The Beatles on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, August 8, 1964
© 1964 SEPS. All Rights Reserved.

Getting the Beatles All Wrong

There was no place to escape the Beatles in the early ’60s. Radio stations across the country were continually playing “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” They were also airing the swarm of criticism aroused by these four young musicians. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about the Beatles, and most were critical.

A February 1964 editorial in The New York World Telegram described their music as “a haunting combination of rock ‘n’ roll, the shimmy, a hungry cat riot, and Fidel Castro on a harangue.”

From Newsweek: “Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.”

Even the mythical James Bond weighed in, telling a love interest in one of his movies, “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done. Such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above a temperature of 38 degrees Farenheit. That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”

American reporters were not exactly sympathetic to the Beatles when they visited the United States in 1964. They laughed at the Beatles’ jokes, but they wrote about them with the dismissive tone they used for lesser celebrities and one-hit wonders.

The Saturday Evening Post—the essence of mainstream media in its day—opened its 1964 cover story about the Beatles with the sort of cute headline that was so popular then:

“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

“They can’t read music, their beat is corny, and their voices are faint, but England’s shaggy-maned exports manage to flip wigs on two continents.”

In his article,  author Alfred G. Aronowitz manages to relay some facts, but he never loses his tone of bemused indifference.

“The first question from the American press was, ‘Do you believe in lunacy?’

‘Yeah,’ answered one of the Beatles, ‘it’s healthy.’

“Another reporter asked, ‘Would you please sing something?’

‘No,’ replied another Beatle, ‘we need money first.’

“Still another reporter asked, ‘Do you hope to take anything home with you?’

‘Yeah,’ a Beatle replied. ‘Rockefeller Center.’

There are only four Beatles, but he doesn’t bother getting the names right. Perhaps he senses that it won’t be important. These musicians might be fading by the time his article hits the newsstands.

You might recognize the Beatles from the picture he gives, but it’s a bad likeness.

“Amid a fanfare of screeches, there emerged four young Britons in Edwardian four-button suits. One was short and thick-lipped. Another was handsome and peach-fuzzed. A third had a heavy face and the hint of buckteeth. On the fourth, the remnants of adolescent pimples were noticeable.”

Like many reporters, Aronowitz focuses on Ringo, who is the most easily caricatured:

“Ringo … has bright blue eyes that remind one of a child looking through a window, although he sometimes deliberately crosses them as he sits dumbly at the drums playing his corny four-four beat. ‘I hate phonies,’ he says with the absolutism of somebody who thinks he can spot one a mile away. ‘I can’t stand them.’

Paul, George, Ringo, and John rehearse for the Ed Sullivan show in Miami Beach. In Florida, the Beatles went yachting, swam in private pools, and visited heavyweight champ Cassius Clay.

“He acquired the nickname because he wears two rings on each hand. He wears different rings at different times, changing them like cuff links. ‘I like the gold ones,’ he says ‘The fans send a lot of silver ones, too. but I send them back.’ Then he adds, ‘Do you know I have 2,761 rings?’

“Although, at 23, he is the oldest of the Beatles, he is at the bottom of what sociologists would call their pecking order. When he joined the group, it already had a record contract, and the unspoken feeling in the quartet is that Ringo was hired by the other three. When they disagree on anything, Ringo is the last to get his way. ‘You’d be nowhere,’ Paul McCartney says to him in the ultimate squelch, ‘if it weren’t for the rest of us.’”

Ouch. Poor Ringo.

Aronowitz doesn’t seem to like Paul, either. His description relies on the opinions of unnamed sources and an actress who admits she didn’t really talk to him.

“The fans call Paul the handsome one, and he knows it. [They do? He does?] The others in the group call Paul ‘The Star.’ He does most of the singing and most of the wiggling, trying to swing his hips after the fashion of Elvis Presley, one of his boyhood idols.

“In the British equivalent of high school, Paul was mostly in the upper ranks scholastically, unlike the other Beatles. ‘He was like, you know, a goody-goody in school,’ remembers one of Paul’s boyhood friends. He also, as another former classmate remembers him, was a ‘tubby little kid’ who avoided girlish rejections by avoiding girls.”

“‘Paul is the hardest one to get to know, although that doesn’t mean he’s the deepest,’ says a friend. When the 18-year-old English actress Jill Haworth had a private audience with Paul in Miami Beach, it lasted only a few minutes. ‘I just couldn’t find anything to talk to him about,’ she later said. ‘It was just impossible to get started talking.’ Paul, who plays bass guitar, wears the same tight pants that are part of the uniform of the Beatles, although he often distinguishes himself with a vest. ‘Paul,’ says one member of the troupe, ‘is the only one of the boys who’s had it go to his head.’ Sometimes, talking with the other Beatles, he finds himself using accents much more high-toned than the working-class slang of Liverpool, where he grew up. When he does, John Lennon mockingly mimics him.”

What was behind Aronowitz’s cynical dismissal? It wasn’t hard facts: He seemed to rely entirely on secondhand sources. Yet his critical view was echoed by countless ministers, editors, and school teachers in those years.

Part of the hostility was, we can assume, a reaction to the sudden rise of unique phenomenon.  In the same March 1964 issue in which Aronowitz presentd his barely informed critique, Vance Packard offered a confident dissection of the Beatle phenomenon. “To get [a craze] started you need to bring into fusion five vital ingredients,” he writes, then generously identifies them all.  Some of his points are quite perceptive, but one of his points was slightly off-target. America’s youth was finding its own, distinct experience—a quest even more important than rebelling against their parents.

After all, 70 million baby boomers reached teenage-hood in the 1960s. With such numbers, and the unprecedented freedom America gave its youth, teenagers had the opportunity to build a culture of their own. They wanted music that reflected their experience; if it annoyed their parents, even better, but that wasn’t essential. America’s youth wanted something that could help define themselves amid an older, vastly more experienced generation that sometimes resented its youngsters.

Art critic Dave Hickey has noted that “even though we all remember that American children rebelled against their parents in the 1960s, we tend to forge that American parents rebelled against their own children in the 1950s—that in the midst of the postwar boom, they began to regard their offspring with jealousy and suspicion, as spoiled, hedonistic delinquents who had not fought World War II or suffered through the Great Depression and were now reaping the unearned benefits of their parents’ struggle.”

Five months later, Aronowitz again reported on the Beatles. This time, he took the phenomenon more seriously. He wrote about their background, the hopeless poverty of Liverpool, and the others who were hoping to follow the Beatles’ path to success. In the short time between issues, the author seems to have realized that there is something more to the Beatles than Ringo’s jewelry or Paul’s arrogance. In fact, he includes a significant quote by Paul:

“‘You know,’ he says, ‘we’re all more confident in ourselves now than we were. Ringo especially. He was always more of an introvert than he is now. Like that thing about us telling him he’d be nowhere without the rest of us. To anybody writing or printing it, we’re the biggest gang of conceited swellheads going. You know, people used to have the idea, and one or two still do, that we pick on Ringo… is so ridiculous.”

Aronowitz doesn’t remind the reader that he was the one who wrote “that thing.”

If the media did such a poor job reporting on the Beatles, can we assume that hip hop music has been unduly criticized? Is it, in fact, better than it sounds? Will we some day listen nostalgically to Snoop Dog, 2Pac, Dr. Dre, and Public Enemy?

Maybe not. But it is possible that these musicians have been given the same dismissive critique that greeted all new music styles.

The Beatles and The Stones: An Early Conversation

We thought this was too good to miss — a conversation between John Lennon, Brian Jones, and Keith Richards, as recorded by David Aronowitz in “The Return of the Beatles”

There was a party afterward in the Dorchester Hotel, and the princess came. So did Brian Jones and Keith Richards, two members of the popular new quintet called the Rolling Stones. The party was formal, with gowns and black ties, but Jones and Richards were wearing turtleneck shirts.

Isn’t this the greatest party crash of all time?” said Jones. The Rolling Stones’ latest record, It’s All Over Now, had just hit the top of the British pop-record charts, and the Beatles came over to congratulate them with glasses of champagne. A society orchestra was trying to play rock ‘n’ roll, but not even the dancers were listening to its eviscerated beat.

An elderly woman came up to John and said. “You’re simply darling.”

“Can’t say the same for you. Luv,” John replied. Later, as the party broke up, he told her, “Good night. Mrs. Haitch. We’ll dance again some Somerset Maugham.”

Meanwhile a crowd of begowned autograph hunters were besieging the Rolling Stones. Brian Jones was still signing his name when the orchestra began playing God Save the Queen. “Stop it,” a diamond-necklaced woman at his table commanded sternly. He kept on signing. “Stop it!” she commanded again, this time with the fury of the empire in her voice. Jones stopped signing and picked up a woman’s scarf which was lying on the table in front of him. Slowly, to the solemn tones of the music, he wrapped it around his neck. When the orchestra came to the final verse, an off-key voice at the front of the ballroom shrieked out the word “save” from God Save the Queen. It was John Lennon, and what he actually had sung was, “God s-a-a-a-ve the cream.”

After the party John, Paul and Ringo went to the Ad Lib, an after-hours club. Paul left early. Ringo was the next to go…

John continued drinking Scotch and Coke at the Ad Lib Club. His hand gripped his glass as if he were trying to crush it. His eyes seemed hard, sharp and unsmiling. His upper; lip sometimes curled as he talked, displaying hard white teeth.

“I love you,’ he told Brian Jones and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. “I loved you the first time I heard you. But there’s something wrong with you, isn’t there? There’s one of you in the group that isn’t as good as the others. Find out who he is and get rid of ‘im.”

For a while they argued about music. The Rolling Stones, who come from London, play American Negro rhythm-and-blues [sic]. The Beatles, they said, were playing white commercial rock ‘n’ roll.

For another while they argued about hair styles. “Your hair makes it,” John told Brian Jones. “Your hair makes it,” he said to Keith Richards, “But Mick Jagger,” he said, referring to another Rolling Stone, “you know as well as I do, that his hair doesn’t make it.” ”

“It’s harder for us than it was for you,” said Brian Jones, “because we have to contend with you and America, You only had to contend with America.’

“Ahhh,” said John, “in another year’ I’ll have me money and I’ll be out of it.’”

“In another year,” said Brian Jones, “we’ll be there.”

John took a drag on his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said, “but what’s there?”

Read “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: Music’s Gold Bugs: The Beatles” by Alfred G. Aronowitz, published March 21, 1964 [PDF].

Read “The Return to the Beatles” by Alfred G. Aronowitz, published August 8, 1964 [PDF].

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March 6, 2010