Night Beat (4 page)

BEATLES THEN

I
n the 1950s, rock & roll meant disruption: It was the clamor of young people, kicking hard against the Eisenhower era’s public ethos of vapid repression. By the outset of the 1960s, that spirit had been largely tamed, or simply impeded by numerous misfortunes, including Elvis Presley’s film and army careers; the death of Buddy Holly; the blacklisting of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry; and the persecution of D.J. Alan Freed, who had been stigmatized on payola charges by Tin Pan Alley interests and politicians, angered by his championing of R & B and rock & roll. To be sure, pop still had its share of rousing voices and trends—among them musicians like Ray Charles and James Brown, who were rapidly transforming R & B into a more aggressive and soulful form—but clearly, there had been a tilt: In 1960, the music of Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, Connie Francis, and Mitch Miller (an avowed enemy of rock & roll) ruled the airwaves and the record charts, giving some observers the notion that decency and order had returned to the popular mainstream. But within a few years, rock would regain its disruptive power with a joyful vengeance, until by the decade’s end it would be seen as a genuine force of cultural and political consequence. For a remarkable season, it was a widely held truism—or threat, depending on your point of view—that rock & roll could (and
should
) make a difference: that it was eloquent and inspiring and principled enough to change the world—maybe even save it.

How did such a dramatic development take place? How did rock & roll come to be seen as such a potent voice for cultural revolution?

In part, of course, it was simply a confluence of auspicious conditions and ambitious prodigies that would break things open. Or, if you prefer a more romantic or mythic view, you could simply say that rock & roll had set something loose in the 1950s—a spirit of cultural abandon—that could not be stopped or refused, and you might even be right. Certainly, rock & roll had demonstrated that it was capable of inspiring massive generational and social ferment, and that its rise could even have far-reaching political consequences. That is, admiring and buying the music of Elvis Presley not only raised issues of sex and age and helped stylize new customs of youth revolt, but also inevitably advanced the cause of racial tolerance, if not social equality. This isn’t to say that to enjoy Presley or rock & roll was the same as subscribing to liberal politics, nor is it to suggest that the heroism of R & B and rock musicians was equal to that of civil rights campaigners like Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, or Rosa Parks, who paid through pain, humiliation, and blood for their courage. But rock & roll
did
present black musical forms—and consequently black sensibilities and black causes—to a wider (and whiter) audience than ever before, and as a result, it drove a fierce, threatening wedge into the heart of the American musical mainstream.

By the 1960s, though, as the sapless Eisenhower years were ending and the brief, lusty Kennedy era was forming, a new generation was coming of age. The parents of this generation had worked and fought for ideals of peace, security, and affluence, and they expected their children not merely to appreciate or benefit from this bequest, but also to affirm and extend their prosperous new world. But the older generation was also passing on legacies of fear and some unfinished obligations—anxieties of nuclear obliteration and ideological difference, and sins of racial violence—and in the rush to stability, priceless ideals of equality and justice had been compromised, even lost. Consequently, the children of this age—who would forever be dubbed the “baby boom generation”—were beginning to question the morality and politics of postwar America, and some of their musical tastes began to reflect this unrest. In particular, folk music—led by Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez; and, in particular, Bob Dylan—was gaining a new credibility and popularity, as well as an important moral authority. It spoke for a world that
should be,
and it was stirring many young people to commit themselves to social activism, especially regarding the cause of civil rights. But for all its egalitarian ideals, folk also seemed a music of past and largely spent traditions. As such, it was also the medium for an alliance of politicos and intelligentsia that viewed a teen-rooted, mass entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had accomplished in the 1950s.

WHEN ROCK & ROLL’S rejuvenation came, it was from a place small and unlikely, and far away. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Liverpool, England, was a fading port town that had slid from grandeur to dilapidation during the postwar era, and it had come to be viewed by snobbish Londoners as a demeaned place of outsiders—in a class-conscious land that was itself increasingly an outsider in modern political affairs and popular culture. But one thing Liverpool had was a brimming pop scene, made up of bands playing tough and exuberant blues- and R & B-informed rock & roll.

One Saturday morning back in 1961, a young customer entered a record store called NEMS, “The Finest Record Store in Liverpool,” on Whitechapel, a busy road in the heart of the city’s stately commercial district. The young man asked store manager Brian Epstein for a new single, “My Bonnie,” by the Beatles. Epstein replied that he had never heard of the record—indeed, had never heard of the group, which he took to be an obscure, foreign pop group. The customer, Raymond Jones, pointed out the front window, across Whitechapel, where Stanley Street juts into a murky-looking alley area. Around that corner, he told Epstein, on a smirched lane known as Mathew Street, the Beatles—perhaps the most popular of Liverpudlian rock & roll groups—performed afternoons at a cellar club, the Cavern. A few days later, prompted by more requests, Epstein made that journey around Stanley onto Mathew and down the dank steps into the Cavern. With that odd trudge, modern pop culture turned its most eventful corner. By October 1962, Brian Epstein was the Beatles’ manager, and the four-piece ensemble had broken into Britain’s Top 20 with a folkish rock song, “Love Me Do.” There was little about the single that heralded greatness—the group’s leaders, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, weren’t yet distinguished songwriters—but nonetheless the song began a momentum that would forever shatter the American grip on the U.K. pop charts.

In many ways, Britain was as ripe for a pop cataclysm as America had been for Presley during the ennui after world war. In England—catching the reverberations of not just Presley, but the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac—the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth subcultural class: the by-product of a postwar population, top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen. For those people, pop music denoted more than preferred entertainment or even stylistic rebellion: It signified the idea of autonomous society. British teenagers weren’t just rejecting their parents’ values—they were superseding them, though they were also acting out their eminence in American terms—in the music of Presley and rockabilly; in blues and jazz tradition.

When Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles at the Cavern, he saw not only a band who delivered their American obsessions with infectious verve but also reflected British youth’s joyful sense of being cultural outsiders, ready to embrace everything new, and everything that their surrounding society tried to prohibit them. What’s more, Epstein figured that the British pop scene would recognize and seize on this kinship. As the group’s manager, Epstein cleaned up the Beatles’ punkness considerably, but he didn’t deny the group its spirit or musical instincts, and in a markedly short time, his faith paid off. A year after “Love Me Do” peaked at number 17 in the
New Musical Express
charts, the Beatles had six singles active in the Top 20 in the same week, including the top three positions—an unprecedented and still unduplicated feat. In the process, Lennon and McCartney had grown enormously as writers—in fact, they were already one of the best composing teams in pop history—and the group itself had upended the local pop scene, establishing a hierarchy of long-haired male ensembles, playing a popwise but hard-bashing update of ’50s-style rock & roll. But there was more to it than mere pop success: The Beatles were simply the biggest explosion England had witnessed in modern history, short of war. In less than a year, they had transformed British pop culture—had redefined not only its intensities and possibilities, but had turned it into a matter of nationalistic impetus.

Then, on February 9, 1964, following close on the frenzied breakthrough of “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” TV variety-show kingpin Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles for the first time to a mass American audience, and it proved to be an epochal moment. The Sullivan appearance drew over 70 million viewers—the largest TV audience ever, at that time—an event that cut across divisions of style and region, and drew new divisions of era and age; an event that, like Presley, made rock & roll seem an irrefutable opportunity. Within days it was apparent that not just pop style but a whole dimension of youth society had been recast—that a genuine upheaval was under way, offering a frenetic distraction to the dread that had set into America after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and a renewal of the brutally wounded ideal that youthfulness carried our national hope. Elvis Presley had shown us how rebellion could be fashioned into eye-opening style; the Beatles were showing us how style could take on the impact of cultural revelation—or at least how a pop vision might be forged into an unimpeachable consensus. Virtually overnight, the Beatles’ arrival in the American consciousness announced that not only the music and times were changing, but that
we
were changing as well. Everything about the band—its look, sound, style, and abandon—made plain that we were entering a different age, that young people were free to redefine themselves in completely new terms.

All of which raises an interesting question: Would the decade’s pop and youth scenes have been substantially different without the Beatles? Or were the conditions such that, given the right catalyst, an ongoing pop explosion was inevitable? Certainly other bands (including the Shadows, the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers, the Zombies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Manfred Mann) contributed to the sense of an emerging scene, and yet others (among them the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and—especially—Bob Dylan) would make music just as vital, and more aggressive (and sometimes smarter and more revealing) than that of the Beatles. Yet the Beatles had a singular gift that transcended even their malleable sense of style, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s genius as songwriters and arrangers, or Brian Epstein and producer George Martin’s unerring stewardship as devoted mentors. Namely, the Beatles possessed an almost impeccable flair for rising to the occasion of their own moment in history, for honoring the promise of their own talents—and this knack turned out to be the essence, the heart, of their artistry. The thrill and momentum wouldn’t fade for several years; the music remained a constant surprise and delight, the band, continually transfixing and influential, as both their work and presence intensified our lives. In the end, only their own conceits, conflicts, ambitions, and talents served as decisive boundaries.

In short, the Beatles were a rupture—they changed modern history—and no less a visionary than Bob Dylan understood the meaning of their advent. “They were doing things nobody else was doing. . . . ,” he later told biographer Anthony Scaduto. “But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were just for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction that music had to go. . . . It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before.”

THE BEATLES, of course, were hardly alone in transforming the 1960s’ pop soundscape. Bob Dylan—inspired by the Beatles’ creativity, freedom, and impact—moved on to electric music in 1965, to the outrage of the folk community though also to an incalculable benefit for rock & roll. The Rolling Stones—whose pop careers the Beatles helped make possible (in fact, Lennon and McCartney wrote the band’s first hit single, “I Wanna Be Your Man”)—were already impressing nervous adults as being a bit repellent for the obvious sexual implications of a song like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” And there was much more: Some of the most pleasurable and enduring music of the 1960s was being made by the monumental black-run Detroit label, Motown—which had scored over two dozen Top 10 hits by 1965 alone, by such artists as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, and the Four Tops. By contrast, a grittier brand of the new soul sensibility was being defined by Memphis-based Volt, Stax, and Atlantic artists like Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Wilson Pickett, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, James Carr and William Bell, and most memorably, Otis Redding. In other words, black forms remained vital to rock and pop’s growth (in fact, R & B’s codes, styles, and spirit had long served as models for white pop and teen rebellion—especially for the young Beatles and Rolling Stones), and as racial struggles continued through the decade, soul—as well as the best jazz from artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Sonny Rollins—increasingly expressed black culture’s developing views of pride, identity, history, and power. By 1967, when Aretha Franklin scored with a massive hit cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” black pop was capable of signifying ideals of racial pride and feminist valor that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.