Week Eight: Beatle Mania (1961-1965)

November 9, 1961:

At the peak of his fame, writing his memoirs in 1964, Brian Epstein, the provincial impresario whose unswerving faith in his musical ministry had helped turn Liverpool, England, into the promised land for style-conscious teenagers everywhere, recounted the epiphany that changed his life—and also the world (such being the newfound significance widely imputed to rock and roll in the wake of "I Want to Hold Your Hand").

As he told the story in his "autobiography" (in fact, a long-form press release, concocted largely by his publicist, Derek Taylor), it happened like this:

On Thursday, November 9, 1961, Epstein, the twenty-seven-year-old scion of a locally prominent Jewish family, dropped by the Cav­ern, a small basement coffee bar in downtown Liverpool. At the time, Epstein was managing the region's largest retail outlet for phonograph records, the North End Music Store on nearby blackchapel Street. The Cavern was around the corner, but (so the official version goes) Epstein had never visited it before. He was coming on this particular day to see a local band, his curiosity having been piqued by a teen customer's keen interest in obtaining a German import recording of the band accompanying an expatriate English singer.

"I arrived at the greasy steps leading to the vast cellar and de­scended gingerly past a surging crowd of beat fans to a desk where a large man sat examining membership cards. He knew my name"— since Epstein had arranged for a free pass—"and he nodded to an opening in the wall which led into the central of the three tunnels which make up the rambling Cavern.

"Inside the club it was as black as a deep grave, dank and damp and smelly and I regretted my decision to come."

He doubtless felt out of place. As one of his former associates has recalled, "he was a handsome but slight young man with a patrician air about him. His wavy brown hair was kept perfectly trimmed and combed. He was usually dressed in a hand-tailored suit, Turnbull and Asser shirt, and a silk foulard about his neck. His imperious manner and elegant dress made him seem older than he was."

His music of choice was classical. He preferred more elevated so­cial circles. It is no surprise that he should have suffered a momen­tary pang of regret at venturing into the Cavern. Still, he was a businessman on a business trip. He began to take mental notes.

The crowd was overwhelmingly teenaged, and consisted mostly of girls with beehive hairdos. The club's sound system was blaring the latest hits from America. The visitor tried to strike up a conversation: "I started to talk to one of the girls. 'Hey,' she hissed. 'The Beatles're going on now.' " There were four of them: two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer. Electric guitars chiming, the drums pounding, the noise echoing, the quartet tore into songs made famous by the likes of Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley. Rhythm guitarist John Lennon, twenty-one years old and the band's nominal leader, stood stiffly, stared blankly, and screamed his heart out. Paul McCartney, nineteen, the band's co-leader and bassist, smiled and bobbed and ra­diated goodwill. George Harrison, eighteen, the lead guitarist, kept to himself. Pete Best, the twenty-year-old drummer, looked cute.

"I eased myself toward the stage," recalled Epstein, "past rapt young faces and jigging bodies and for the first time I saw the Beatles properly.

"They were not very tidy and not very clean"—roughly dressed, one imagines, in their regular outfit: black turtlenecks, black leather pants, black leather jackets. Playing the part of rock and roll beat­niks, they were hoods without the customary gobs of greased-up hair: with the exception of the drummer (who was still mimicking Elvis), they sported "French cuts" with blow-dried bangs—an arty (and androgynous) touch.

"I had never seen anything like the Beatles on stage," Epstein re­called. "They smoked as they played and they ate and talked and pretended to hit each other. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes."

After the band had finished their set, the emcee welcomed Mr. Ep­stein to the club, and the shopkeeper made his way to the bandstand to introduce himself. It was Harrison, the quiet guitarist, who first extended his hand: "Hello there. What brings Mr. Epstein here?"

For the rest of his short life—Epstein would die in 1967, whether a suicide or the victim of an accidental barbiturate overdose has never been determined—the man who discovered the Beatles relished retelling this particular story. Whatever the facts of the matter, the story has the ring of mythic truth. Epstein in the Cavern evokes Or­pheus in the Underworld, and also Stanley in search of Livingstone, plunging into the heart of a dark continent. That this particular dark continent happened to be a coffee bar was equally evocative. After all, Britain's first rock Svengali, the legendary Larry Parnes, was said to have discovered Tommy Steele, Britain's first native rock star, in the 2 I's coffee bar in London's Soho in 1956; and Parnes, like Ep­stein, had gone on to manage a stable of artistes, mainly proletarian bad boys repackaged with pretty Presley-style haircuts and moody stage names like Marty Wilde and Billy Fury (subtlety wasn't at issue here), producing a flock of teen idols who doubled as adoring ephebes for Mr. Parnes, who kindly invited several of the lads to live as house guests in his magnificent London mansion. It was a lifestyle that Brian Epstein in the fall of 1961 had every reason to envy.

An academic failure who had also dropped out of the Royal Acad­emy of Dramatic Art, Epstein had finally found a niche for himself in the family business, which consisted of a chain of furniture and record stores. For the past several years, by methodically tracking the whims of his customers, he had turned the family-owned NEMS store into a highly profitable retail outlet.

He was prosperous. But he was also bored. He felt a desperate need to make a new beginning.

Shortly before his visit to the Cavern, Epstein had spent six weeks in Spain at the behest of his mother, who was worried about his men­tal health. Throughout the summer, her son had been unhappy and depressed. He was drinking too much. Driving recklessly, he had smashed up his car more than once. Above all, he was living in fear, worried that a blackmailer he had helped send to prison would, upon his release in September, reveal the secret that he had thus far shared with only a handful of his closest friends: that he was a homosexual.

The Beatles offered him hope. He began to think about changing the shape of his life. Building on his experience in record retailing, he could become the band's manager. He could make them stars. In re­turn, they could make him money. Perhaps they could even make him happy: following in the footsteps of Larry Parnes, he, too, might be able to build a stable of grateful teen idols, leather-clad bad boys personally in his debt.

There certainly were plenty of leather-clad bad boys to be found in Liverpool (which had already produced the toughest stud in Fames' stable, Billy Fury). A rough-and-tumble port city, Liverpool had never fully recovered from World War II. Rubble still scarred the landscape, a reminder of the German blitz, and unemployment ran high, leaving plenty of kids with time to kill.

Perhaps that is one reason why the city sported so many rock and roll bands. By the fall of 1961, there were hundreds of them, appear­ing regularly in dozens of clubs and coffee bars. The thriving local scene supported a fortnightly journal called Mersey Beat, which ran ads for the clubs and stories on the bands. The editor, Bill Harry, had gone to school with John Lennon, so of course he championed John's band. But the paper also chronicled the comings and goings of Gerry and the Pacemakers, Johnny Sandel and the Searchers, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the Merseybeats. Willy-nilly, these amateur bands had forged a style of their own, playing American rock hard and fast, with a relentlessly pounding beat, jangling guitars, and keening vocal harmonies.

The repertoire of the Beatles was typical. Learning the songs from records (since none of them could read music), they spiced their set with hits currently popular in the States, as well as a few ballads and even some sentimental show tunes ("Till There Was You," "Falling in Love Again"). But the heart of their act was vintage rock and roll, the songs made famous by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and Buddy Holly. Connoisseurs of rock song form, their repertoire featured no less than eleven songs written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller ("Kansas City," "Hound Dog," etc.).

Because of the stress on primal rock and roll, and the rough-and-ready way the old songs were sung, the "Mersey Beat" of the Beatles and their Liverpool rivals was a world apart from the milder sounds then popular in England. The year's biggest single hit in Britain was Elvis Presley's cloying version of a German folk tune, "Wooden Heart," complete with tuba oom-pahs, and possibly the most insipid record Presley ever made (which is saying something). The most pop­ular British album of the year featured songs from the Black and black Minstrel Show, an unembarrassed throwback to the racial stereotypes of another era that was hugely popular on the London stage and also on British television. Rock and roll was perversely hard to hear, since the airwaves in England were controlled by the state, and the British Broadcasting Corporation refused to play any­thing held to be too vulgar. In any case, most of England's home- grown rock stars, taking their cue, as always, from Elvis, and led by Cliff Richard, the most popular Elvis clone of them all, were busy making insipid records of cloying ballads.

The Beatles weren't insipid. They were clever, ironic, acerbic. They played hard-core rock and roll. And they took pride in mocking the pieties of popular music.

In the first issue of Mersey Beat (dated July 6-20, 1961), John Lennon contributed a typically sardonic little essay "on the Dubious Origins of Beatles": "Once upon a time there were three little boys called John, George and Paul, by name christened. They decided to get together because they were the getting together type. When they were together they wondered what for after all, what for. So all of a sudden they all grew guitars and fashioned a noise."

In fact, John Lennon had first met Paul McCartney on July 6, 1957, at a church picnic. At the time, Lennon was about to turn sev­enteen, and McCartney was just fifteen. The gist of what happened was simple: after they had been introduced, McCartney showed Lennon how to tune a guitar, and wrote out the words for two clas­sic rockabilly songs, Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock" and Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula." His rock and roll bona fides thus confirmed, McCartney was invited to help the older boy form a new band.

Shortly afterward, Lennon and McCartney added George Harrison, an equally earnest student of early rock and roll. For nearly two years, this threesome, augmented by a shifting cast of friends, per­formed informally. In the spring of 1960, they regularly played on Friday afternoons at Liverpool College of Art, where Lennon was completing a third year of education.

The art school context was crucial to the band's emergent attitude and sense of style. In the postwar period, Great Britain had created a unique network of schools like Liverpool College of Art. Here boys and girls with poor academic credentials and no other professional prospects were able to learn the commercial arts in a low-key atmos­phere of bohemian experimentation. In this setting, Lennon, Mc­Cartney, and Harrison were free to make music without having to work at pleasing anyone. Like jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, they played with their backs to the audience, refusing to feign civility, let alone enthusiasm, and taking a perverse pride in flouting the conven­tions of show business. Lennon and his friends also dabbled in beat poetry, reading Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Corso. They learned how to cut an ironic figure by looking like Elvis Presley, using vulgar rock hairstyles to stand out from the art school crowd (just as they would later use an arty French-cut hairstyle to stand out from the rock crowd).

In I960, shortly after Lennon had left art school, the newly chris­tened Beatles, named in (punning) honor of Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets, turned professional. Hired after auditioning in Liverpool for Larry Parnes and Billy Fury, the band embarked on their first tour outside the city, accompanying the one and only Johnnie Gentle. Their next trip was on their own, to Hamburg, Germany, where they stayed for nearly four months, honing their skills. In the months that followed, they split their time between Liverpool and Hamburg, and also made their first trip into a recording studio, in Germany, to ac­company the expatriate English singer Tony Sheridan.

Though Lennon and McCartney by then were already composing together, they rarely performed their own songs live. The patrons preferred the songs of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The Beatles obliged, stripping the old songs of any lingering traces of subtlety, and driving them home with casual aggression, delivering the lyrics (if it was Lennon singing) in a hoarse, grainy voice of pure wounded pride.

Besotted though he was by the nervous energy of classic rock and roll, Lennon played with grim determination. Just listen to the ver­sion of Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula" that the Beatles sang at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany (during a live set taped in 1962). Vincent had sung his piece of good-natured gibberish with a smile and a leer, his band playing with quiet finesse—his drummer used brushes. The Beatles blow up the song. The drummer pounds mind­lessly. Lennon's vocal is harsh, adamant, seductively self-absorbed, as if to say (as one witness later recalled): "I'm going to have a bloody good time, hope you'll join me."

Since every issue of Mersey Beat ran news about the Beatles; since Brian Epstein's record store sold the magazine; since the second issue of Mersey Beat had trumpeted the Beatles on the cover, with a photo and bold headline; and since Brian Epstein himself had been con­tributing a regular column to Mersey Beat starting with the third is-for all of these reasons, it seems certain that Brian Epstein had heard of the Beatles well before his pilgrimage to the Cavern on No­vember 9.

At least one Liverpool veteran remembers seeing Epstein at a Beat-les show in June, standing in the shadows, staring intently, clapping wildly. Still another witness, who worked at the NEMS store, swears that Epstein in these same months would often gaze longingly at a photo of the band, torn from the pages of Mersey Beat: a reverie of young lads in leather.

However the connection was first made, it was at this intersec­tion—between the band's alienated look and the impresario's longing gaze—that a new kind of rock and roll sensibility took shape. It was, in a word, a matter of camp: a new way of seeing the world, in terms of artifice and exaggerated style. To look at rock in this way in­volved, among other things, the ironic embrace of kitsch; a theatrical flair for witty masquerade; the seductive packaging of deadpan im­ages of revolt and marginality; and, above all, the projection of am­biguous erotic fantasies with a wink—as Susan Sontag remarked in her famous essay on the topic, "the androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility."

In the photo reportedly admired by Epstein, the band's look was rough, enigmatic, defiantly aloof. The picture had been taken in Hamburg by a young German artist and photographer named Astrid Kirchherr. A bohemian devotee of French existentialism and modern art, she had given the group their first French cuts, and helped them pick their black-on-black leather outfits. She had then shot the group with their instruments in a variety of industrial wastelands. Her pho­tos left an impression of dreamy disaffection, as if a band of aspiring delinquents had wandered by accident onto the set of a film by Anto-nioni. The settings were artfully cold, the poses sullen, coy, sexy.

Brian Epstein reacted with rapture. The closer he got, the more ex­cited he became. Back at the record shop after introducing himself to the band at the Cavern, all he could talk about was the Beatles, as one of his employees later recalled: "He ranted and raved about them to anyone who would listen. They were wonderful, he said, just wonderful. The music was the best he ever heard of any beat group, loud and crazy and driving, and they were so much fun to watch, there was something infectiously happy about them."

The night after his lunchtime visit to the Cavern, Brian Epstein ventured out to see the Beatles again. He was a man obsessed (though it would be several weeks before the band formally con­sented to have him become their manager).

The venue on the night of November 10 was the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton. The Beatles were headlining a show packaged by a local promoter named Sam Leach, who aspired to do for Liverpool what Alan Freed had done for Cleveland with his Moondog Corona­tion Ball—put the Big Beat on the city's musical map. Besides the Beatles, the bill featured Rory Storm's band, along with Gerry and the Pacemakers (another quartet that Epstein would eventually man­age).

Operation Big Beat, as Leach called it, turned out to be one of the largest rock shows in Liverpool yet. By eleven o'clock, the Tower Ballroom was packed. Nearly 4,000 people filled the hall.

One by one, the bands took their turn on stage. At the ballroom taps, the ale was flowing. Gangs roamed the room, looking for trou­ble. While waiting to perform, Paul McCartney was nearly hit by a hurled table.

It was after 11:00 when the Beatles took the stage. The crowd surged forward. While Brian Epstein looked on, the band began to play. The girls began to shriek. Sam Leach, aware of the crowd's volatility, held his breath.

"That night," Leach later recalled, "was when Beatlemania be­gan."

Almost no one noticed. In Liverpool, the newspapers ignored the event. For the Beatles themselves, little had changed. They were still a provincial band, far from the limelight of London, let alone New York City.

Brian Epstein, though, had found his calling. As he would fa­mously snap at a skeptical record label executive a few months later, "These boys are going to explode. I am completely confident that one day they will be bigger than Elvis Presley."

He had a job to do—and a world to convince.

Nov. 7, 1963: There have been moments in modern times-and their rarity has only made their occurrence more striking—when an art­work has provoked an enthusiasm so profound, so widely shared, and so intoxicating that, to those swept up in it, life seems suddenly full of new possibilities, new prospects, new cultural horizons. At times like this, it may even seem as if an artist has been graced with supernatural powers, and that his works can be held up to "Life, as the prophetic mirror of its Future," as the composer Richard Wagner once put it. The works of such artists then appear to embody nothing less than a new spirit, heralding the advent of a whole new world.

Such, for example, was the import of Wagner's opera in Bis­marck's Germany. And such, for better or worse, was the impact of the Beatles on the 1960s.

"This isn't show business," John Lennon remarked in December 1963, shortly after the idolatry of his band had become a source of shared wonder. "It's something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines"—and different, certainly, from anything that Brian Epstein or John Lennon had ever imagined.

That the Beatles should have functioned as demigods to a genera­tion was, after all, unplanned, unforeseen, and finally unprecedented. More than songs or singing, they offered the world themselves—not as a "total artwork" meant to serve as a "prophetic mirror," but rather as a spontaneous representation, at first quite unconscious, of a new kind of culture, a "counterculture" as it would later be called: a culture of prescriptive youthfulness, committed not to reason or beauty or sober good taste, but rather to whimsy, freedom, and fun, the crazier the better.

An inadvertent by-product of the usual ballyhoo, the phenomenon of the Beatles—their importance as a cultural touchstone—only be­came clear over the course of a few hectic months, starting in the spring of 1963. In the months that followed, fascination with the Beatles, at first confined to young British fans of popular music, breached the normal barriers of taste, class, and age, transforming their recordings and live performances from events of strictly parochial interest into a matter of much wider public import. Before it was all over, the growing popular passion for the band had pro­duced an explosion of shared sentiment that spread convulsively: from Liverpool to London; from aspiring rock musicians like Brian Jones to the faceless rock fans who paid attention to their aspira­tions; from England to America; from the margins of pop music to the heart of the mass media; and from the centers of global culture to the periphery, finally embracing virtually everyone in the world—and transforming even those who, starting the process, imagined they were in command of it.

Only seven years later, John Lennon would speak of the Beatles as a kind of "dream," a myth, a puerile fantasy that he, personally, had outgrown: "I don't believe in Beatles." That the mania for the Beatles invested them with a pseudo-religious aura in these years is hard to dispute. Still, to this day, it is difficult to say why, or what the inten­sity of belief was finally about—if anything.

It had begun with "Please Please Me"—music that was rough yet sweet, crisply harmonized, aggressively performed. It had quickly be­come a matter of the band's look—faintly exotic, androgynous, ut­terly unexpected. And by the spring of 1963 in England it had become, as well, a matter of the band's collective persona. Unlike the English Elvis clones, with their lacquered good looks and empty prat­tle, the Beatles seemed like four characters in search of a play, figures from a waking dream, bursting with inventiveness and wit.

Ray Coleman, at the time an editor at Melody Maker, the hippest of England's music weeklies, has recalled how even jazz snobs warmed to the Beatles in the spring of 1963, thanks largely to John Lennon and his gift for improvised wordplay. "Most pop stars before John had a problem sustaining a conversation beyond the bland talk of their latest record and their narcissism. Lennon single-handedly stood that credo on its head. In his speech alone, pop music grew up." Where Lennon was acerb and ironic, the rest of the band was just plain funny. "The Beatles made me laugh immoderately," recalls Maureen Cleave, the first reporter from a British daily newspaper to be bowled over by their unrehearsed antics. "They all had this won­derful quality—it wasn't innocence, but everything was new to them."

So it seemed as well to photographer Dezo Hoffmann. Sent to Liv­erpool on assignment for the weekly Record Mirror, Hoffmann, a veteran used to the self-conscious posturing of pop icons from Char­lie Chaplin to Marilyn Monroe, found himself floored: "They were so fresh, so full of vitality and fun and so honest."

In April of 1963, Hoffmann spent a day in Liverpool shooting the band in a variety of locations, from the Cavern Club to the barber­shop where the boys had their bangs trimmed. Most memorable of all was a sequence of shots taken at a local park picked by McCart-ney. After letting the lads horse around with his photo equipment, Hoffmann asked them to leap in the air with arms akimbo. It was this icon of playful whimsy that appeared, fittingly enough, on the picture sleeve of the extended-play disc containing "Twist and Shout"—the band's signature song in these heady months.

Recorded in February and featured on the band's debut album, re­leased in March, "Twist and Shout" had quickly become the Beatles' trademark raver, their showstopper, the song they invariably used throughout these months to climax their short but exciting sets (which, at Epstein's behest, had been streamlined and pared down to twenty-five minutes). They had picked up the song from a recording made by the Isley Brothers. A black vocal group, the Isley Brothers had first won notice in America in 1959 with a recording called "Shout," an outlandishly perfervid simulation of a gospel sing, re­plete with meaningless call-and-response lyrics. In 1962, the Isleys had resurrected the formula, toned it down, and applied it to a trashy novelty called "Twist and Shout," a lyric meant to cash in on the Twist, a dance craze launched by Dick Clark on American Band­stand. Ignoring the graceful ease of the Isleys' rendition, John Lennon sang "Twist and Shout" with grim, almost ferocious deter­mination. Shouting—literally—at the top of his lungs, Lennon turned the song into a shrieking catharsis; it is no wonder that, in 1970, he would be drawn into the orbit of Arthur Janov, a psychologist who preached the therapeutic value of what he called "the primal scream." If nothing else, a scream that is primal will cut through a lot of ambient noise. In the summer of 1963 (a time when the Rolling Stones were still just starting to roll), the sound of the Beatles was both ubiquitous and, among the smart set, an indispensable orna­ment of hip taste. In England, the album that featured "Twist and Shout," Please Please Me, rose to the top of the British album charts, and remained there for thirty consecutive weeks. The extended-play recording that featured "Twist and Shout" (and also Dezo Hoffmann's jump photo) sold tens of thousands of copies in its own right. And the band's third single, "From Me to You," eclipsed even the sales of "Please Please Me" and "Twist and Shout," remaining at number one for seven weeks.

Never before had a musical act enjoyed this level of popularity in Great Britain. Never before had a record been so keenly anticipated as the Beatles' next single.

"She Loves You" was released on August 23—and instantly set a definitive musical stamp on what the British press, with good reason, would soon be calling "The Year of the Beatles."

Anarchic in feel and informal in structure, the recording cleverly reprised the wild exuberance of "Twist and Shout." A celebration of old-fashioned rock and roll, "She Loves You" also conjured up the good-natured sweetness of "Ain't It a Shame," the chaotic verve of "Tutti Frutti," the joyous aggression of "Hound Dog." Famous for its exuberant refrain—"yeah yeah yeah"—it became equally famous for its falsetto "WOOOOO," a mock-ecstatic device copied from Little Richard, also used by the Beatles in "Twist and Shout," and sung in concert by McCartney and Harrison, who would shake their mop-tops in unison, a cue for the crowd to shake and shriek along. Number one for four weeks in September, and then again for two weeks at the end of November, "She Loves You" became the best-selling recording of the 1960s in England—the unofficial anthem of an era.

As the Beatles continued to crisscross the country, the crowds at their shows began to mushroom. The band was the toast of British teens—and, increasingly, the talk of their parents. In one way, at least, they were a throwback to an older era. Since Britain still boasted relatively few television sets, radio was still an important na­tional medium. The BBC routinely aired a number of performances taped live in their studios. In 1942 and 1943, at a time when World War II had put a halt to the distribution of new recordings, Frank Sinatra had become the first major teen idol on the basis of live radio broadcasts in America; in 1963, the Beatles accomplished something similar in England. Between March 1962 and June 1965, the Beatles were featured on fifty-two BBC radio programs. And throughout the summer of 1963, from June through the end of September, they hosted their own series of radio shows, Pop Go the Beatles, singing the songs they had written, and also singing the vintage Fifties rock and roll songs they loved, by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

By that fall, the music of the Beatles had become a constant com­panion in the lives of a great many people in England. But most of them had never laid eyes on the band. That changed on October 16, the night the Beatles performed on Britain's top-rated TV show, Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

Fifteen million people tuned in to watch—the largest audience in the history of British television. Paul McCartney and George Harrison went "WOOOOO" and shook their heads. John Lennon shrieked "Twist and Shout." Ringo Starr looked animated and cute. Screams echoed from the fans inside the theater, while outside a crowd of several hundred more fans pressed against a police cordon, chanting "We Want the Beatles." By the next day, virtually everyone had heard the news. "Siege of the Beatles," ran one typical tabloid headline: "What a Sunday Night at the Palladium!"

A week later, the band flew to Sweden for a week of concerts. On their return to Heathrow Airport on October 31, they were mobbed by countless screaming kids. The scene was captured and dutifully broadcast by the British press corps, out in force. "We were amazed," said Paul McCartney a few weeks later, "because although we had had several No. 1's in the record charts, teenage interest had only been on the normal, pop level."

For the Beatles, however, life on a "normal, pop level" was now over. Brian Epstein was elated but alarmed. He didn't want anyone hurt. He certainly didn't want his boys associated in any way with "hooliganism." In his autobiography, he deplored the rioting and vandalism typical of rock and roll "in the days of Bill Haley and 'Rock Around the Clock.' . . . Yet though the Beatles' music is rock and roll, though it is as exciting and stimulating as the mid-fifties version, it has remained remote from savagery."

Keen to have the band project a wholesome image, Epstein over the summer had negotiated a spot for the Beatles on a prestigious variety show staged annually for the royal family. Filmed on Monday, No­vember 4, for broadcast the following Sunday, the 1963 Royal Variety Performance featured Marlene Dietrich and Tommy Steele, in addition to the Beatles, who were the seventh act on a nineteen-act bill.

But of course the Beatles by now had become the main event. Once again, the press appeared in force. Once again, reporters watched to see what these wonderfully wacky lads would do next, running in a pack that reinforced the mood of carnivalesque excite­ment the Beatles now provoked without even trying.

In the days leading up to this appearance, the most important one yet in the eyes of their manager, Epstein had asked his favorite Beatle how he expected an audience of lords and ladies to respond to "Twist and Shout." "I'll just ask them to rattle their fucking jew­elry," John Lennon had shot back—and with the expletive deleted (to Epstein's great relief), it was a line that Lennon actually used.

It remains one of the most celebrated single sentences ever uttered by a rock star. The audience tittered; the press applauded; and all of England smiled.

The air of festive good feelings around the Beatles now became generalized, while the members of the band were left to cope as best they could with the discrepancy between their private sense of self and the band's happy-go-lucky corporate persona. Lennon, for ex­ample, was deeply ambivalent about fame, as well he might be, given the bohemian art school milieu that had shaped his ambitions. A deeply cynical, even bitter young man, he nevertheless became an ob­ject of universal affection, and a target on stage for stuffed animals and plush dolls: "Although all the Beatles are 'fab' in every way and form," one fan wrote Lennon, "you are the 'fabbest' of them all. I love you, John, so much that I bought you this cuddly toy, which is what I think of you as."

Fleet Street was beside itself. The Daily Mirror, in its headline on November 11, the day after the Royal Variety show had aired, coined a name for the new sentiment that now seemed to grip all of England: BEATLEMANIA! "You have to be a real sour square not to love the nutty, noisy, happy, handsome Beatles," declared the Mirror: "The Beatles are wacky. They wear their hair like a mop—but it's WASHED, it's super clean. So is their fresh young act."

What the educated British elite now discovered came as a shock. Unlike previous teen idols, the Beatles were articulate. They were funny. They had wit, irony, attitude. They even seemed intelligent! On November 22, Parlophone released With the Beatles, the sec­ond album by the band, and the first to be planned as a coherent program of music, without any help from a current hit single. A demonstration of the band's musical versatility, the album also fea­tured a striking black-and-black photo on the cover, showing the faces of the four Beatles in half shadow, looking almost somber, and certainly looking serious.

Consisting of fourteen songs, the album featured eight new origi­nal compositions. "All My Loving" was a joyous romp with a bright walking bass line and a beautiful guitar solo, played by Harrison in the rockabilly style of Carl Perkins. McCartney crooned "Till There Was You" with the beguiling directness of Peggy Lee, one of his fa­vorite singers, while Lennon sang "You Really Got a Hold on Me" with a sweet sincerity worthy of Smokey Robinson, the song's com­poser and one of Lennon's idols. From their repertoire at the Cavern, the band resurrected Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven." But the climax came at the end, with a blast of John Lennon at his most feral, this time shouting out a version of a Berry Gordy song, "Money," so vehement and so aggressive that it made the original (released in 1960 by a singer named Barrett Strong) sound effete by comparison.

As if the new album was not enough, a week later, on November 29, Parlophone released two more new songs by the Beatles, as their fifth single: "This Boy," a ballad as delicately wrought as anything the Everly Brothers had ever sung, and "I Want to Hold Your Hand"—the song that would shortly make the Beatles famous around the world.

Cleanly recorded with propulsive hand-claps, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had starker dynamic contrasts than "She Loves You," with a serene bridge leading abruptly back into an agitated expres­sion of sexual longing ("it's such a feeling that my love, I can't hide!"). The piquancy of the vocal harmonies, like the freedom you could feel in the unorthodox chord changes, gave the song an irre­sistible aura of novelty. Roughly hewn yet utterly self-assured, the record had an aggressive confidence that hadn't been heard in pop music since Elvis Presley's breakthrough in 1956.

But the Beatles' breakthrough in 1963 differed from Presley's in one crucial aspect: from the start, the tribunes of elite culture be­stowed their blessings. On December 27, the Times of London solemnly declared the Beatles to be "the outstanding English composers of 1963." Gingerly acknowledging the most vulgar aspects of the group's overwhelming popularity—the screaming fans, the media hype, the "handbags, balloons, and other articles bearing the like­nesses of the loved ones"—the anonymous author (a musicologist later identified as William Mann) consecrated their music by describ­ing it in the most recondite of terms: "Harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat-submediant key-switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of 'Not a second time' (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth}:'

This may well be the first time that anyone had the audacity to compare, without irony, a rock and roll musician and an Olympian figure like Gustav Mahler—a token of cultural prestige. Not that John Lennon (who had composed and sung "Not a Second Time") especially cared, knowing little about Mahler, and less about Aeolian cadences: "To this day," Lennon admitted in an interview in 1980, "I have no idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds."

Meanwhile, Brian Epstein had flown to New York, trying to drum up publicity for the band's new single and upcoming visit. Several weeks before, Epstein had arranged to have the Beatles follow in the footsteps of Elvis Presley by headlining The Ed Sullivan Show, Amer­ica's version of Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium. By chance, Sullivan and his wife had been in London at Heathrow on October 31. "There must have been 50,000 girls there," Sullivan re­called, "and I later found out they had prevented Lord Home and Queen Elizabeth from taking off." Suitably impressed, Sullivan intro­duced himself to Epstein, and secured the Beatles for three shows the following February.

As Epstein explained to a reporter from The New Yorker several weeks later, shortly before their first trip to America, "They have tremendous style, and a great effervescence, which communicates it­self in an extraordinary way. . . . They are genuine. They have life, humor, and strange, handsome looks."

Despite the Sullivan booking, Epstein still had plenty of reason to worry about the band's prospects in the U.S. Earlier in the year, Capitol, the American record label owned by EMI, the multinational that also owned Parlophone, had passed up every one of its options to issue the Beatles' records. As a consequence, Epstein and George Martin had been forced to lease "Please Please Me," "From Me to You," and "She Loves You" to smaller, independent labels in Amer­ica. Not one had been even a modest success.

Dick Clark, at the time still a tastemaker, recalls airing "She Loves You" when it was first released in America, in September 1963. Largely because the option on this particular Beatles record had been picked up by an old friend and former business associate, Clark de­cided to feature the disc on the "Record Revue" segment of Ameri­can Bandstand. After hearing the record, a jury of three randomly selected Philadelphia teenagers was asked to rate it. "It's all right, sort of like the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry mixed together," said the first juror: "I'll give it a 77" (out of a possible 100—a mediocre mark). "It's not all that easy to dance to," sneered the sec­ond reviewer, "I give it a 65." "It doesn't seem to have anything," said the third kid; "the best I can give it is a 70." Clark then showed everyone a photo of the four lads with the funny haircuts. The kids all snickered.

That was before news of Beatlemania began to filter out of Eng­land, along with pictures of girls in ecstasy.

While he was in New York, Epstein convinced Capitol not only to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but also to launch it with a lavish ad campaign. News of the frenzy surrounding the band over­seas had reached America, provoking curiosity and giving the publi­cists at Capitol something to work with, in addition to the band's upcoming appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Printing millions of stickers, Capitol papered New York and Los Angeles with the news that "The Beatles Are Coming." The actress Janet Leigh was photographed in a Beatle haircut. Capitol even tried, without success, to bribe a cheerleader into holding up a card saying "The Beatles Are Coming" during the pageantry at the Rose Bowl, a nationally televised sports event.

Such publicity ploys became moot once people heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Capitol released the record the day after Christ­mas. Within three days, 250,000 copies had been sold. By January 10, sales had topped one million. In New York City, the disc was re­portedly selling 10,000 copies an hour—though who was keeping count?

There has never been anything quite like Beatlemania, either be­fore or since. Listeners in the nineteenth century may have swooned to the artistry of Franz Liszt—but that was before modern media made it possible for millions of people to swoon as one. Subsequent rock stars, for example, Michael Jackson in 1984, have certainly sold more records than the Beatles—but without the music getting under people's skins, or provoking anything like a collective swoon.

With the Beatles, by contrast, the popular reaction, in America, as it had been in England, was sharp, profound—and enduring. It was as if a large segment of the population had fallen suddenly, and hope­lessly, in love—the feeling of shared pleasure was that intense. At Carnegie Hall, where the Beatles did a couple of shows on their first visit to America, a journalist saw a young girl turn to her two friends and exclaim, "God! It's the greatest catharsis I've ever had!"

Performing in front of a studio audience of 728 people, many of them teenagers invited specifically to shriek and scream for the cam­eras, the Beatles made their live American television debut on Sun­day, February 9, 1964. The Ed Sullivan Show that night was seen by an estimated 73 million people: at the time, the largest audience, by far, in the history of television.

Unlike Elvis Presley in 1956, the Beatles received generally respect­ful notices, however grudging. Television critic Jack Gould, writing in The New York Times, carped that the show was an "anti-climax." But the same paper's music critic expressed almost unqualified admi­ration, in terms that anyone properly cultured might appreciate: "The Beatles are directly in the mainstream of Western tradition. Their harmony is unmistakably diatonic."

Leaving little to chance, Epstein had paid a claque of fans in New York City to besiege the airport, and then stake out the hotel where the band was staying, waving placards and creating a photogenic hubbub. He had also organized saturation coverage of the trip, hir­ing Albert and David Maysles to shoot footage, some for a planned documentary film, some for a television special in England, and some simply for the private use of the Beatles (who were preparing to make their first feature film, with the working title Beatlemanid).

Unlike Tom Parker, who had kept the press at a distance from Elvis Presley, Brian Epstein, by now confident of the boys' winning personalities, treated the media as allies, granting them easy access. Wherever the band went, they were shadowed by reporters and the film crew. As they traveled from New York to Washington, D.C., and then flew on to Miami, the bloated entourage reinforced the atmos­phere of hysteria, as reporters and disc jockeys and photographers moved freely in and out of limousines and hotel rooms, grabbing quotes and taking pictures. The images of that trip, widely broadcast at the time, have, in retrospect, an almost touching innocence: the frenzy of the crowds, the glee of the media, the joy of the band, not yet jaded by the wages of fame.

In its cover story—the first that a serious, mass circulation maga­zine in America had ever devoted to a rock and roll act—Newsweek recounted the band's visit to the British embassy. While they were in Washington, they had attended a party thrown by the British ambas­sador, Sir David Ormsby-Gore: "At one point, Sir David, confused about the names, asked John if he was John. No, John said, he was Fred. Then, pointing to George, he said: "He's John.' Sir David started to address George as John. 'No,' George said, 'I'm Charlie,' and, pointing to Ringo, said 'He's John.' The game worked so splen­didly it was repeated several times. As the Beatles were leaving, Ringo turned to the unsettled ambassador and inquired: 'And what do you do?' "

Like boys on an endless lark, the Beatles in these days seemed able to send up everything—even themselves.

George: "We're rather crummy musicians."

Paul: "We can't sing; we can't do anything, but we're having a great laugh."

So why Beatlemania?

John: "Why not?"

And how does it feel to put on the whole world?

Ringo: "We enjoy it."

Paul: "We aren't really putting you on."

George: "Just a bit of it."

John: "How does it feel to be put on?"

For all the joshing, the Beatles weren't a joke—least of all to John Lennon (no matter how many disparaging remarks he would later make about the band after it had broken up in 1970). Shortly after returning from America, Lennon had a characteristic, and revealing, dustup with a British journalist named George Melly. A former jazz singer turned pop music critic, Melly, like Lennon, was a native of Liverpool with a caustic wit and a blunt personality; later in the decade, his book Revolt Into Style, on the pop arts in England, would famously argue that in pop music, "what starts as revolt fin­ishes as style—as mannerism."

At a party for Lennon, Melly did not shrink from taking a jab at Lennon's vanity. Implying that the Beatles had already sunk into mannerism, he declared that Lennon, despite his fame and wealth, had made music that was manifestly inferior to that of the black American singers he admired.

"He turned on me with sublime arrogance," Melly later recalled. "He'd admit no such thing. Not only was he richer but better too. More original and better."

The episode captures perfectly the cocky belligerence—and creative determination—with which Lennon and the other Beatles took their popularity to heart. The adulation they received only reinforced the pride they took in their craft, creating a form of vaulting ambi­tion all but unprecedented in rock and roll.

That spring, shortly after returning from their trip to America, the Beatles took time off from touring to make their first movie. Shot on a low budget and a tight schedule, A Hard Day's Night shrewdly ex­ploited the excitement that now surrounded the band wherever it went. Pioneering a mixed genre—the director, Richard Lester, called it a "fictionalized documentary"—the film dramatized "an exagger­ated day in the life of the Beatles." The script, by Liverpool writer Alun Owen, depicted the pop process with startling candor, tearing away the veil of glamour, and showing a band being pushed around by its managers, trapped as well as exalted by its fame.

Featuring seven new songs by Lennon and McCartney, the film re­volved around a make-believe television broadcast, which allowed Lester to choreograph the rapture of the fans, reproducing what TV viewers in England and America had seen on the Parnell and Sullivan shows. There was an almost magical scene of the band running free in a park, clowning and leaping about and acting as carefree as they had looked in Dezo Hoffmann's photo on the sleeve of "Twist and Shout." There was a fake press conference with new ad-libs improvised by the band (Q: "How do you find America?" A: "Turn left at Greenland."). There was a mad dash through a railway station, another mad dash into a limousine, scenes replete with real fans running wild in a real frenzy (scenes that were easy to stage, since frenzied fans routinely fer­reted out every location where the film was being shot).

Premiered in London on July 6, A Hard Day's Night soon enough made its way into cinemas around the world, communicating the wit of the band, the adoration of the fans, the sheer exuberance of the moment—and bringing the glad tidings, of Beatlemania, to viewers around the world.

"Although we did it in a light way, I still feel there is a serious purpose to the film," Richard Lester remarked years later, reflecting on what he had hoped to accomplish. "The Beatles told everybody, 'You can do anything you damn well like.' Just go out, and do it. There's no reason why you can't."

At first glance, this may seem a banal sentiment. But as Lester well knew, in a country like England, where the prospects of young peo­ple had long been circumscribed by caste and class, Beatlemania was anything but banal. As Lester put it, "the Beatles sent the class thing sky-high; they laughed it out of existence." John Lennon was not by upbringing a member of the working class; in England in 1964, he became a working-class hero.

In the United States, on the other hand, the band's impact was dif­ferent. In America, the prospects of young people had long been cir­cumscribed not by class, but rather by an openhearted eagerness to want whatever one was supposed to want, to do whatever one was supposed to do, to be just like everyone else.

In America, it was this timid conformism that the Beatles laughed out of existence. The stars of A Hard Day's Night made the cookie-cutter teen idols of American Bandstand seem fake and meretricious by comparison. A new sort of festive spirit took shape, unafraid, even proud, of what before would have seemed alien, idiosyncratic, unacceptable.

Evidently on an island unto themselves, nourished by the appar­ently inexhaustible love of their fans, the Beatles as they appeared in these months offered one image of Utopia in the Sixties. Affluent, un­attached, carefree, they were able to act out before a mass audience a surreal saga of triumph and conquest, achieved as if without effort— as if life, in the prophetic mirror of their music and persona, could become a permanent vacation.

LET GO! HAVE FUN!

Such were the imperatives of the new age dawning—and the party had just begun.

-end