The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians & Other Fans Remember PDF
Preview The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians & Other Fans Remember
The Beatles Are Here! 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians, and Other Fans Remember —Edited by— PENELOPE ROWLANDS ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2014 Also by Penelope Rowlands ANTHOLOGY Paris Was Ours: 32 Writers Reflect on the City of Light BIOGRAPHY A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters MONOGRAPHS Jean Prouvé: Visionary Humanist Eileen Gray: Modern Alchemist ILLUSTRATED BOOK Weekend Houses (with photographer Mark Darley) For Julian, always, & for my sisters in screaming: Vickie Joann Linda “All those beautiful songs that helped me exist . . .” —CYNDI LAUPER CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Tools of Satan, Liverpool Division by Joe Queenan Greil Marcus, rock critic We Saw Them Standing There by Amanda Vaill A Newspaper Article by Gay Talese In Love with Gorgeous George by Penelope Rowlands A Letter from Vickie Brenna-Costa Henry Grossman, photographer Good Bye, Mitzi Gaynor by Verlyn Klinkenborg Jamie Nicol Bowles, fan Billy Joel, musician Swimming to John by Noelle Oxenhandler Gay Talese, reporter My Four Friends by Cyndi Lauper A Facebook Encounter Vickie Brenna-Costa, fan America’s Beatlemania Hangover by Debbie Geller “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, disc jockey Sister Mary Paul McCartney by Mary Norris Peter Duchin, bandleader Anne Brown, fan A Diary Entry by Anne Brown, age 15 Springsteen’s Hair Stands on End by Peter Ames Carlin FUN by Véronique Vienne Vicky Tiel, fashion designer Tom Long, fan Janis Ian, musician A Way to Live in the World by Carolyn See Up, Up, Up by Lisa See Joann Marie Pugliese Flood, fan Into the Future by Pico Iyer Fran Lebowitz, nonfan Michael Laven, fan An E-mail from Phillip Lopate White Out by Judy Juanita Renée Fleming, soprano Where Music Had to Go by Anthony Scadutto Tom Rush, musician Thawing Out by Barbara Ehrenreich Laura Tarrish, fan Screening the Beatles by David Thomson Gabriel Kahane, composer and songwriter Vera, Chuck and Dave by Roy Blount, Jr. Linda Belfi Bartel, fan David Dye, radio show host The Back of the Album by David Michaelis Will Lee, musician Why Couldn’t They Leave Us Alone? by Sigrid Nunez Leah Silidjian, fan Independence Day, 1976 by Will Hermes CONTRIBUTORS SOURCES AND PERMISSIONS INTRODUCTION WE WERE THERE. We were there when the Beatles first landed on American shores, half a century ago. This book is about the impact of their arrival. It is a “scrapbook of madness,” in John Lennon’s famous words.* Our madness, and theirs. People who weren’t around then can scarcely imagine how it was when the Beatles came. How quickly they changed . . . everything. Suddenly, they were here. There. Everywhere. The band infiltrated the airwaves by way of AM radio, at first via just a few songs, including, notably, “She Loves You,” with its famous “Yeah, yeah, yeah” chorus and insistent, captivating beat. Two minutes and nineteen seconds that seemed to render almost everything, musically, that came before it obsolete. It erased so much. The world was so different then—as so many witnesses to the Beatles phenomenon attest in the following pages. The Atlantic seemed impossibly vast. There was no Internet, of course. News traveled by way of long-distance calls (rare because of the expense) and telegrams. Telegrams! Beginning in late 1963 the songs arrived, ultrafast, delivered to us via quick-talking DJs and in vinyl form—45s, EPs, LPs. Each album came in mono or stereo. Whatever the format, each Beatles song was a burst of fresh sound, with a danceable beat, sweet, easy lyrics. I can still recall how electrified—shocked!—I felt by the first one I ever heard; from its thrilling opening drum roll to its curious last chord, “She Loves You” took me somewhere else. One release followed another in staccato succession—“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Love Me Do,” “I Feel Fine,” “Eight Days a Week”—a sustained climax that went on and on. Which partly explains the intensity of the experience. Within a quick slice of time the band changed the way we dressed, moved, listened, thought. The way we were. One writer in these pages, Sigrid Nunez, likens the experience of Beatlemania to drinking a potion. It was that transformative and abrupt. Joe Queenan describes a revolution: “The Beatles swept away Pat Boone, Vic Damone, the Kingston Trio, doo-wop, and all that other twaddle in about thirty-six hours.” We carried around the Beatles’ songs on plastic transistor radios with their scratchy sound. We moved to the music. We came alive to it on boardwalks “down the shore” in New Jersey; in sleepy Southern towns; on farms in Oregon; in Detroit cityscapes. We blared it out to our American world from streamlined, finned, gas-guzzling cars; suburban houses with pristine lawns; urban apartments overlooking sooty alleys. And some of us heard it in our heads as we chased the Beatles down hotel corridors or yelled up to them from the sidewalks below. We were so primed to scream. As quite a few people in this collection, including “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, the legendary disc jockey, and the musician Billy Joel, remind us, the band’s arrival in February of 1964 seemed to awaken this country from a profound, shattering grief. President Kennedy had been assassinated only six weeks before. America was in shards. I remember coming home from school through the streets of Manhattan on the day JFK was killed, walking among hollow-eyed, tear-stricken adults. Grown-ups who had apparently emerged from a black-and-white horror film, lurching along, as if barely alive themselves. Within a few short months, I was running through those same New York streets with a pack of girls I scarcely knew, following the Beatles and other British rock and roll bands around town, shrieking at the top of our lungs. Which is how The Beatles Are Here! came about. Many years after the
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