Beatlemania!

Beatlemania!
iverpool, England is a grimy industrial seaport city on the Mersey River, close to the Irish Sea at the island of Britain’s narrow waist. Like seaports everywhere in the world, it caters to a rough, hard-­‐drinking, brawling clientele of sailors from all quarters of the globe. Like industrial cities everywhere, it also provides distractions for mill-­‐hands and machine operators, people whose tastes in entertainment often tend toward the raw, the vital, and the elemental. It’s a rough town, Liverpool; a blue-­‐collar town, short on refinements. For entertainers, it’s the sort of place where you either please the crowd or they might throw you out – literally. In the early 1960s, each dive and cellar club had musical entertainment of some sort – a pianist or a small band – playing for drinks and tips and a small salary from the club’s owners. Mostly they played current rock ‘n’ roll hits from America, tunes by Bill Haley or Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry, interspersed with some of their own material of the same sort. The music had to be simple, and it had to move, if the bands were to keep working. One bad night and they’d be out on their ears. Most performers did something else during the day, but the extra quid earned at night helped pay the bills, so you played what the customers wanted to hear. One rather typical group in Liverpool in the late 1950’s was a four-­‐man band called the Cavemen. They were also known as the Moon-­‐
dogs, the Quarrymen Skiffle Group, and the Moonshiners, depending on which club they were working at the time. Three of the Cavemen were rather bored college students by day. They enjoyed playing at night, and would have been happy to make a career of their music. They pay, however, would hardly support an aspiring musician. Fifteen dollars a week wouldn’t go far, even in 1960. When the group got an offer from a club in Hamburg, Germany, for $20 per week, it looked too good to pass up. But what name to use? One of the group thought up a name that was a play on words. In the late 1950s, America’s intellectuals went through a period of fascination with the writers who called themselves the Beat Generation. Their deliberately bizarre appearance and behavior earned them the nickname of beatniks. The Cavemen adoped the name the Silver Beatles for their Hamburg job, and it is as the Beatles that they have been known ever since. The Hamburg job produced nothing much more exciting than a slightly higher salary and one recording. Dame Fate, who chased after Gene Autry until she made him a star, seemed not to notice this unremarkable band of Liverpudlians, but the Lady was merely being coy. She located a young department-­‐store heir named Brian Epstein, who in 1961 heard the groups’ recording and undertook to manage them. He changed their appearance from grungy beatnik to choirboy cute and arranged for recordings and TV appearances. They replaced their first drummer with Ringo Starr, and the magic circle – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Starr – was complete. This is a good place to think about a question that applies to many entertainers; Why was this group to become so popular? There were dozens – perhaps hundreds – of similar bands in Liverpool and all over England, playing similar songs in similar ways. Many of those bands probably had musicians as talented and proficient as any of the Beatles. The quartet themselves had no inflated view of their abilities. Harrison once remarked wistfully that he wished he could be a “really good guitar player,” and Lennon once stated that the one thing about their art that they took seriously was the money. What made the difference in this case was the fifth Beatle, Brian Epstein. However talented a person or a group is, a good promoter can maximize their potential (or minimize their defects). Epstein had a flair for promotion, and by the time he died in 1967, the Beatles could say, in awe but with some justification, “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ.” They began by conquering England. In 1963, they earned their first gold record in Britain. Life became a whirl of recording dates, concerts, television appearances, a command performance before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. As went England, so went the Continent. “Beatlemania,” it was called, and it swept Europe like an epidemic. At almost any time, night or day, if a person turned the radio dial, a Beatle tune was playing on some station. The United States held out until 1964. At the beginning of January in that year, there were no British groups with songs in Billboard magazine’s Top 100. Within a month, Meet the Beatles was the hottest selling album in the country. The group presented a concert in Carnegie Hall in February, and appeared on Ed Sullivan’s televised variety show soon afterward. America surrendered to Beatlemania with mixed delight and apprehension, and shaggy Beatle haircuts appeared from Manhattan to Pacific Palisades. Parents of teenage daughters who had already been scandalized by Elvis Presely’s suggestive wiggling felt distinctly uneasy about “the Moptops” from England. True enough, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” did sound pretty tame. It inspired visions of innocent puppy love, with none of the alarming double meaning of “Sixty Minute Man” or even the “Love Me Tender.” But who could make sense of ditties like, “It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night?” Besides, if these Brits were as harmless as they appeared, why did the girls get so excited? Surely there was something, well, sinister in all that… Truth to tell, an enormous amount of the Beatles’ appeal had nothing to do with music. The facts that they were young, rather cuddly-­‐looking, and had a talent for smart-­‐
aleck remarks and absurdity, explained much of their appeal. They mocked ostentation in society, in themselves, and even in their fans. At live concerts, the girls squealed and shrieked so loudly and so continuously that the boys sometimes stopped singing into their mikes and just mouthed the words – and no one was the wiser. Their tunes had much of the strong rhythm and lighthearted, tongue-­‐in-­‐cheek brashness that made rock ‘n’ roll popular in the first place. They sang covers of older rock ‘n’ roll songs by Chuck Berry and others, but they also sang their own material, which was often steeped in the centuries-­‐old British folk-­‐song tradition. These qualities – together with lighthearted, sometimes frivolous (but often poetic) texts – were like a fresh breeze to a pop-­‐music field that was stuck at the rockabilly and rhythm-­‐and-­‐blues level. Rock was always changed rapidly, mostly because each style of rock tents to become a parody of itself so quickly. To a certain extent, such exaggeration is an element of rock’s basic aesthetic. It is effective as satire; it loses force when it is taken seriously. In these early days, pomposity was a fault the Beatles easily avoided. As the group matured and accepted the fact of their own enormous success, the Beatles began to reach out for new sources of ideas and inspiration. Curiously enough, one sources was the classical-­‐music tradition of India. George Harrison discovered the sitar and its best-­‐known exponent in the West, Ravi Shankar. While he used the sitar as if it were some exotic version of the guitar, he at least introduced the sound of the instrument to a vast audience, and brought this fascinating musical tradition to the attention of Europe and America. The Beatles songs of the late 1960s changed from bubble-­‐gum confections like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to more mature topics (as in the song, “Strawberry Fields Forever”) and much more adventurous musical resources. Besides the occasional use of the sitar, they used electronic distortions of recorded sound, and on the “super-­‐album” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band even used a symphony orchestra. As so often in rock, pomposity was once more rearing its head. Yet out of these experiments in blending rock with the music of the symphony hall or of other cultures grew one of the most interesting and significant styles in history of popular music. After 1970, the Beatles broke up and pursued solo careers. In December 1980 John Lennon, the foremost songwriter of the four, was assassinated by a deranged fan.