar in Hallyday’s band was Mick Jones, who a decade later would become a founding member and the chief songwriter of Foreigner. Jones has his own being-in-the-room anecdote about the Beatles. After some time sharing the bill at The Olympia but not crossing paths personally, a stage snafu almost destroyed Jones’s prized Gibson SG guitar.

While I’m trying to save the guitar Lennon hears me swearing and cursing.  He comes up behind me, taps me on the shoulder and says, “Ey Wack, are you English?”  I said yeah, and he said, “You should have told us!  Come back to the hotel and have a drink with the boys.”  And from that moment on I was completely in awe of the Beatles.

In other words, as a professional musician sharing a stage, Jones admired the Beatles (as he has often attested). Being in their company, though, turned his admiration into awe.

Just before this, Robert Freeman, a photojournalist with The Sunday Times, shot the famous half-lit faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo that graced the cover of their second British LP, With The Beatles (and, perhaps even more famously, graced the cover of their first Capitol album in America, Meet The Beatles!).8 This was a man who had photographed the greatest jazz musicians of the day, including John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Elvin Jones, and had been inside the Kremlin to shoot Nikita Khrushchev. Yet he too was struck when he met the Fab Four. *

They were quite easy, young people.  They didn’t look like pop stars at all . . . I got the impression they were very intelligent and somehow surrounded by a kind of aura.

*Realize that all these impressions date from a time when rock ‘n’ roll was considered by most outside its core demographic to be music made by morons for morons. In the early 1960s, the idea that an adult would find any such musicians to have “an aura” about them, or charisma so overpowering as to “sweep everything before them,” would have been laughable. It makes these early impressions especially compelling; not only do they predate the Beatles’ international fame, they come from the days when nothing associated with rock ‘n’ roll (except maybe the money to be made) was taken remotely seriously.

The more you dig, the more you find repeated support for the proposition that inexpressible extra-musical qualities were integral in the Beatles’ success, often in can’t-put-your-finger-on-it terms. In later years Taylor succinctly stated, “The Beatles, those faces, that time — most people say really it was the music. That was only a part of it.” As we heard above from Rickie Lee Jones, the “spirit and magic” of the Beatles was put into their music, but “there was something larger than that that was happening.” Lamont Dozier, part of the immortal Holland-Dozier-Holland writing team that made Motown so successful, remembers, “It was more than just the songs that was making the Beatles so popular. There was something else about them.” Brian Wilson singled out the Beatles as unique among rock groups in that “I started digging them for their attitude and magnetism as well as the music.” William King, who with Lionel Richie founded the massive soul/funk group Commodores, says the Beatles were their primary model. Why? It was the music yes, agrees King, but “add to that, charisma and magnetism. That is what the Beatles had in abundance. They glowed. They clicked together. We wanted to have that.” Marshall Crenshaw elaborates: “That’s what a lot of people forget now. I mean, whenever people talk about the Beatles now, they talk about them as artists, and they talk about them as individuals and stuff.  But in the beginning it wasn’t like that; people were just bowled over by the presence that the Beatles had.  And the music was just, like, extra.”

But, of course, what an extra that proved to be. Multiply that presence by that music, and the product, as George Martin intuited, swept everything before it. As Beatlemania spread across England followed by Europe, America and the rest of the world, people everywhere — in the same way as Graham Nash, Lemmy and Billy J. Kramer did, back when the Beatles were in Ringo’s words, “just shitkickers from Liverpool” — seemed to know, even if they couldn’t articulate why, that what they were witnessing was rare and historic.

Martin Barre, the great lead guitarist of Jethro Tull, saw the Beatles not long before their conquest of America.

They were just special.  Somehow, I knew they were amazing. I don’t know why. I’d seen quite a few shows, but something about them . . . I just knew that they were an incredible band. They were just in a whole different universe to other musicians.

Another iconic prog rocker, Greg Lake, saw the Beatles at almost the same time as Martin Barre and came away similarly awestruck.

They had this property which was almost spiritual — to be able to somehow be better than great.  They would push you to a point where you couldn’t stand it emotionally; you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I saw it with my own eyes, it was a phenomenal thing. 

And then there’s Ron Delsener, the legendary concert promoter and impresario whose career is the subject of the recent documentary “Ron Delsener Presents.” He is expansive in conveying the personal impact of seeing the Beatles, but equally at a loss to explain it. Delsener was instrumental in staging the Beatles’ outdoor performance at Forest Hills Stadium, New York, during their first tour of America. A Frank Sinatra acolyte (Delsener came of age in the pre-Beatles 1950s), here is how he remembers his state of mind after the concert.

I’m driving back and I said I’ve just seen something I’ll never see again in my life. And I was, like, almost crying. Because how do I tell people what I just saw?  It affected me that much.  I was euphoric.  I was lifted.  I’d just seen the greatest presentation — and I thought Sinatra was my guy.  Frank was magnetic, but the Beatles had it plus . . . it was like, wow, I’ve never seen a show, anything like this in my life, this is the greatest — it was a feeling that made me happy, and the whole world was perfect.  Everybody was happy. We were all feeling so good. How do you keep this feeling captured for the rest of your life? 9

Such extraordinary responses to seeing the Beatles in person brings up an important note. The Beatles on stage did not leap around,10 dance, wear garish costumes, or strike self-conscious rock poses. They had no stage show. As they always said self-deprecatingly, they had no “act.” All they did was play and sing with an exuberant, joyous energy that needed no artifice to communicate musical excitement. The total absence of stage contrivance is just another suggestion that the Beatles simply possessed a rare charisma. Certainly no other performers, in any area of show business, have ever generated the same level of audience hysteria.

Jerry Casale of Devo put it this way . . .

All the Beatles did was wag their heads, and they created more insanity and energy in the crowd than all kinds of masochistic whack-off antics, ending with Iggy Pop, ever could. It's the energy that gets created and transmitted, not how much kinetic energy the band puts on stage.

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Mick Jagger sitting at the feet of Paul McCartney during the recording of the orchestra on “A Day In The Life.”

Fast-forward a few years. It’s the late 1960s. The Beatles are now much more than an entertainment phenomenon, they are cultural demigods and arguably the four most famous men in the world. But the joined-at-the-hip “four-headed monster,” in Mick Jagger’s memorable words, is exhibiting signs of split personality. JohnPaulGeorgeRingo is increasingly John, Paul, George and Ringo, and tension has begun to fray the seemingly inexhaustible bonhomie between them.

Yet the presence surrounding them, the aura that seemed so evident to outsiders, the charismatic magic that seduced all comers — this remains undimmed.

Billy Preston had met the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany back in 1962 when they were still an amphetamine-driven bar band and he was a young Hammond organ player with the explosive Little Richard. They became close and shared a mutual admiration, even as their careers took them in different directions. In what must have seemed like a lifetime later, the winter of 1969, Preston was playing London with Ray Charles and made a casual visit to the Beatles’ Apple studio to say hello to his old friends. He ended up being drafted by the Beatles to join the fraught Get Back sessions.11 Preston:

It was fabulous.  The guys were just — it’s such a glow when all four of those guys are together.  Like, the room glows. 

So here’s a keyboard virtuoso, who has spent the 1960s with some of the world’s most gifted and dynamic musicians, including Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Jimi Hendrix, visiting a group of old friends who are at a low point in their career and would break up in the summer. And still he is struck by how, in their presence, “the room glows.”

This is affirmed repeatedly by others who found themselves in the Beatles’ midst in those late years. Jeff Lynne, while recording The Idle Race’s first album, got to visit EMI studios in late 1968 while the Beatles were recording what became the White Album — another project that was marked by tension.

Our engineers knew the guys at Abbey Road and they took us up there to say hello. The Beatles were so amazing; they had this aura about them.  To be in the same room as the four of them caused me not to sleep for like three days.

Shortly before that, Neil Innes, the musical mastermind first of the satirical Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and later of Monty Python, had begun spending time with the Beatles after they utilized the Bonzos as the faux-nightclub act in the “Magical Mystery Tour” TV film.

They were magic people.  It’s almost impossible to describe.  I think all of us who went through that period, you still get it from the music — there’s a kind of chemistry that touches things you can’t describe.   

Ray Cooper is the flamboyant percussionist whose baldheaded and sunglassed visage has been seen on concert stages for decades. 50 years of playing on every rock star’s records and supporting them on tour has run parallel to his longtime involvement with British theater and film, bringing him into contact with legends like Laurence Olivier and Sean Connery. He has been surrounded by the most famous artists in the world since the 1960s and knows a thing or two about charisma.

The Beatles — all of them — had that.  When they walked in the room, things changed.  Things changed.  There was an aura. Extraordinary people. 

We need to take a quick detour here. In the same interview, Cooper pointed out that the charisma factor was a phenomenon of the individual Beatles (“there is still an aura, with Ringo and Paul”), not just the foursome. It would take an entirely separate piece to review the awed testimonies of stars who encountered even the solo Beatles, but a few will provide a taste.

Ringo? Gregg Bissonette, a world-class drummer who among countless credits has been a long-time touring member of Ringo’s All-Starr Band, confides that “I can’t say names, but I’ve seen people shake over the last ten years.  Just come backstage and then just shake — you know, people that are big, big stars.” Sam Hollander, one of the top producers and songwriters of the 2010s, whose whole career has been based on collaborating with major stars, did some work for the first time with Ringo Starr and said, “You get in a room with this guy, and the one thing I would say is your head is about to get just crushed with the amount of physical energy and spirit.” Stewart Copeland simply says of his encounters with Ringo, “He is not as other men.”

George? Bobby Whitlock, the super-session keyboardist who practically grew up at Stax Records and was the main co-writer for Derek and the Dominos, recalls the time George Harrison briefly joined Eric Clapton on the Delaney & Bonnie and Friends tour. “When George walked in, the whole dynamics of everything changed.  There was just — you could feel him coming before he was in the room, you knew something special was happening.  He walked with a sense of peace and tranquility, and that projected out into the room.  You could feel it before he was even there.  You could feel him, his presence.”  Steve Lukather remembers the star-studded memorial concert held in 1992 for his friend and fellow Toto member Jeff Porcaro, one of the most recorded drummers in history during his short life. Lukather invited George Harrison to join the many other luminaries. “He walked into the room and there was a collective gasp.  And I was already in a room with a bunch of famous people.  It was just, you know — the aura.  It’s definitely another level.  I mean, there’s no question about that, and there’s nobody who’d argue that.”

Paul? When the great Tony Bennett first saw the Beatles he was nearly 40, a jazz purist who loathed rock ‘n’ roll. Yet, he recalls, “I knew Paul was sprinkled with stardust the moment I saw him walk onstage.  With some people in show business — a certain few stars — a magic shines through their every move, whether they’re performing or not.” The English music and sports impresario Harvey Lisberg agrees that Paul’s charisma was not limited to performance: “He had a magic, there’s no question.  And it was nothing to do with music, either; he had a magic in that personality.”

Tom Meighan, lead singer of top British band Kasabian, really felt it. He was engaged by the NME in 2014 to interview Paul for a 40th anniversary special about the Band On The Run album. “That's the first time I felt the aura of someone. It was the most freaked out I’ve been in my life.  I was shitting myself.  I didn’t even shit myself when I met the Stones.  I felt nothing like that.” And James Corden, whose “Carpool Karaoke” has booked every global mega-star imaginable, says his encounter with Paul is easily the most memorable of his career. “I’d heard the phrase ‘stopped traffic’ before and I’d never really understood it.  Until walking down Penny Lane with Sir Paul McCartney and every single car at the junction is stopped — and you cannot hear a single horn.”

John? The comments about John are astonishing.12 They also make it easier to understand the intra-Beatles dynamic: each of the other Beatles worshiped John in their youth, and despite roles and prominence that waxed and waned over the years, John remained the band’s de facto leader and most forceful personality.

Eric Carmen: John Lennon was the most charismatic person I’d ever met. Period.  Bar none.  I’ve met a lot of rock ‘n’ roll people over the years, some that I had idolized . . . and some were cool and some weren’t, but they all seemed pretty much human.  John was really just overpowering in person.

Jay Messina: You know, from all the people that I’ve worked with — Miles Davis, you know, lots of big-name people — after five minutes, everybody, for the most part, is the same.  [But] John was just a magical person to be around.  He just had — there was something special about this guy, even if you didn’t know his name. 

Joey Molland: John would raise the room temperature, just by walking in. He had ferocious energy.  He lit up the room.

Richard Perry: John Lennon was the most exciting person I’ve ever been in the studio with.  His energy was overwhelming.  The natural force and strength of his personality, he lifted everybody in the room up. I can remember very distinctly every minute with him; it was probably the greatest thrill of my career. He worked at a fast pace, he had amazing energy and electricity, and it spread to everyone else.

Alan White: He’d walk into a room, and you could feel the aura around him.  It was huge — I mean, everyone would start revolving around him because he was emanating so much.

Elton John: I couldn’t meet John without being awestruck, and I knew him quite well. He’s the only person in this business I’ve ever looked up to, the only person. I’ve met my equals.  I’ve met people who are great, like Mick Jagger and Pete Townsend, who I admire tremendously. But they are not in the same league, I’m sorry.

Thom Panunzio: I never got over John being in the room.  I think I could have worked with him another 10, 20 years and I would still feel that way. And later, when I met the other three Beatles at different times, I could hardly speak. After all the years being in the music business, all the years and all the people that I’ve been doing this with, it’s just something about those guys that is so special — something about them when they’re in the room.

Still, as Leonard Bernstein once observed about the Beatles: “Individually they were something, together they were IT.”

The late Alan White, longtime drummer for Yes, played on several early solo records and live performances with John Lennon, some of which included Eric Clapton. Around the same time he also worked with Ginger Baker and Steve Winwood. For him, no atmosphere compared to Beatle atmosphere — even breaking-up-Beatles atmosphere.

The problem with being in a room with any one of the Beatles is that the whole room revolves around that one person.  When you get two of them in the room and the whole room revolves around those two people . . . and I’ve been in a room with all of them together, it’s just unbelievable. It’s an aura you feel more than anything.  It’s kind of scary — because it’s a very powerful kind of thing that they have together.

White’s recollections are seconded by another drumming giant, Jim Keltner, one of the greatest and most prolific session drummers of all time. Keltner has recorded and performed with practically every major artist of the last half century, including all four Beatles.

You always had to listen carefully when any of them were talking, and try to unscrew the “code.”  And when a couple of them got together, just stand out of the way.  You probably heard about the “inner circle”?  It really was, because [while] I did feel a part of the group, they had a communication between them that was really a special bond.  They speak of each other as brothers, or more than that, and sometimes you could see, almost feel, something going on between them. 

Recalling his final experiences with them — the Let It Be and Abbey Road sessions in 1969, as the band was breaking up — George Martin still marveled. Even for him, after seven years of constant work with the band and an increasingly tense group dynamic which almost led him to refuse to continue as their producer, a mystical aura around the Beatles somehow remained intact. “There was just an inexplicable presence when all four of them were together in a room. Their music was bigger than they were.”

All of which brings us to a wonderful turn of phrase that comes courtesy of Robert Fripp. Writing in his diary in 1999, Fripp jotted down what he listened to that evening.

This evening's music has moved from Eddie the Elgar to The Beatles' "Revolver". Now onto "Rubber Soul". Were the Beatles the last example of group genius in Western popular culture?

“Group genius.” It has been said a million times about the Beatles that they embodied the alchemic concept of a whole being greater than the sum of its component parts; that when you take the four individual pieces and combine them, a chemical reaction occurs, a combustion which yields far more than A + B + C + D.

The metaphors have taken a variety of forms.

Robyn Hitchcock compared the Beatles to “a four-color separation photo”: break a photo down to its components and there’s a blue, but it’s too much blue; a red and it’s too much red. Put them together and not only are they in natural balance but additional colors and shades fill out the image.

Tom Hanks, giving the commencement address at Vassar College in 2005, used “the power of four” to make the point that great numbers of people aren’t needed to make a difference. After noting that engineers had calculated that removing 4 cars out of 100 was the difference between gridlock and free-flowing highways, he continued, “Take four musicians in a depressed area of England. Name them John, Paul, George, and Ringo and you have 'Hey Jude.’ Apply the power of four to any area and you will make a difference.”

Steve Jobs, in discussing his successes at both Apple and Pixar, said, “My model for business is the Beatles. They were four very talented guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that's how I see business.”

Ken Burns, the great documentary filmmaker: “Look, one and one equals two, we know that.  If not, airplanes don’t fly and trains don’t run and doors don’t shut.  But the thing we want in our lives is for one and one to equal three: in our faith, in our art, in our relationships.  And I think that the Beatles did that for me.” 

Don Was takes the Burns model even further. The bassist, musical director, and president of the iconic jazz music label Blue Note Records, is rhapsodic in his conviction about this multiplying magic . . .

“Suddenly, one plus one plus one plus one equals . . . a thousand.”

Group genius indeed. Bill Flanagan has said that when John, Paul, George and Ringo were together “there is a fifth thing that happens that’s not like any of the four of them.” And he offered a fascinating insight which is essentially an expansion on Fripp.

We don’t have – critics, academics, culturally – we don’t really have a vocabulary for the idea of a collective genius.  You know, we want authorship.  We want to say, that movie was made by Martin Scorsese, or The Sopranos was made by David Chase, or Miles Davis made those records.  And I think the Beatles really challenge that.  They make us contend with the notion that four people together can create something extraordinary, and you cannot break it down and say this guy was the genius, or that guy was the genius.

Fripp and Flanagan are talking about the Beatles in terms of their musical output, but their formulation works just as well when it comes to the Beatles’ charisma. Either way, maybe this helps explain the quasi-religious language we hear other artists use in describing the Beatles; maybe, seen through our traditional lens as four “ordinary” individuals, the Beatles simply defy our vocabulary.  They transcend our available means of definition or explanation, and become, for some people, divine.  (Just for fun, take a peek again at that first group of comments at the top; you might read them slightly differently now.)

There’s one more anecdote about all this aura stuff, and it might be the most bracing testimony of all about the Beatles’ strange energy. It amplifies the sensation of what might be called the compounding effect of Beatle aura — and the special alchemy that seemed to occur when, as Don Was analogized, all four gems were in the crown.

Chris Thomas is one of the most successful producer/engineers of the rock era, a man who has worked closely and extensively with Pink Floyd, Sting, U2, Elton John, Pete Townshend, The Sex Pistols, INXS and many others. Celebrity and fame make him yawn. When the Beatles were recording The White Album in 1968, Thomas was engineering at Abbey Road and George Martin was producing. He tells the following story.

George Martin informed me that he wouldn’t be available.  I can’t remember word for word what he said to me, but it was something like, “There will be one Beatle there, fine.  Two Beatles, great.  Three Beatles, fantastic.  But the minute the four of them are there that is when the inexplicable charismatic thing happens, the special magic no one has been able to explain.  It will be very friendly between you and them but you’ll be aware of this inexplicable presence.”  Sure enough, that’s exactly the way it happened.  I’ve never felt it in any other circumstances. It was the special chemistry of the four of them which nobody since has ever had.

So in the end, what are we left with? Observations, recollections, personal reactions, many of them quite eloquent. But no explanations. For there really is no explanation for the Beatles.  No thumbnail precis can summarize their appeal. There are too many people who sensed something in the Beatles outside of recognizable experience. Those who want to think of them in miraculous terms can be forgiven their hyperbole.  For what it’s worth, even George Harrison — the Beatle who, to put it mildly, had the most complicated relationship with their fame — understood that there was something celestial about it all.

“There was a magic chemistry that happened between us and somehow it got into the grooves on those records. You can take the Beatles separately and analyze all their energy, but when you put them together astrologically and chemically, something stronger takes place that even the Beatles never understood.”

But going viral doesn’t have to be on a national scale. It can be limited to communities, groups, adherents of one thing or another. It can also be less than truly rampant; a minor virus, if you will.

And minor viruses definitely exist in Beatles comment. Certain expressions pop up again and again, like a Herpes outbreak. Suppose a writer or musician is discussing the innovations that characterized Revolver or Sgt. Pepper. A good drinking game can be built around the inevitable drop of the phrase “using the studio as an instrument.”

Another good one is “like going from black-and-white to color.” This has been used by so many people* to describe the impact of the Beatles that the wonderful vividness of the phrase has been dulled to something like, well, black-and-white.

* At the risk of spoiling future citations of the term (you’ll note one below, in fact), those who have used this precise metaphor include Ann Wilson, Holly Johnson, Tom Petty, Francis Rossi, Eric Idle, George Thorogood, Steve Lukather, Larry Kirwan, Bob Herbert, Ozzy Osbourne and Andrew Solt — just to mention a cross-section of musicians, playwrights, journalists, documentarians and actors.

One particular conceit which seems unique to Beatles fans — and is shared by many artists and musicians — is that Beatles universality is so literal that those who claim not to like them are actually lying.  As touched on in an earlier post, there are variations on this theme in the form of excuses or rationalizations. Thus, Beatles dissenters are explained away as suffering from too little exposure to the group’s eclectic catalogue; too much exposure to the same few songs over and over; they could be drinking the self-deceiving Kool-Aid of the cooler-than-thou hipoisie, or cowed by their social group’s orthodoxy; they could be ignoramuses, misanthropes, tone-deaf, party poopers. Whether someone simply won’t admit they like the Beatles, merely doesn’t know enough to appreciate them, or is a genuine crank — it all adds up to the same thing: it’s not normal. The mammoth Rolling Stone Album Guide puts it this way: “The Beatles are the last great consensus in rock. Not liking the Beatles is as perverse as not liking the sun.” Ozzy Osbourne, as usual, is more pithy: “To me, it’s like saying you don’t like air.”

Which leads to the minor virus of “they’re lying.” I’m trying and failing to think of another artist in the rock era whose importance other musicians believe is so beyond dispute.

Billy Squier: If you’re a rocker from the ‘70s or ‘80s, there’s only two types of people: either they’ll tell you the Beatles meant everything, or they’re lying.  Those are the only two musicians possible.

Dennis DeYoung: The fact that all four of those guys got together at that time and brought those miraculous talents in one spot to make all those records basically in seven years – it can’t make any sense to musicians like myself.  It’s unrepeatable. And I guarantee any musician who denies this is a liar.  How they did that, none of us will ever know.

George Thorogood: You know, to me, the world was totally black and white . . . and [then] all of a sudden the world went technicolor.  You know what I mean?  That’s what threy did for me. But the Beatles did that for everybody. I’m not the only one.  And anybody who says different, who was born after 1950, is lying to you.  The Beatles opened it up.

And it’s not just musicians of a certain age. Artists of the 21st century use the same terminology.

Justin Russo: Everybody’s influenced by them. It’s unavoidable . . . and, well, anyone who says the Beatles didn’t change their life is lying or lives under a rock.

Jana Peri: If you’re a rock musician and you say you don’t like the Beatles, then you’re a jerk. You’re just trying to be cool, but you’re really not. You can’t deny the Beatles.

a Nameless Ghoul: They have a quality that few bands have — which is a sheer beauty in itself — and that’s a universal appreciation of their music. Everybody all over the world knows and loves the Beatles. If you say you don’t then you’re a liar.

Let’s have a little fun with this. Apparently some people who profess not to like the Beatles really are lying. Some of the more conspicuous evidence goes all the way back to the 1970s, especially the early years of British punk.

It was essentially a litmus test: if you hoped to be on the cool side of the rock divide in mid-1970s Britain, you had to disavow not only the prevailing mainstream of slick, well-produced pop music and virtuosic rock genres such as prog, but the sacred classic acts of the 1960s — starting with the Beatles.

The front line of punk’s idol-smashing brigade were the Sex Pistols (whose leader Johnny Rotten notoriously despised the Fab Four and sacked bassist and primary songwriter Glen Matlock in part for being a Beatles fan), and The Clash, who famously sang “phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” in their anthem London Calling, and whose rallying cry, first chanted on “1977” from their debut album, was “No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones.”1 But the Pistols and the Clash were only the most noisily explicit; the anti-legacy anti-Beatles stance was pan-punk orthodoxy, and became de rigueur amongst many others in rock who wanted to stay musically relevant. David Bowie, for example, loved the Beatles and adored John Lennon; but he also acknowledged that in the punk days he would never have admitted such a thing. “One wouldn’t have declared it in the ‘70s. Because that would have been most uncool: to say that you actually liked the Beatles in any way, shape or form.”

It goes further. Billy Idol, whose Generation X was one of the biggest of the early British punk groups, makes a pretty explicit connection between the Beatles being “uncool” in the ‘70s and . . . well, lying. In conversation with Bill Flanagan in 2018 he talked about those seminal days.

Flanagan: When punk came along and everybody was pretending to hate the Beatles and the Stones, you did not join in.  You always stuck up for the great British rock of the ‘60s, didn’t you.

Idol: Well yeah, I did — but I was a massive Beatle fan.  And you know it’s funny, because a lot of the American punk rock groups, like the Ramones, loved the Beatles. It was just the English punk rock groups were very against them, but I found that very difficult. It was very difficult for me to pretend that I didn’t love them. 

Flanagan: It’s funny ‘cause in later years guys like [the Clash’s] Joe Strummer all admitted that of course they were fans. 

Idol: Of course they were. It was trying to be Year One of a revolution, so of course a lot of people said things that were kind of ideological rather than what they truly felt.  Like, I knew [the Clash’s] Mick Jones loved the Beatles.2

In this light it’s fun to go back to that recollection of Bowie’s that in the punk days you wouldn’t be caught dead saying you were a Beatles fan. Because if your guard was down, you’d be caught indeed. In 1980 — when punk and new wave were thriving — long-time BBC journalist Andy Peebles came to New York to conduct separate interviews with Bowie and John Lennon, who had just emerged from a 5-year musical hiatus. This is how he described his time with Bowie.

I was in town to meet both him and Lennon.  David was spellbound by that.  All he talked about was the Beatles.

Sometimes, ascribing dishonesty to Beatles deniers — or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, mere abnormality — is rhetorical. Smokey Robinson: “We were all Beatles fans. I mean, who wasn’t?” Melissa Etheridge: “Who isn’t?  How can you be in music and not be a Beatles fan?” It doesn’t have to come from musicians either. Former New York Mets pitching great Ron Darling has a piquant way of putting it: “If you’re alive and have a heartbeat, you enjoy [the Beatles].” So when it turns out that someone has a heartbeat but doesn’t enjoy the Beatles — well, that can be too much to handle. The always colorful Elle King explained to Billboard in 2015 why she had to break up with a guy who wasn’t sharing her love of the Beatles. “My ex-boyfriend, I said to him, ‘I can’t stop listening to the White Album, it’s the greatest album fucking ever made, let me give you a blowjob listening to it.’ And he’s like, ‘Not into it.’ I was like, ‘Fine, next, we’re breaking up.’”

And she’s not the only one . . .

Steve Lukather: If you don’t dig The Beatles, I just can’t talk to you. If you don’t get that, I’m sorry.

Eric Hutchinson: Everything you could do with pop music, it begins and ends with them. I broke up with a girl once because she didn’t like the Beatles!

Ozzy Osbourne: I remember talking to Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. He said, “I didn't like the Beatles.” I said, “There is something fucking wrong with you.”

Kate Nash: I don’t really trust people who don’t like the Beatles.

The “trust” thing is almost a mini-meme. For example, Ben Lovett of Mumford & Sons was asked in an interview with Q magazine which artists make him distrust anyone who doesn’t like them. “The obvious one is the Beatles.”

Unspoken in every flavor of disbelief is the idea that, ok, someone may think they don’t like the Beatles but they really would if they would just take off the blinders (or earmuffs). And to be sure, there are artists who became fans by doing just that. (So many in fact that an entire Let Us Now Praise installment can be built around them). But we’ll just look at two here, representing two sides of the same anti-Beatles coin: ignorance on the one hand, and a kind of demographic political correctness on the other . . .

Aidan Moffat is the leader of the band Arab Strap and something of a cultural Zelig, popping up variously as poet, indigenous Scottish folk performer, guest artist with other rock groups (Mogwai, et al), and writer. Born in the ‘70s and finding success in the 2000s, he’s likely fairly representative of his age group in musical tastes and biases.

I hated the Beatles. I wasn't interested in them. My mother would talk about them and it seemed like another world away, nothing that could ever speak to me in any way. Then when I was 16 or 17 a friend of mine I was at school with, his parents went away on holiday in the summer and left him alone, which is something I will never do with my children. He's like, "Come round to my house and we'll get pissed [drunk] and see what happens." So I went around to his house and his dad had one of these brilliant old record players that had a little brush on it so as the record played it would also clean it. He's trying to play me his dad's records and to me the idea of listening to your parents' music was fucking awful — nobody did that. He was like, "Do you want to listen to the Beatles?" and I was like, "Fuck off!" I was not remotely interested in the Beatles. He said, "Trust me, this is a genuinely brilliant record," and he takes out his dad's White Album and he takes out his dad's brandy and I eventually ended up on the floor, drinking his dad's brandy listening to the White Album and — I didn't know the Beatles sounded like that. I didn't know the Beatles ever made a sound other than the pop sound that I knew them for. The White Album is such an intense and claustrophobic record . . . hearing it for the first time, you can't understand where it's coming from or what's going to happen next. Famously, it became an inspiration for mass murderers and fucking lunatics because it's so confounding; you try to find a meaning in it, but there isn't really any meaning in it at all, it's absolute chaos and there cannot be any better description of life than that.

And here is how hip-hop star-turned-actress Eve responded when she was asked in an interview to name one album she loves that would surprise people.

A year and a half ago, somebody introduced me to The Beatles' I album, with all the Number One hits. And I was like, "Oh, shit, that's kind of hot. Do I like the Beatles? I can't like the Beatles!" And then, fuck it, I bought the album. You can't deny good music.

“I can’t like the Beatles!” How much is packed into those 5 words? Despite many rap artists being unabashed Beatles fans — including Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Outkast, the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Dr. Dre, Coolio, and Biz Markie — the default posture among most of the hip-hop community is not exactly one of Beatlemania. But sometimes all it takes is a listen.

Maybe the most honest outliers are those who genuinely don’t like the Beatles yet freely acknowledge their importance (and, weirdly, often love one of the individual band members — usually John). Julian Cope, for instance, describes himself as “someone who loathes the Beatles but realises that it’s me who’s out of step.” And yeah, he’s crazy about solo John Lennon (especially the early Plastic Ono Band period).

Even that most notorious of Beatle haters, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd, who has maintained his anti-Beatles bona fides to this day, allows (hilariously) that their influence was seismic, including on himself.3

“They were vital to my development.”

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Johnny Rotten’s own acknowledgment of the Beatles’ importance and influence is the kind of counterweight against musical misinformation that may become more useful as time goes on. Consider, for example, the Quora post below, which is a reasonable proxy for a strain of thought not uncommon among otherwise knowledgeable people. The background: someone had asked why the Beatles are so much more popular than many bands which “rocked way harder.” One answer pointed out that in the context of their time the Beatles rocked as hard as anyone, and that many of the bands the original poster had in mind wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the Fab Four. This in turn engendered the following response:

The idea that without the Beatles, most bands that rock “way harder” wouldn’t even exist is preposterous. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Hendrix, The Doors, Creedence, Cream, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, etc were not influenced by the Beatles at all. The Beatles tend to be an influence for pop acts, e.g. The Monkees, Brian Wilson/Beach Boys, ELO, etc.

This kind of ahistorical revisionism is what happens when posturing and gratuitous iconoclasm is absorbed by those who don't know better. The fact that almost every band on the above list is on record attesting to how they were influenced by the Beatles is beside the point.4 So is the fact that — again, by their own admission — many of the biggest bands that followed the Beatles, including the Rolling Stones (Keith Richards: “there’d be no Stones without the Beatles”) and hard rock bands from Anthrax to ZZ Top, would indeed not have existed if the Beatles never had.5 What’s not beside the point is that this is far from an isolated misconception and is too often casually propagated — repetition giving counterfeit currency to a fallacy. Listen to thrash metal legend Scott Ian:

“If you don’t educate yourself on the Beatles . . .”

I hope it’s been clear that practically this entire post is done with tongue at least partly in cheek. Vive la difference! The world would be a pretty terrifying place (not to mention crushingly boring) if everyone liked and disliked the same things and experienced the same events in exactly the same way. We think we’d be in paradise if every single day had beautiful weather, but after a while we wouldn’t even notice it (just ask San Diegoans). Just as it can take freezing winters to really appreciate the beauty of summer, or fasting to really appreciate eating, it can take dissent to really heighten one’s own passion (and to appreciate consensus). Then there’s the simple entertainment value of variety: take a second to imagine what it would be like if everyone really did love the Beatles . . . how much less colorful would the world be without William F. Buckley’s priceless commentary at the height of Beatlemania?

The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “anti-popes.”  It helps a little bit to know that no one thinks they are more of a joke than the Beatles themselves, and one is relieved in supposing that they go to bed at night laughing at their utterly inexplicable success, if solemn at the thought that they must inhabit a world that features themselves.

Great stuff. And note: it sure doesn’t sound like Buckley is lying. Neither, undoubtedly, are the many others (ok, maybe the two or three) who insist they really can’t stand the Beatles.

A future installment will be a deep dive into Beatles dissent (“Let Us Now NOT Praise The Beatles”?), and that will be both fun and enlightening. There’s plenty to go around and it’s certainly not all without merit. But there’s something in the mere phraseology of artists who can’t fathom that dissent (“they’re lying,” “I broke up with them,” “there’s something fucking wrong with them”) that says so much about the universality of the Beatles’ appeal and the depth of their cultural impact.

Rick Wakeman — known to most of us as a grand old icon of progressive rock but also a classically trained pianist with a formidable command of historical piano repertory — said recently, “I don't think there's a musician alive today that hasn't been influenced in one way or the other by the Beatles.” Not a musician alive today? Hyperbole perhaps; but it goes some way to explaining why some musicians call others who hate the Beatles liars: thousands of other musicians, across multiple genres, would agree with Wakeman. When it comes to the Beatles, happily that kind of hyperbole seems to be the most viral of them all.

• The classic Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home” — a composition which the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Ned Rorem called “equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote” — was written by Paul McCartney after he came across an article in The Daily Mail about a 17-year-old runaway.

  

  Incredibly, and completely unbeknownst to him, McCartney had met the very girl in the article years before.  Even more incredibly, there is film of that encounter: in 1963, 13-year-old Melanie Coe was a contestant in a miming contest on the British TV program “Ready, Steady, Go.” The judge who picked her as the winner and presented her with an autographed album, was 21-year-old Paul McCartney. To watch this clip with She’s Leaving Home in mind — Melanie Coe is the young girl dancing and miming on the far right and McCartney may as well be a lifetime away from who he would be in 1967 — is truly an exercise in the surreal.

• The backstory of “Eleanor Rigby” is at least as strange.  McCartney has said that Eleanor Rigby began as “Miss Daisy Hawkins.”  (Folk singer Donovan says Paul visited him once and played him the song-in-progress when the name was “Ola Na Tungee.”) Paul changed the name to Eleanor because he liked the name of the actress, Eleanor Bron, who had just starred with the Beatles in their second movie Help! Wanting a more natural-sounding surname, he settled on Rigby after coming across a wine and spirits shop called “Rigby & Evans” in Bristol.  In a crazy historical twist, it was discovered — years later, in the 1980s — that a Liverpool cemetery contained a grave whose headstone actually bears the name Eleanor Rigby.*  Even crazier, Paul and John used to take shortcuts through this very cemetery as youths (it is situated in Woolton, near where John grew up, and was where John’s uncle George Smith was buried).  Perhaps craziest of all, given the song’s lyric, the real Eleanor Rigby toiled as a scullery maid; and is not even the principal honoree of the headstone, appearing a full 4 names below a “John Rigby.” (Buried along with her name, indeed.)

  

  *To this day, McCartney insists he never knew this obscure Liverpool headstone existed, though he acknowledges the possibility that he could have come across it as a youth and had the name lodged in his subconscious. In 2017, when the deed to the grave was put up for auction with hopes that its putative Beatles connection would fetch a premium, McCartney issued the following statement: “Eleanor Rigby is a totally fictitious character that I made up. If someone wants to spend money buying a document to prove a fictitious character exists, that’s fine with me.”

There are others too numerous to review here.  (Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In — the first volume of his mammoth in-progress Beatles biography — reveals, for example, that a dizzying array of previously unknown happy accidents, happenstances and luck conspired to save the Beatles from oblivion after the young group were rejected by virtually every record label in England.)

But one of the most interesting and historically important convergences has to do with a date on the calendar that passed last week: November 22.

The assassination of President Kennedy has long been a part of Beatles historiography. The murder of the youthful and charismatic president on November 22, 1963 — carried out in broad daylight and captured on amateur film — traumatized the country.  Two and a half months later, with the national wound still fresh, the exotic, exuberant young Beatles landed in America amidst a frenzy of anticipation, record sales, and saturation radio coverage.  Beatlemania overtook the country practically overnight. 

There’s a chicken-and-egg element to this JFK-Beatles convergence: did The Fab Four rescue a sleepwalking America from a cloud of gloom, or was America hankering for something, anything, to get excited about?

Or was there no convergence at all — just a myth fashioned by coincidence and hindsight?

That a pall hung over the country after JFK’s assassination is clear from a glance at any benchmark of popular culture. In the week after Kennedy’s death so few people attended the movies that Variety didn’t even publish box office figures. When they returned, mindless froth – Under The Yum-Yum Tree, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Charade – monopolized the box office. 

Similarly — in what was perhaps the musical low point of the rock era — the biggest records in December 1963 and January 1964 were The Singing Nun’s “Dominique” and Bobby Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again.” There wasn’t much relief further down the charts either.  Save for a precious few exceptions, the two months between the Kennedy assassination and the arrival of the Beatles was a musical abyss of instrumentals, novelty records, and Hollywood teen idols.1

Coincidental or not, this cultural malaise was a fitting metaphor for the depression that gripped much of the country.

Listen to Emmylou Harris’s vivid recollection . . .

“When the Beatles came along, all of a sudden it was alright to feel joy”

There is, to be sure, a debate over how much one thing had to do with the other and whether connecting the Beatles’ impact to JFK’s assassination is a revisionist exercise.  Jay Jay French has long been fascinated with the story of Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath.  He suggests that while the event had a profound effect on the course of American history, the Beatles connection is an open question:

Had Kennedy not been assassinated Lyndon Johnson would not have been able to pass The Civil Rights Act.  It’s a very important thing to keep that in mind. That never would have happened. And then of course the question of would the Beatles have been as big as they were, because they happened two months after Kennedy was assassinated.  And that’s always been a question that sociologists ask themselves.  I’m a huge Beatles fan and I’m not sure I know the answer to that, because the Kennedy assassination was so traumatic.

Iconic producer Joe Boyd is among those who dismiss the theory that the Beatles’ popularity in America was a product of the gloom following the Kennedy assassination:

I think it just comes down to the fact that it was so good.  You know, there were plenty of beat groups around in Britain, having the same influences, and they didn’t make music like that.  I think in music I subscribe to the “Great Man” theory of history, you know, that it’s not historical forces, it’s individuals who turn the course of history.  And I think that the Beatles were just brilliant individual musicians who imposed themselves on the world.

At the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival, Alec Baldwin and Don Was, discussing the impact of the Beatles in the context of the 50th anniversary of the movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” also downplayed the role of JFK’s death.

Baldwin: When we talked backstage you said that it even goes back to the Fifties — it wasn’t just, as some people think, oh, Kennedy’s assassination and people needed this release or what have you — you said things that were going on in this country even in the Fifties fed into the Beatles’ ascent.

Was: Oh, I think it was set up for decades really.  You had this postwar prosperity where young people were suddenly going to college and having time on their hands to think about philosophical issues; you had the predominance of TV, global TV for the first time, connecting the world.  And we’re aware of what’s going on in the world, we see the results of war, and suddenly there’s a kind of distrust of authority.  [There’s] an educated youth group, the baby boomers are the largest demographic group of the time.  And it was primed for a youth revolt against the conservative kind of complacency of the Fifties.

Slate magazine went even further and published an entire article debunking the JFK-Beatles connection. Some of the assertions in the piece are dubious, but hey, like Jay Jay French said, sociologists are divided over the issue.

The problem is that if the JFK-Beatles theory is a truly revisionist construct we have to disregard the very personal recollections of many people who were around in 1963/1964 — or worse, ascribe revisionism to their own memories. And like Emmylou Harris’s, those memories are pretty compelling.

Tommy James: All of a sudden came the Kennedy assassination.  A lot of people said, and I believe it’s true, that the only thing that made 1964 bearable after what the assassination did to the country was the Beatles.  I happen to believe that’s accurate. Because everybody was so saddened and heartbroken when John Kennedy was killed.  For me, the Beatles and that event, the assassination of President Kennedy, always stays in my mind as almost one and the same.

Actor Ed Begley, Jr: You know, the horrible assassination of JFK — part of the reason I and many of my friends were able to recover from that was the gift that the Beatles gave us: we started to feel good again, after that horrible thing with the loss of our president.  It was one of the joys that began to creep in our life, their music.  So they’ve been a very good friend to America in many ways.

Billy Joel: I remember the country had the blues.  My age group was kind of detached from the establishment stuff.  After Kennedy was shot, nobody believed that a flunky like Lee Oswald did it; everybody thought it was a conspiracy. Everybody was just so taken aback by the assassination of this young, vital president who represented us. We thought he was like us.  He was our guy, representing youth and progress.  So when the Beatles came, they filled that vacuum in a way: all of a sudden, they now represented us, instead of that president who was dead. It all kind of coalesced with the release of Meet The Beatles!, and [then] The Ed Sullivan Show.  We went crazy, my age group went insane.  They filled up the vacuum that was left when Kennedy was taken away.  And we were all kind of as one – we were a community now, again, because of the Beatles. 

Chris Hillman: The Beatles just totally came out of left field. I really credit them — now, you may think I'm crazy — but the Beatles were a real healing force. They came out just after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. All of a sudden comes this fresh, energetic, just unbelievably exciting band . . . they opened the floodgates for everybody.

George Thorogood: I saw the Beatles on TV, and they were the first people I ever saw — ever — that looked happy.  Now this is a few months after Kennedy was assassinated. In those days, I never saw any happy people.  Guys hated their job.  Parents never got along, the brother’s always getting beat up, there were fights all the time.  Unless it was somebody in a movie, who was faking it — you know, an actor — I never saw anybody that was really happy.  I never saw anybody smiling, in my neighborhood.  And I looked at the Beatles and said, those guys are the first people I’ve ever seen happy! But they did that for everybody, I’m not the only one.  And anybody who says different, who was born after 1950, is lying to you.

Richie Sambora: They were the most incredible thing I ever saw. I couldn't put it into any kind of historical context at the time — I couldn't connect it with the Kennedy assassination — but I knew that I was witnessing something truly life-changing. And not just for me, but for everybody as well. Beyond that, they did something even more important: they made people feel good. They gave people hope. They brought people together. Don't they give out Nobel Prizes for that sort of thing, and how come The Beatles haven't gotten any?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dom Famularo, a renowned drum teacher and clinician who has been called Drumming’s Global Ambassador, hosted a podcast with other musicians and wondered aloud what kind of healing music might come out of the global shutdown. 

If you think about the timing of the Beatles — a very important part of it was we had just seen, and witnessed, a U.S. president get assassinated the November before.  So the world was in mourning.  This band came by and had 73 million people [watching] a television show in America, and gave us hope . . . happiness . . . love . . . unity. They delivered to us a message.  So I ask you now, in the time of this incredible pandemic: This is a very serious time. . . what kind of music should be delivered, now, that can give the world hope and humanity?

Now, obviously, the assassination of John F. Kennedy didn’t cause American youth to embrace the Beatles. Nor did the Beatles single-handedly turn the United States from a mausoleum one day into a dance party the next (although some people — Little Steven van Zandt, Tom Wolfe and Allen Ginsberg among them — imply something very close). But one thing these recollections and the examination of contemporary music and film suggest is that the assassination’s lingering fallout served as something of a lid on excitement. Think of the the way a teenager at a somber event feels pressure to suppress laughter or horseplay. On a macro level, that’s what the national mood was for weeks after Kennedy’s assassination: one long somber event, as if the whole country would have shouted “too soon!” at anyone caught enjoying themselves too much.

That pressure, for whatever reason, seems to have been relieved by the arrival of the Beatles. In fact, whether or not the whole assassination-Beatlemania theory is historical revisionism is almost beside the point. It’s enough that America was depressed for weeks after Kennedy’s death, and that the Beatles were the first entertainment phenomenon after the assassination and that American youth did unite around them in almost orgiastic excitement. The collected testimonies here by people who were all young when JFK was shot effectively confirm that their entire generation responded to the Beatles like a shaken bottle of champagne finally uncorked.

Tommy James, above, said something interesting: that for him the Beatles arrival and Kennedy’s assassination are “one and the same.” In another interview he alludes to the dark/light, yin/yang duality of this confluence. “The Beatles’ career beginning and the Kennedy assassination are in my mind at the same time. And it’s really a shame isn’t it, in so many ways, to have those two events linked. But that’s what’s in my mind.” In putting it this way, James unwittingly touches on something more than the simple chronology of JFK’s death and the Beatles’ arrival: that is, the assassination of John F. Kennedy signalled the end of an era, while the arrival of the Beatles heralded the beginning of another. Journalists who lived through these two events are particularly quick to recognize this.

Bob Herbert: Nineteen sixty-four was the year the 60s really began. For a decade known for its excitement, the 60's got off to a decidedly slow start. Doo-wop music was still around, and dreamy songs of widely varying quality — "Moon River," "Where the Boys Are" — were among the biggest hits. It was a quiet time. The average annual salary was $4,700, and a favorite pastime was bowling.  There was no reason to think that radical changes were brewing when 1964 debuted. The nation was still in shock and mourning over the murder of Jack Kennedy the previous November.

And then in February, suddenly and without warning, the Beatles were upon us. If you spend just a little time reflecting on the Beatles you come away astonished by the changes they wrought (or came to symbolize) in what seemed like a split second of real time. People dressed differently, wore their hair differently, danced differently . . . The Beatles blew in like a sudden storm and permanently altered the cultural landscape.

Steven D. Stark: When historians go back and look at the second half of the 20th century, they will recognize that the Beatles were historical forces in a way that artists and musicians had never been before and probably will never be again. There was something about them and the times in which they made their music that made the whole thing unique. That is important.

Mark Bowden: For those of us whose first impressions of the larger world — brought to us in dramatic images on television and in LIFE magazine — were the Cuban Missile Crisis, when civilization itself teetered on the brink of destruction, and then the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Beatles arrived as an affirmation of joy, youth, pleasure, creativity — and the future.

If there’s one aspect of the JFK-Beatlemania linkage that can only be made in hindsight, it’s this handing of the baton from one epoch to another. In 1964, the assumption could only have been that the Beatles were a temporary teenage distraction; no one could foresee the changes in the band, popular music, the country and the world over the rest of the decade, much less that those changes would render the pre-1964 world ancient by comparison, or that they would still reverberate nearly sixty years later, or that the Beatles would be permanently fixed among the symbols of an altered Western society.

All of which only makes the Kennedy-Beatles synchronicity, whether random or causal, even more remarkable. Because now we come to the piece de resistance of this accident of historical timing — an irony that we can now look back at, wide-eyed, as one of those eerie examples of “fate” — and which lies hidden in plain sight. . .

So far we’ve examined the Beatles’ American impact in general terms, using February, 1964 as shorthand for their arrival and effect on American youth. In actual fact, Beatlemania in the U.S. began to spread in late January. This is an important distinction, because Americans had not yet experienced the Beatles. With their momentous performances on The Ed Sullivan Show still a few weeks away, the craze was driven by their records, mainly their first Capitol releases: the single, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” and the album it led off, Meet The Beatles! 2 Each was a phenomenon. They exploded almost simultaneously and stayed atop the single and album charts for months. When people talk about the Beatles lifting the national mood after weeks of post-assassination trauma, it’s these records that lay the groundwork, feeding the mania that kept growing right up to the Beatles’ arrival at Kennedy (!) Airport on February 7, and through their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show two nights later.

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The cherished place which Meet The Beatles! holds in the hearts and minds of American musicians will be the focus of a future Let Us Now Praise installment, but what’s relevant here is its role in the Beatles-in-the-wake-of-JFK story. That role needs to be stressed.

Pat DiNizio: I came across a magazine, American Heritage I think, that said 1964 was the year that changed everything. It dealt largely with the Vietnam War, student protests, the assassination of JFK — but also with Beatlemania and the profound impact it had on the youth of America. I think the Beatles lifted the spirits of the entire world. . . and Meet The Beatles! is arguably the most historic rock ‘n roll album ever made.

Steve Lukather: Meet The Beatles! was the “on” switch to my life, and every song was magic. The sound was otherworldly to me, as if something from another place and time came to touch me.  And that feeling is still there for me and for everyone I know that was there in real time. Not “retro” but real time. You had to be there and live through it all, really, the way the Beatles changed everything. Kids today could never understand it. It was not like some teeny bop shit. It was real, and still is.

Ian McNabb: Americans were still in a bit of a Bobby Darin period — they were on a downer ‘cos of the Kennedy thing and the Cold War — and Meet The Beatles!, this explosion of energy from some place they’d never heard of, just really knocked them on their ass.

As Billy Joel said, American Beatlemania “all kind of coalesced with the release of Meet The Beatles!”

So, now: consider the historical linkage between the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963 along with its extended national trauma, and the arrival to national delirium two months later of the Beatles and the advent of a new era in popular culture.

Now consider that Meet The Beatles!, the album most closely associated with this new era, was essentially the American equivalent of the group’s British LP, With The Beatles.3

And finally, consider that the release date for With The Beatles was . . .

November 22, 1963.

It’s almost enough to make you want to accompany this whole story with the theme from The Twilight Zone.

Or at least “Revolution 9” — that frightening, disturbing collage of musique concrete on Side Four of The Beatles’ White Album, meant to capture in sound the chaos and turmoil of a year, 1968, that included, among myriad global instances of violence and upheaval, another assassination of another Kennedy.

Yeah, “Revolution 9” would be even more appropriate. It was released that year on . . .

November 22.

Turner Classic Movies recently aired the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. It got me thinking about the incalculable importance of that movie in cementing the Beatles’ hold over popular culture, particularly in the United States.

Let’s let Alice Cooper kick this one off:

A Hard Day’s Night was released in the U.S. during the summer of 1964, just six months after the Beatles performed in front of 220 million people over three consecutive Ed Sullivan Shows.  Beatlemania was at its height.  In some ways the movie was simply an extension of the Sullivan appearances: black and white scenes of a young and exciting new rock and roll group, speaking with English accents, wearing suits and long hair, exuding good humor, and making everyone around them look old and square. Kind of a big-screen, long-form version of what had been a tantalizing few minutes on the nation’s TV sets. In that sense, A Hard Day’s Night seemed to embody everything about the Beatles that fans had already fallen in love with (only with more dialogue and slapstick).

But a close look at the public and critical response to A Hard Day’s Night reveals that the movie achieved something else: while thrilling its intended audience of those who were already fans, it also made new fans, including adults — especially film critics and young professional musicians. This was almost unheard of for anything connected to rock and roll and went a long way in assuring the permanence of the Beatles phenomenon — even if that permanence was still largely unrecognized at the time.

In the last post we examined (with utter incredulity) the revelatory reactions many future musicians had to a record as seemingly banal as Love Me Do. This should have provided a clue that the Beatles had qualities, musical and otherwise, that for whatever reasons (and it turns out there were many) reached people. It also spoke volumes about the pre-Beatles cultural landscape. Just knowing, for example, that Love Me Do was capable of stopping young listeners in their tracks should make us cringe at what must have passed for pop music in 1962 England — and, even more profoundly, help us appreciate the impact of the Beatles’ next releases, each of which made Love Me Do sound tamer and tamer, catapulting the Fab Four into a national obsession.

Cut to America in summer 1964. What had developed in Britain over a period of nearly two years had consumed the United States in barely six months. Like an avalanche, Beatlemania spread across the country almost overnight: in just a fourteen week period, starting with the day in late December of 1963 when “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was first played on American radio, the momentum of the group’s popularity — assisted by an aggressive PR campaign launched in January — led to virtually every song the Beatles had ever recorded being released on a variety of competing record labels. (The Ed Sullivan shows straddled the exact mid-point of this stretch.) And virtually everything sold: by April, one out of every 7 songs in the Top 100 was by the Beatles.

As summer progressed, there was no indication that what most assumed to be a fad was losing steam.* The British Invasion was in full swing and the Beatles remained inescapable. Teen magazines, a tsunami of Beatles merchandise, and the band’s omnipresent records and radio play dominated youth culture.

*Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night, recalled decades later that his marching orders from the film’s producers were based on those assumptions: “United Artists wanted to make a very low budget black and white film, to start shooting in March [of 1964], but it would have to be in cinemas in July because they felt that by the end of the summer The Beatles would be a spent force.”

Beatlemania in Great Britain and America were mirror images of each other in many ways, but not all. One crucial difference had to do with personal appearances. In the U.K., the Beatles appeared live constantly — on television, on radio and in concerts throughout the country. America, by contrast, had seen hardly anything of the Beatles since the group’s three February appearances on Ed Sullivan.

Another difference was the generation gap. In England, for a variety of reasons including national pride and the apparent seal of approval from the Royal Family, the Beatles enjoyed near-fawning press coverage and a surprisingly tolerant (if largely bemused) attitude on the part of older Brits. In the States however, while The Ed Sullivan Show had made instant Beatlemaniacs of seemingly every young person in the country, there remained a gigantic divide — a chasm — between generations.* 

*There were exceptions on both sides — holdouts among kids who preferred other music, and no small number of grown-ups who enjoyed the Fab Four — but these only proved the rule. The Beatles’ conquest over America’s youth was effectively universal, and most adults reacted with mockery if not contempt. In fact, a review of the comments by newspaper columnists, television hosts, socio-political commentators, and other old guardians circa 1964 makes for fabulous entertainment. It will have to be the subject of a future “Let Us Now (Not) Praise The Beatles” post.

This was the environment into which A Hard Day’s Night — intended by United Artists (and assumed by every reviewer) to be a cheap, quick cash-in on a silly teenage distraction — was released.

The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, one of the deans of American film critics (and also one of the harshest), typified the adult attitude going into the movie, and the metamorphosis many underwent watching it. He went in expecting trash and he came out bowled over. Crowther’s review of A Hard Day’s Night was a rave — itself almost unthinkable — and reading the review it’s interesting that right away he reveals the condescension he obviously assumes will be shared by his reading audience. First, in his opening line. . .

“THIS is going to surprise you—it may knock you right out of your chair…”

…and then in his conspiratorial assurance:

“I wouldn't believe it either, if I hadn't seen it with my own astonished eyes…”

A Hard Day’s Night won over most of the nation’s critics just as thoroughly as it did Crowther. And the film’s reputation has only grown since: today it holds a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie review website which aggregates contemporary and historical film reviews to reach an algorithmic consensus. (Until very recently, A Hard Day’s Night’s approval rating was actually a rare 100%.)

We’ll get back to the question of A Hard Day’s Nights merits as a movie, but first let’s make a lateral move to a theme touched on in the previous two posts: that absurd but persistent idea that the early Beatles was a phenomenon that catered mostly to young girls and served as a prototype for modern “boy bands.”

As in all caricatures, there is some truth in this. The scenes at theaters showing A Hard Day’s Night were preposterous, and it was mostly teenage girls making them:

Nancy Wilson: When we went to see A Hard Day’s Night in our local town, there was a line around the theater twice.  It was really a happening.  People — mostly girls, but guys, too — were already screaming before they even opened the doors.  We got in just under the wire for the first showing, and we had to sit up in the back in “the cry room,” behind the glass partition, where people take their young babies. Even in the cry room, people were screaming and crying [laughs].  But teenagers were really screaming and crying.  And then of course we just stayed there for the second showing, ‘cause we had to see it all over again.  Every teenager in the vicinity was there somehow.  It was something in the culture that was just immediately new. 

Tom Petty: They sold advance tickets, which was the only time I’d ever seen a movie with advance tickets, and they sold you a big souvenir ticket with a picture of the Beatles on it.  We went, really excited, and then they came on the screen, and the girls screamed the entire movie — so loud that I couldn’t hear the dialogue of the film.  So I went back later that night to a late-night show to see it without the screamers . . . but it was that exciting. People couldn’t contain themselves.

Carol Miller, legendary New York DJ: I saw A Hard Day’s Night at least 30 times in the movie theater.  Sometimes it was playing with an Elvis Presley movie first, a double feature, and you’d have to sit through this Elvis Presley movie – Blue Hawaii or something like that.  And then you’d kind of hide, and A Hard Day’s Night would come on.  The first time I saw it there was a girl sitting in back of me pounding my shoulder, screaming “Paul!”  At the movie theater!  And then the girls rushed up and kissed the screen.  And after that, as I said, I saw it at least 30 times. 

Kevin Cronin: That movie was just amazing.  I went to see it at The Woods theater in Chicago.  The entire theater was full. It was a rock show in a movie theater; there were girls screaming, there were people absolutely losing their minds. . . basically every time Paul’s face came on the screen, all you could hear was girls screaming. 

Bob Ley, longtime ESPN anchor: I could watch that movie once a week.  I mean, what it brought to the culture; you never noticed it was black and white.  First time I saw it, you couldn’t hear it, girls were screaming in the movies.

Richard Lester himself recalled that when he attended the premier at the London Pavilion, “We heard nothing during the film. There was wall to wall screaming for 90 minutes.”

Hearing all this, if one didn’t know any better, it might be excusable to think that maybe A Hard Day’s Night was the movie equivalent of bubblegum music. Maybe it would be torture to suffer through the entire thing, surrounded by squealing 13 year old girls.

Alright then. Time for a little exercise: Imagine a demographic of male musicians in their late teens and 20s who consider themselves on the cutting edge. Now imagine them voluntarily going to see a movie built around, say, Justin Bieber, or the Korean pop sensation BTS (or, some years ago, Backstreet Boys or One Direction, or ‘N Sync). Since this is about as likely as Democrats and Republicans voting for each other, it should already be the end of the exercise. But now imagine the same guys seeing Justin Bieber or BTS or Backstreet Boys and having their life changed. Imagine today’s twentysomething professional musicians beside themselves with excitement over the latest boy band, changing their entire style because of them, idolizing them.

Below is just such a cross-section of musicians and artists testifying to what happened to them when they saw the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. If you ever need to set someone straight about the early Beatles being a bubblegum pop group strictly for young girls, this might be a helpful arrow in your quiver (ages as of summer 1964).

Roger McGuinn (age 22): When we went to see the Hard Day’s Night movie, it was a life-changing event. We took notes on what instruments they were playing and what they were wearing and tried to emulate them as closely as we could.

Jerry Garcia (age 22): I’m a cinephile, and I remember going to see a Richard Lester film one night—A Hard Day’s Night—and being blown away by the Beatles. They took rock music into a new realm and raised it to an art form.

David Crosby (age 23): A Hard Day’s Night was a turning point in my life.  I wanted to have that much fun; we all did.  We all went to see it together — Roger and I, and Gene (Clark), and I think by that time Chris Hillman was with us, and maybe Michael Clarke too — but I know that I came out of there and swung around a post at arm’s length, going “YES!”  We all knew one thing: that we wanted to be them. They changed everything.  I went into that movie and came out knowing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Stephen Stills (age 19): I wanted to be the Beatles.  When I saw A Hard Day's Night at the Waverly Theater in 1965, I immediately thought, "Yeah!" 

Cheech Marin (age 18): I have to tell you, A Hard Day’s Night is still my favorite movie of all time.  I’ve seen it 50, 60 times, something like that, I watch it all the time.  They were the best comic actors.  I mean, they had musicians’ timing, they knew when to come in. . . they were teamed with a very good director, Richard Lester, and he picked up on the rhythm of what they were doing and designed shots to highlight that.

Randy Bachman (age 20): When A Hard Day’s Night opened in Winnipeg at the Garrick Theatre in the summer of 1964, I was right there on opening day. I went with a few friends for the matinee, and in those days you didn't have to leave the theatre between shows. My friends went home but I stayed, mesmerized, memorizing everything. I completely lost track of time. Sitting in that darkened theatre, I decided that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I must have seen the movie five or six times when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Phil Brown, the chief of police in West Kildonan, and my dad, who was an alderman in West Kildonan. They'd been out looking for me after the other boys had returned home and I hadn't. My dad had phoned the hospitals and the police were looking for me. They decided to go check the theatre, and there I was, immersed in Beatlemania.

Bob Weir (age 16): The Beatles were why we [the Grateful Dead] turned from a jug band into a rock ‘n’ roll band.  What we saw them doing [in A Hard Day’s Night] was impossibly attractive.  I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.

And this is only a sampling. Denny Doherty of The Mamas and The Papas, for example, has said that he and Cass Elliott saw A Hard Day’s Night at a time when both were folk singers in Greenwich Village (Doherty was 23 and Elliot 22). According to Doherty, when they came out of the movie Cass decided it was time for a change.  “She said, ‘That's what we have to do!' ” Doherty recalled. “We bought electric instruments and dressed up in suits with no lapels.” Al Kooper, age 20, thought the movie was “amazing.” Chris Hillman, mentioned above by David Crosby, says he owes “a tremendous debt” to the Beatles because it was seeing A Hard Day’s Night at age 19 “that took me from bluegrass and mandolin playing” to rock music. And on and on.

The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night was a cultural phenomenon which reached into multiple strata of society. In an extremely rare trifecta, we have not only the expected young fans of the latest pop craze, but hipsters and professionals normally contemptuous of pop crazes, and nearly the entire critical establishment of the country — each as different from the others as it is possible to be, and yet each united in their reaction to the movie.

The more one thinks about the natural biases against teenage fads among anyone other than young teenagers, the more surprising this cross-demographic conquest becomes. Obviously A Hard Day’s Night was different from the usual quick-buck exploitation movie, something other than the latest assembly-line pop film. But how, and why?

To hear film professionals tell it, there was a variety of reasons. Energy. Attitude. Quality. Intelligence. Empowerment. Humor.

Cameron Crowe:

The exotic nature of the Beatles was a huge draw. . . their manner was like an accessory to the whole experience.  [Because] you didn’t know anybody like that. I’ve often asked actors to sit down and watch A Hard Day’s Night with me.  Just to get an idea for energy and enthusiasm and a way to embrace life. I keep trying to rip off A Hard Day’s Night, frankly.

Roger Ebert:

The really good ones—Casablanca, Citizen Kane—can hold up under repeated screenings.  And this is one of those.  I’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night at least 25 times and on at least 5 occasions I’ve taught it to film classes, one shot at a time. The more I look at it, the more I’m not bored by it, the more I’m exhilarated by it.  If I were to sit down right now, and see the movie, I would enjoy it again.

Steven Soderbergh:

[A Hard Day’s Night] was sort of happenstance, the planets lining up with the perfect filmmaker to capture it.  That's really what's happening: [Lester]'s capturing something, as opposed to staging it.

Screenwriter and playwright Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, etc) was a boy when he saw A Hard Day’s Night and recalls the impact it had on him and others like him:

I remember going to see A Hard Day’s Night in the Bromley Odeon with my mum, and the other boys and their mums.  And all the mothers stood up and put their hands over their ears and screamed.*  And I was so amazed by this phenomenon, and what it was the Beatles were doing — and why they weren’t working in banks, which is what we were supposed to be doing.  I suppose in a sense they sort of liberated us; they made you think you could get away from the suburbs in some way, you could get to London, which was in those days swinging . . . and lead a life which was quite different to the one that was expected of you.

*Again, fascinating for the demographic: “All the mothers stood up and put their hands over their ears and screamed.” And recall what Nancy Wilson of Heart said above — that “guys too” were screaming. This is slightly amazing, and it’s absolutely true, however at odds it may be with conventional wisdom. In future posts we’ll hear people like Joe Walsh, Rick Springfield and others unabashedly admit they screamed “along with all those chicks” when watching the Beatles.

Chris Columbus (Harry Potter, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Help, Pixels, etc) was asked in 2016 to name his five favorite films:

The thing I love about all these films is that they still feel extraordinarily fresh, as if they were made yesterday. There’s a timeless quality and a vibrancy and an energy to all of them, but particularly A Hard Day’s Night. It’s a film that really defies any sort of specific genre — it’s a rock and roll film, right? It’s also sort of like a documentary of the early years of Beatlemania, and it’s also comedically like a Marx Brothers film. I just love the combination of all of those things, which give it an intense vibrancy and charm. I watch [it] at least once a year. . . The Criterion Collection just restored it and it’s a marvel to see it restored and how beautiful a movie it is.

Five decades earlier, Woody Allen was making the transition from stand-up comedy to film. He was interviewed at length by Studs Terkel, America’s foremost cultural oral historian. Terkel asked Woody what kind of movies he was interested in making.

All I want to do is a comedy that is a heavyweight comedy. I mean, I want to do comedies that are more adult, certainly, than Jerry Lewis.  I want to do comedies in the style and of the quality of the Marx Brothers and Chaplin, that kind of comedy — only, my contribution.  I don’t think anyone is doing it in the United States.  I think they’ve tried it in England, they’ve had a little more success.

Did you see A Hard Day’s Night?

I liked it.  It was the best thing they did . . . that’s in the direction of a comedy that was funny and un-self-conscious, and wasn’t geared to the moron level.

A number of those involved in the making of A Hard Day’s Night identified a key ingredient that no one would have been surprised to find missing. The man who produced A Hard Day’s Night, Walter Shenson of United Artists, who had earlier been responsible for the hit Peter Sellers film The Mouse That Roared, begins:

I think that the Beatles’ performances are incredibly good, in that they were not trained as actors.*  Any trained actor will tell you that the hardest thing to do is to be yourself, to stand there and let your own personality come through.  This is what the Beatles have, and do, better than anybody I know. . . I remember when I got home [and] my wife asked me how the Beatles performed on the first day of shooting, and I said, “I really can’t tell.  All I know is I couldn’t keep my eyes off the screen.”

*An interesting side note about the filming of A Hard Day’s Night is that many of the outdoor scenes had to be shot in one take. Director Richard Lester: “We couldn’t control the crowd. It became impossible to shoot. Every day we got one take. We’d get police permission to shoot in whichever street, we’d do Take 1 and suddenly 2,000 kids would arrive from nowhere. I think we had a mole in our production department. The police would rip up the permit and we’d have to go off and find a street six blocks away and hope we could get another take in before they found us again. It was total guerrilla filmmaking.”

The featured role of Paul’s grandfather, the “clean old man,” was played by veteran British comic and TV star Wilfrid Brambell. He agreed with Shenson about how effective the inexperienced Beatles were in front of a camera.

They don’t need to act in this film.  They just play their own everyday selves as The Beatles. But they’re so natural that working with them is like working with long experienced actors.

While A Hard Day’s Night revolves around the Beatles as a wise-cracking, music-making, interdependent band of brothers (in Mick Jagger’s words, a “four-headed monster”), there are several memorable scenes in which individual Beatles take solo turns. The following clip is now commonly cited as evidence of George Harrison’s on-camera instincts (Richard Lester said he was the most underrated of the four, as he “always hit it right in the center”). Enjoy also the pitch-perfect hilarity of Shakespearean actor Kenneth Haigh as the advertising executive.

Academy Award-winning Julie Harris was the costume designer.

Ringo got into disguise, and he bought an old coat and a hat off a barrow.  And he put this on, and I thought he just looked amazing. Suddenly he had this cap, and he had those big eyes . . . and there was a tremendous pathos, which, you know, you felt it was Jackie Coogan . . . and maybe here, with this Beatle, there was some wonderful actor that was going to come from it.

Victor Spinetti, a 50-year veteran of stage and film, played the television director in A Hard Day’s Night.

The Beatles didn’t keep to the script and they cut out so many of the outtakes, isn’t that sad? I walked round the set in my furry sweater and I said, ‘You’re late for rehearsals. I’m the director.’ John replied, not in the script, ‘You’re not the director. You’re Victor Spinetti playing the part of the director.’ I said, [next line] ‘I am a director, I have an award in my office.’ John said, ‘Office? You haven’t even got a dressing room.’ I hit Ringo’s cymbals and Ringo leant across and said to John, ‘He’s fingering me cymbals.’ John said, ‘He must be a director as all directors are famous cymbal- fingerers.’

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To American film-goers, the most surprising thing about the Beatles themselves in A Hard Day’s Night was how genuinely funny they were. As noted above, America, unlike Britain, had almost no exposure to the Beatles as personalities. The Fab Four’s February blitz provided some pretty spectacular evidence, but it had come in brief bites (mainly the press conference at JFK airport). The persistence of the Beatles’ insane popularity in America had recived little visual reinforcement — it was entirely a function of their records, the radio and the fallout from the Big Bang that was Ed Sullivan.

And then, into this already flammable mix, A Hard Day’s Night dropped a charisma bomb.

Mike Myers: They influenced everything that I’ve ever done.  They made fun an art form. I always remember crying at the end of A Hard Day’s Night because I liked these guys so much I wanted to go have fun with them.

Steven Soderbergh: You don't just want to watch it; you want to be in it.  You want to be one of them. You want to climb inside of it and be surrounded by that kind of energy.  That specific kind of exuberance is very difficult, if not impossible, to fake.

Kevin Cronin: That movie just kinda changed everything.  It brought the Beatles up close and personal.  It showed their amazing music, but it also showed the chemistry between them, their senses of humor, their acting ability, just what a great foursome they were . . . it gave us all a little touch of what Beatlemania might have looked like over in England. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, black and white and all.

Joe Perry: I think the Beatles were what made me want to be in a band.  Everything changed when I went to see A Hard Day's Night. I wasn't into sports, I wasn't a great student, I didn't go out for school activities or anything — I was just kind of into my own little world. But seeing The Beatles on screen, running around and laughing, plus seeing them play all these incredible songs . . . It was like The Beatles were their own gang, and that seemed so cool to me.

Michael McKean: Amazing movie.  It really changed everything.  We wanted the world to be black and white.  And full of Beatles.  And for a while it was.

John Pizzarelli: It’s amazing how from generation to generation they get discovered. Whether it’s from listening to their songs or seeing their movies. There was this other connection that the Beatles had through their movies. They were funny, especially in A Hard Day’s Night. We thought, “Look how funny these guys are. And they make good music too, and it’s not cheap!” . . . There were ways that they got to people. The Beatles really seem to turn over with every generation; people keep discovering them and realize, wow, they are amazing.

Janis Ian: I grew up on classical and jazz and folk. Pop was really off my radar. . . [but] I came out of that film a convert. The energy when Lennon and McCartney joined voices and harmonized or sang in unison was astonishing.

Tom Bergeron: I remember going to A Hard Day’s Night at the Paramount theater in my hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and seeing this incredible comedic talent on top of their musical talent, on display.  It was like a modern day Marx Brothers.  I thought that was amazing.

Lenny Kaye: They’re the total rock and roll band.  I mean, I think their four personalities interacting, as you can see in A Hard Day’s Night, were kind of four fingers of a hand.  And the audience is the thumb.

Billy Idol: I was captivated [by] A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles’ irreverent humor spoke to a generation of youth sick of being ground up and used for workplace fodder by the rich and powerful.  It motivated us to believe that our destiny was in our hands, if we so chose. 

Stephen Bishop: To tell you the truth, when A Hard Day’s Night came out, I was just blown away.  I was like, oh my god these guys are so funny, and especially John Lennon.  I just thought, I want to shape my personality after John Lennon.  And so I did, for years . . . he was so funny and ahead of the time.

David Crosby: The thing that communicated to people was the joy.  They were having fun.  You know, human beings are very, very drawn to fun.  When they see somebody obviously, really having a blast, singing music, they are very moved by it. 

Crosby says that he came out of A Hard Day’s Night “just out-of-my-mind happy.” That little phrase is the best summation of the effect the movie had on people. Whoever you were — child, teen, adult, girl, boy, musician, actor, critic — it seems you had little defense against A Hard Day’s Night’s strain of Beatlemania.

What’s extraordinary is how powerful the contagion proved to be over time: thirty-five years after its original run, Miramax prepared an anniversary theater release and conducted audience tests and research. Mark Gill, Miramax president, marveled, “We got astonishingly high audience surveys—second only to the ones we got for ‘Good Will Hunting.’  It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll get as big an audience as we got for ‘Good Will Hunting,’ but it does mean that the people who come into the theater will walk out the door and tell other people that they love it.  [And] not all of them identify themselves as Beatles fans.  We’re also getting non-fans, or people who are not yet fans, and they love the movie too.”

Original producer Shenson, who was involved in the Miramax preparation, agreed: “Nothing has dated about it. I played it for film students and when I finished I asked, ‘How many of you have seen the film before?’ Maybe half a dozen hands go up out of an audience of 100. They'd never seen the picture before and they were flipping over it.”

The trailer for the Miramax re-release:

The success of A Hard Day’s Night is a manifestation of a perfect storm. Everything about its creation and the circumstances of its release seemed to be guided by an invisible hand. Like any cultural phenomenon, luck played a huge factor. If any ingredient had been altered — if the screenwriter had not been Alun Owen, if the director had not been Richard Lester, if United Artists had dubbed the voices as they initially insisted on doing (afraid that Americans would not understand the Liverpudlian accent), if Ringo had not uttered the malapropism which gave the movie its name and led to the writing of the magical title song, if the film had been released at a different time, even if the minuscule budget had been bigger — things would have been different. But the ingredients were what they were, including the most important ingredient of all: the Beatles. It’s interesting that some of the quotes above refer to the fact that A Hard Day’s Night was in black and white. It’s almost as if being in black and white served to heighten the contrast between the camaraderie of the glowing four Beatles and the dullness of the world around them. Again, timing: In Western societies suffocated by a variety of malaises — lingering post-war deprivation in Britain and Europe, the Cold War and the Kennedy assassination in the U.S. — the Beatles appeared as if an explosion of optimism and color in a world of grey.

We started with Alice Cooper talking about how A Hard Day’s Night’s combination of irresistible music and irresistible humor proved the Beatles were aliens from another planet. Roger Ebert, probably the most famous American film critic and the first to ever be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, essentially agreed. In calling A Hard Day’s Night one of his three favorite films of all time, Ebert gave it perhaps the ultimate compliment: “It is one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies.”

Revolver is considered by some to be the best Beatles LP and it has topped more than one ranking of the greatest albums of all time. But we’re going to turn the clock back a little further right now — about 45 months — as a way of illuminating not just the Beatles’ astonishing evolution, but how that evolution must have come across to fans and musicians alike.

This coming week — October 5 — marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Love Me Do, the Beatles’ debut single. The recording, featuring the just-joined Ringo Starr on drums, was made on September 4, 1962 and would achieve moderate success on the British charts, breaking into the national Top Twenty and peaking at Number 17. Another recording of Love Me Do — the one most people are familiar with, as it was the version on the Beatles’ first LP and would become a Number One single in the U.S in early 1964 — was taped a week later, September 11, with Ringo on tambourine this time and studio drummer Andy White, copying Ringo’s original part virtually beat for beat, on drums.

We will not here concern ourselves with the history of these historic first Beatles recording sessions, in particular the convoluted story of which drummer played on which session and why.

Instead we’ll look at the surprising (shocking?) reactions to Love Me Do and what that reaction says about the popular music standards of the day and the light-speed advances that would soon follow.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assert that probably 99% of us (and that may be understating things) would agree that Love Me Do, while not without its charms, is a primitive piece of pop pablum — and certainly provided little clue of the energy and musical invention that would burst from practically every subsequent Beatles single.

Get ready to be amazed.

It turns out that Love Me Do was hip. It was a game-changer. In fact, in 1962 Britain it was downright radical.

Love Me Do!

This is almost impossible to understand from a 2022 perspective (or hell, even a 1972 perspective). But it’s how many future stars have described its release.

• Peter Frampton says it changed his life.

• Sandie Shaw considers it a historic milestone. “Love Me Do. . . signified when everything changed.”

• Allan Clarke calls it his favorite Beatles record.

• Peter Gabriel remembers it being “so rough” that he saved up his money to buy it, the first record he ever bought with his own money.

• Ray Davies picks it as one of his favorite early British records. “I thought it was a new American group.”

• Jon Anderson drove all the way to Southport to see the Beatles perform just on the basis of hearing Love Me Do on the radio.

• Bryan Ferry remembers hearing it and simply thinking, “God, that’s different.”

• Andrew Loog Oldham, manager and producer of the Rolling Stones, says, “The first time I heard Love Me Do I was 18 years old and I thought the record was amazing. It had space, mood and sex.”

• Joe Cocker has a vivid memory of hearing it and thinking “I wonder who the hell that was?” He was especially struck by the singing style, in particular Paul McCartney’s soul-inspired phrasing of the title refrains. “I’d never heard any other singer do that on a pop record.”

Here is the coda of the 1962 UK version of Love Me Do, featuring the vocal stylings that Cocker found so different and appealing:

Meanwhile, however, the reaction to Love Me Do by those who knew the Beatles as a powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll band in the clubs of Hamburg and Liverpool was quite different. Most of them did consider Love Me Do to be shallow fluff. In fact, many thought it was an embarrassment.

Tony Sheridan, probably the biggest star on the Hamburg scene, who played countless gigs with the Beatles and used them as his backing band for several German recordings, was highly disappointed:

We were amazed when they cleaned up and did Love Me Do. We all thought, “What’s this? From being one of the best rhythm and blues groups around, they’ve suddenly gone to pleasing the teenies.”

Brian Griffiths, guitarist with Liverpool group Howie Casey and The Seniors — whose leader Howie Casey would go on to a major career as a sax player, including several world tours with Paul McCartney — agreed:

It was bloody awful.  I said, “What is that crap? It’s like a country and western song.”

Even Billy J. Kramer, part of Brian Epstein’s stable of Liverpool acts who had a string of hits during the early days of the British Invasion and who idolized the Beatles, acknowledged its shortcomings:

When Love Me Do came out, I was disappointed because I’d seen the Beatles do Twist and Shout, Money, you know, the Chuck Berry and Little Richard stuff.  So when I heard their first single, I thought it was a bit timid. 

Beatles producer George Martin himself was not particularly enamored of Love Me Do. He always made it clear that he knew it wasn’t the hit record he was looking for.*

*In fact Love Me Do was almost not put out. Martin instead wanted to issue “How Do You Do It,” a Mitch Murray composition which the Beatles reluctantly recorded during the same September 4 session as Love Me Do. While the group made it clear they preferred that their first record be one of their own compositions, Martin was skeptical. The main reason he eventually agreed to issue Love Me Do is that EMI, which at the time owned Beatles copyrights through their publishing arm Ardmore and Beechwood, pressured him to release a Lennon-McCartney original.

At the same time, Martin recognized right from their first meeting that the Beatles had a special magnetism. Not long after Love Me Do’s release he and his engineer Norman Smith traveled to Liverpool to see the Beatles perform at The Cavern Club, where he witnessed the tremendous impact they had on audiences. (Including himself: Martin said that while he didn’t think much of their songs when he first met them, he fell in love with them as personalities. “Sparks flew off of them when they played or when you talked to them.”)

So it seems pretty safe to say that by every conceivable benchmark, Love Me Do failed to capture the musical excitement the Beatles normally generated.

And yet. . .

Context.

Note again that those who were dismissive of Love Me Do had something important in common: they had already experienced the Beatles in person. Love Me Do was tame in comparison.

But the general record buying and radio-listening public had no such preconceptions. Most were completely unaware of what was happening in the dives and dance halls of northern England and Hamburg. Their reference point for pop artists wasn’t Merseybeat or the Reeperbahn or the London underground blues scene; it was the BBC Light Programme and the previous generation’s big band crooners.*

*The seminal American R&B and rock and roll pioneers had made a brief impact in the mid to late 1950s but had largely disappeared, to be replaced by Svengali-created teen idols with hilarious names like Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager and Johnny Gentle.

And thus is illuminated both the moribund musical landscape of 1962, and the special Beatles quality that shone through even banal early incarnations. Love Me Do was simultaneously a toothless sellout to the few who knew the Beatles in their natural state, AND possessed of enough Beatle originality and charisma to be completely unlike anything on the hit parade. . . and unforgettable to many who first heard it.

Sting: “It changed my life”

Mick Jones: I was just stricken. . . it was a cathartic, kind of incredible experience just hearing that first [record] — Love Me Do, in my case. It got me right away, completely.

Geezer Butler: As soon as I heard Love Me Do on the radio, I was just completely taken over by it. . . it was a whole new thing. We realized English musicians could have their own sound.

Chris Thomas: The Beatles came out and completely blew me away. I remember the first time Love Me Do was played on Radio Luxembourg — you just knew it was going to change your life.

Painter Rita Donagh: At Newcastle there was an art history lecture once a week. If you were late you were very conspicuous – the lecturer had to stop and so on.  We were gathered there and in came [future writer and broadcaster] David Sweetman.  He had great charisma – that theatrical quality which some people have.  He opened the door and he had this record in his hands.  And he held it aloft and said, “I’ve just bought this incredible record! You’ve all got to listen to it.”  The record was “Love Me Do.”  It was the first time that any of us had heard of the Beatles.

Justin Hayward: “I’d never heard anything like it. . . it changed everything”

Donovan: I first heard the Beatles on a trip back home from my wanderings as a beatnik folk singer.  The house was empty and I went upstairs to my bedroom. The radio was playing a pop single, yet I had left “pop music” behind when I embraced folk, jazz, blues, classical and bluebeat.  When I heard the two acoustic guitars, drums, bass, vocal harmonies and a harmonica I was stunned and fell into an altered state. “Yes, pop pickers,” chimed the DJ, “that was The Beatles with Love Me Do.”  I slumped down on the stair-carpet and heard a voice in my head say: “That’s exactly what I’m going to do”. . .

Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that both Sting and Justin Hayward, in the audio clips above, use almost the exact same terminology to describe the effect of hearing Love Me Do for the first time: “the world was going to be completely different.”

It’s also interesting that in his autobiography of his early life (Broken Music, Simon & Schuster), Sting takes his memory of Love Me Do even further, pointing out that it wasn’t just him feeling the impact: (emphasis added)

I remember being in the changing rooms of the swimming baths.  We were drying ourselves off and, as was our custom, flicking towels at each other’s genitals.  It was at this point that we heard the first bars of Love Me Do from a transistor radio in the corner.  The effect was immediate.  There was something in the sparseness of the sound that immediately put a stop to the horseplay. . . I recognized something significant, even revolutionary, in the spare economy of the sound, and the interesting thing is, so did everyone else.

“So did everyone else.” It’s astounding. While Sting’s experience with his friends might not be a perfect proxy for the rest of the country — it only got to Number 17, after all — remember that we’re talking about Love Me Do here. If the list of artists who had visceral responses to this particular record was limited to one or two, it might still be mind-boggling. In fact, we’ve only covered some of them. In addition to those above, other British stars who have described their reactions include Ian Gillan, Paul Rodgers, Russ Ballard, Barry Gibb, Dave Mason, John Lodge, Roger Glover, Ian McDonald, and more.

From the vantage point not only of the rest of the Beatles’ staggering catalogue but of 60 years of subsequent rock history, it seems almost beyond comprehension that Love Me Do could have elicited such a response. Reconciling what our ears seem to tell us with these changed-my-life testimonies is the embodiment of cognitive dissonance. Love Me Do?! This excited people? This blew them away?

But then again, we’re not living in 1962 England.* However surprising it may be to us, the testimony is real, and it comes from people who were there, hearing Love Me Do in real time.

*It’s important to note here that it wasn’t just 1962 in Great Britain. More than a year later, Americans responded as well. People like Smokey Robinson (“I was captured by the rhythm and the feeling of Love Me Do. The rhythm and the feeling got me”), Gregg Rolie (“I don’t know if anybody knew who they were at that time, but I remember how I felt like I was the one who discovered them”), and Little Steven van Zandt (“I’d never heard a record that sounded like it before it — and haven’t heard anything like it since”).

The most revealing takeaway from all these recollections of Love Me Do? It might be the vivid story they implicitly tell about the impact of the next Beatles releases and the evolutionary path the Beatles were on from Day One. Revolver was less than four years away, but it may as well have come from another species in another century. Before then, Beatlemania would circle the globe as fast as any pandemic, spread by music filled with a joyous energy that overcame all defenses. And a small part of appreciating Beatlemania might be to imagine the musical and cultural landscape that preceded it — and then to listen to records like Please Please Me, She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand and imagine how they must have sounded in a world where even Love Me Do could be a revelation.

First let’s get the obvious out of the way, as if the name isn’t clear enough: this project is a celebration of the artistry and cultural impact of the Beatles.

The raw material, which will hopefully delight and educate casual and dedicated fans alike, is a unique archive — the largest in the world — of comments, memories and insights about the Fab Four by other leading musicians, artists and public figures.

The celebration will revolve around the music primarily, but not exclusively: there were many ingredients that went into the Beatles potion. The band’s energy and exuberant camaraderie, for example, is part of many musicians’ recollections of what they first found irresistible about the Fab Four. So were about ninety-seven other things. All will be illuminated with eloquence and passion by a global chorus of famous voices.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: we need to wade through more stuff about the Beatles like we need more coronavirus.  You’re thinking one more vacuous anniversary tribute and you might join an insurrection. Haven’t we read enough and watched enough about the Beatles to last a lifetime?  Haven’t we heard enough bland platitudes about them to last several lifetimes? For some, especially the three or four people who aren’t fans, maybe.   

But before you nod your head too quickly, this isn’t going where you think it is.  The problem isn’t too much Beatles per se. (As even casual fans know, there’s no such thing).  The problem is the subtle but perverse damage done by too much mindless repetition, too much Beatles “shorthand.” 

We’ve all experienced it: Beatles music as aural wallpaper. . . incessant cover versions, often neutering the originals’ vitality. . . endless rehashing of the same old stories and myths. . . simplistic stereotyping of the band and their music.  

The repetitive, banal drone of absent-minded hagiography has dulled the reality of who the Beatles were and what they wrought. It has softened every edge, erased all the radicalism, muffled much of the excitement.  Major events such as Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary notwithstanding, the Beatles — progenitors of the most seismic musical and cultural shift since the advent of recorded sound — often seem to have receded into cliche.

Hopefully then, one benefit of Let Us Now Praise will be, if we can paraphrase Little Steven, to revise the revisionism.  Collectively these quotes can correct calcified myths, provide surprising insights and even make the case that the Beatles — crazy as it may sound — are actually underrated.

Not that the Beatles are alone in being gradually fossilized.

The passage of time often robs historical figures and events of impact and context.  The shock of a phenomenon as it is experienced in real time can never be sustained.  Its visceral immediacy recedes.  Shared experience is transformed into mere description, relegated to outdated media, supplanted by modern events and recency bias (often mistaken for progress).  Slowly but surely, the phenomenon is reduced to a cartoon.  It is caricaturized, decontextualized, oversimplified.

Babe Ruth becomes a fat guy who hit a lot of home runs.  Charlie Chaplin is a sentimental clown.  Louis Armstrong turns into a grinning, gravel-voiced crooner.

And the Beatles. . . they become a pop group.  A hugely successful pop group, yes, but still a pop group, in the pejorative sense of the term: the original “boy band,” popular but safe, the idols of screaming pre-teen girls and, later, of nostalgic baby boomers.*

*In the 1960s, pop meant something very different. Everyone in rock — whether that rock was folk, acid, blues, hard, soft, progressive, heavy, country or jazz — was part of the umbrella pop scene and referred to themselves as such. Modern fans of the Who, the Stones and Jimi Hendrix might be surprised to hear the likes of Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger and Hendrix self-identifying as pop artists.

There are many shibboleths in Beatles revisionism. One of the most stubborn is the idea that they were not really a rock band, that other groups from the Sixties, and many since, were edgier, grittier, rocked harder and more powerfully embodied rock’s rebel ethos.

Consider this exchange between music journalist Maureen Droney and mega-producer Rick Rubin for Mixonline.com back in 2000:

You've been fortunate that your personal taste has struck so many chords with the public. How do you think you developed that taste?

I was lucky enough to grow up with The Beatles. What little I know about music is from them.

Ah, the gold standard. But you were attracted to more hard core, rebellious music, which The Beatles really weren't.

But they were. Because they became the biggest band in the world, and because they don't exist anymore, you don't look back on them as being this outlaw band. But they really were.

This is a particularly revealing exchange. The interviewer expresses, almost as a statement of fact, a view of the Beatles that is now practically mainstream:  Yeah, the Beatles were great songwriters and hugely popular, but they weren’t “hard core” or “rebellious” or any of the things which are supposed to make rock music matter to its contemporary generation.

Does she have a point?

Ozzy Osbourne: The Beatles were revolutionaries. And their music was revolutionary music.

Chris Cornell: A lot of The Beatles' songs were heavier than most so-called metal tracks of the last 20 years.

Billie Joe Armstrong: There are Beatles songs that are way more punk rock than anything the Circle Jerks or Bad Religion ever put out.

Joe Perry: The Beatles were ahead of their time — there are songs they wrote that predated Led Zeppelin, predated Deep Purple, predated [groups] that we call heavy metal and hard rock. . . songs which get right down to the root of what heavy rock can be. They did it before anybody else, and they did it better than anybody else.

Okay, but was there really anything radical about the Beatles?

Edgar Winter: The Beatles altered the mindset of an entire generation, and they brought about a revolution without ever firing a shot. . . a revolution in the freedom of thought.

Gene Simmons: There are what scientists call singularities.  They happen every once in a while and have a quantum effect on life as we know it.  When the Beatles first appeared, it really changed the world.

Sinead O’Connor: I have this theory that the Beatles were actually the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you know? Insofar as they changed the entire face of the planet.

Justin Hayward: There was one huge explosion and that was the Beatles. It’s difficult to explain, but they just completely changed the world, and not just musically. They were in a different stratosphere, a different planet to the rest of us.

Booker T. Jones: They crossed boundaries and reached heights that no one else in rock 'n' roll had done. Everything about them just spoke creativity. . . and I don’t know if enough people at the time really recognized the Beatles as the infinitely creative people that they were. They were doing earth-shaking, ground-breaking things.

Lemmy: The Beatles were the greatest rock band of all time. Nobody even comes into the same planetary system. They changed everything — not just rock music, but life, the universe, everything. You had to be there to truly understand what I’m on about but for anyone that was there, they know. After the Beatles, no one was ever the same again, the young and the old, singers and politicians, sportsmen and actors. Everyone.

It’s funny, but the tendency to downplay the influence and brilliance of the Beatles rarely comes from other musicians. It’s usually found in certain quarters among fans and even writers and critics. This is understandable to a point — younger music listeners, for example, are more likely to have only a passing familiarity with the Beatles. But for others, and especially for the pundit class, the possible explanations tend to ring more hollow. Maybe they grew up with hyperaggressive modern music forms, or are partisans in the tired Beatles-Rolling Stones debate, or believe dismissing the Beatles’ musical and rock bonafides is the cool stance to take — that doing so confirms their iconoclast, connoisseur credentials.* Or maybe they are simply ignorant of the history.

*We’re not talking about personal taste here; obviously there’s no objective “truth” when it comes to art of any kind, high or low. To this day my own endorphins are triggered more by “Playground In My Mind” than almost anything by the Grateful Dead, but I wouldn’t claim that Clint Holmes was more important or musically advanced than the Dead. At least I think I wouldn’t.

So what accounts for the persistence of the revisionist narrative?

Let’s go back to that interview with Rick Rubin. Look again at his response to the assertion that the Beatles weren’t a “rebellious” group.  The key line, aside from his blunt correction, is surely “because they became the biggest band in the world.”  It gets at the core of why so many people today, even if they enjoy Beatles music, would never put the Beatles and “outlaw” in the same sentence.  As the award-winning British actor Stephen Merchant put it, describing how for a time he had stopped listening to their music, “It felt like the Beatles had become a piece of the furniture. I’d just taken them for granted.”

“A piece of the furniture.” This may be as good a summation as any of the place the Beatles occupy for lots of people — even many who count themselves as fans. The Beatles are a cultural given, almost an abstraction. Consider the hundreds of “reaction” videos which proliferate on YouTube, in which young fans videotape themselves reacting to music they haven’t previously heard. The Beatles, unsurprisingly given their name recognition, are the subject of a disproportionate number of these videos. As often as not the reaction is rapturous. . . and just as often it is bathed in surprise, as for many of these YouTubers the Beatles are synonymous with a sort of bland universality. If they know Beatles music at all, it’s what they might have sung along to as small children in school. Some Beatles songs have become as ubiquitous as Christmas carols.  And how many Christmas carols are radical or rebellious?

No wonder the journalist talking to Rick Rubin so casually says that “the Beatles really weren’t.”

But as Rubin is quick to point out, the Beatles were.  It just so happened that they were also avatars of joy, seduced millions, and were immortal songwriters.  That they could check so many boxes may be a miracle (the Beatles are surely among the few to ever pull off the trick of being hip and mainstream at the same time) but it’s also a curse: mass popularity, usually for good reason, breeds cynicism and backlash. We assume that mass success is driven by mindless consumerism and we like to congratulate ourselves for not being among the mindless.  

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Which brings us back to Let Us Now Praise. . . The Beatles.  An ongoing project, the amassing of thousands of quotes about the Fab Four by other artists and public figures is at its core about the music, but it’s also something else: a kaleidoscopic reminder of all the Beatles’ myriad dimensions: musicianship and performance, imagination and innovation, humor and charisma, ribaldry, poetry, exuberance, style, excitement, brotherhood, versatility.  Of their still unmatched reach across cultures, creeds and continents. Of what might be called Beatles exceptionalism.

Patterns emerge.  “Wow” moments are constant. 

• We’ll hear from some of the baddest asses in rock history about how phenomenal the Beatles were as a live band, especially in the group’s early years. 

• We’ll hear from icons of jazz and the classical music world who marvel at the unschooled Beatles’ mastery of melody, harmony, arrangement and song structure. 

• We’ll hear from guitar heroes, bass gods, keyboard wizards, drum gurus and singing stars who explain why John, Paul, George and Ringo are massively underappreciated as players and performers.

• We’ll hear from the biggest innovators in cutting-edge music, from house to hip-hop to electronica to thrash, citing the Beatles as a primary source and influence. 

• We’ll hear from black artists about the Beatles’ cross-racial appeal, the warmth and respect that was mutual from the start, and even how the Beatles changed the black community’s perceptions of white people. 

• We’ll hear from prominent Eastern European figures about what the Beatles meant to those living under Communism – and how they contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

• We’ll hear from a chorus of famous fans from the 1960s who will put the lie to the myth that the early Beatles were a “boy band” that appealed mainly to preteen girls.

• We’ll hear from people who worked with the biggest stars in the business and are world-famous themselves — yet attest to an almost supernatural aura and charisma around the four Beatles. 

• We’ll hear not just from musicians, but from writers, actors, dancers, painters, business icons, athletes and world leaders.  

And we’ll hear, always, about the music — music, in the words of author Hunter Davies, “which will be sung as long as we are on the planet and have the breath to hum the tunes.”