You knew they had to show up sooner or later, and why not today, the 50th anniversary of the first time they set foot in the U.S. Yup, the date was 7 February 1964. And what a welcome for John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
They came over to play on the Ed Sullivan Show, which aired
on February 9th. The second appearance was on 16 February, and the third on
February 23rd. It so happens that this year those dates fall on Sundays as they
did in 1964.
In 1964, I turned 5. In August. This is the music of my childhood. There is a shortlist of things I could come up with from childhood that have had a long-term effect on who I am . . . things like “middle child,” “lost an older sibling early,” “raised Catholic,” etc. Somewhere on that list would be The Beatles. How early did I become aware of them? I don’t remember a distinct impression from the Sullivan shows, though I’m sure they played in our house. The Beatles didn’t make a real in-roads on my consciousness until the 45 we had: “A Hard Day’s Night” backed with “Should Have Known Better.” And when the film was shown on TV was when I was fully clued in about them as figures who were oddly both fictional and real. My first taste of what celebrity really is.
“She Loves You,” though, was unavoidable. It had the tagline
“yeah yeah yeah”s that became associated with The Beatles, sneered at by elders
as moronic and ungrammatical. To answer
“yeah” rather than “yes” to a query from an elder was deemed insolent.
I was also struck—in my dim-remembered past—by the fact that
the singer is telling some guy about how a girl feels about him. What a nice
guy! The fact that Paul and John sing together is probably the thing that most
struck me, as I was used to songs with lead singers. And, apart from the
infectiousness of the “yeah yeah yeah,” there were a few other points about the
song that grabbed me (I always liked it better than “I Want to Hold Your Hand”):
the drumbeats that open the song and the way they punctuate after “yeah yeah
yeah” (twice) and the way a fourth, descending “yeah” (that’s the one that gets
me) leads into Harrison’s guitar part (ah, Rickenbackers) before the first
verse (which is only so-so, I never liked the “yesterday-yay” bit) that gets a
big jolt from “she said she loves you” (thump) “and you know that can’t be bad”
(guitar figure) “she said she loves you and you know you should be glad.” Now, when that part comes back around we get
the great “ooooooo” after “glad” (1:02), which, from then on out becomes the
most charged part of the song (you wait for it to repeat and it does), until
the part at the end, on third time, “with a love like that you know you should . . . be glad!”
(then “yeah yeah yeah” as harmony). The other
thing, which was kind of mature for boy-girl relations at the time, is that the
lyrics call upon a guy to “apologize to her because she loves you.” Wow.
Granted, for a pre-teen there’s something icky about that,
like some girl loves you and you’re supposed to care? But The Beatles say you
shouldn’t blow her off, y’know, like you should consider her feelings ‘n’ stuff.
Anyway, when I recall the early Beatles it’s like thinking
back to playground etiquette and how one learns to get along with other kids. The fact
that these guys were a frame of reference for virtually everyone colors those
days for me. Leastways, for kids so young, it defined what popular music was,
it owned the radio and it made for collective occasions when other kids asked if
you “heard the new one yet.” Because
time seems to take so long to pass at that age, the time from 1964 to 1969 took
forever. They changed so much, but then, so did I. And so did my siblings and
my peers. At times you forgot about The Beatles, but they were always there somewhere and their
earlier songs were often more prevalent than current ones once they got seriously into making
albums. Which is also a way of saying that The Beatles were for me the time
from “A Hard Day’s Night” to “Penny Lane.” Then later appearances with “Hey
Jude” and, finally, “Let It Be” and I was into double digits. The first LP of theirs I heard was Abbey Road, and by then the rumors of their eventual demise (to say nothing of McCartney's actual demise) were already in the air.
All of which I’m sure I’ll get to, one way or another. But
today it’s the time to “meet The Beatles” fifty years on.
2 comments:
It strikes me that there's an extra level of detail in this discussion, right down to references to the exact time when something happens. I don't think you've done any such "super-close" reading in the rest of the series. Does that say something about The Beatles? Or about how one listens to them?
One of my favorite details in a Beatles recording is the hand claps in "Here Comes The Sun." Several devoted Beatles fans that I have mentioned that to over the past few years did not believe me that there were any hand claps!
And the other day, my shuffling jazz playlist gave me "Birdland," by Weather Report, and I noticed it has some cool hand clapping too.
I think a few others have been as detailed (XTC, for instance) but I think you're right that discussion of The Beatles sorta demands such detail, if only because they are so thoroughly discussed. But I think it has more to do with their recording techniques in which everything is so well thought-out. It took me a while to realize that the early Beatles recordings are wonders in that regard; I used to dismiss them as "juvenile boy and girl songs," so I have some making-up to do. As to the hand-claps: yes, it's often the little touches that continue to delight, over the years.
And "how one listens to them": it's my contention that, to me, how I learned to listen to the Beatles influenced how I learned to listen to all music after them.
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