Just saw Martin Scorsese's Beatles '64, up today on Disney+. It's everything you would expect from a master like Scorsese and his masterful 1978 The Last Waltz, but much more, given what the Beatles were and are to so many millions of people on this planet. As I began saying in the 1970s, that impact will last for thousands of years, right up there with Socrates and Shakespeare, even though at one point in the documentary, a young Paul scoffs at The Beatles having anything to do with "culture," preferring instead to say that what The Beatles are about are "laughs".
Here are some of the highlights of Beatles '64, made possible by some of the footage the late Albert and David Maysles brothers took of The Beatles first trip to America -- for their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, concert in Washington DC, and concert back in New York in Carnegie Hall -- that had special resonance with me. I present them in more or less chronological order in the movie:
- A girl fan in New York City tells about the gifts she brought for each Beatle. For Ringo, it's two "science fiction books". She doesn't say which ones, but even so, it's good to hear.
- Another girl says Elvis "is old anyway". I think Elvis was great, but I get what she means.
- Yet another girl, who goes to Julliard, explains that "we don't usually like rock 'n' roll ... [but] The Beatles are the greatest". See below about Leonard Bernstein and his CBS special and his daughter Jamie for more on this point.
- Ronnie Spector, interviewed probably ten or so years ago, says "Murray the K was downstairs [saying] you gotta get me upstairs to meet The Beatles." My second published article was about Murray the K (in The Village Voice in 1972 -- my first was about Paul McCartney in the same weekly newspaper a year earlier in 1971), and I even wrote a song about Murray the K that he played on his WNBC-AM radio show. Beatles '64 had a lot more to say about Murray, which I'll discuss below.
- I loved seeing the Ronettes hold the Phil Spector Christmas Album, which has two recordings by the Ronettes -- "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "Frosty the Snowman" -- that I still play on YouTube all time.
- A nasty NYPD cop tells two girls to get off the floor The Beatles were on, in their hotel, to walk down the stairs "before I throw you down the stairs". An unfortunate parallel to the London bobbies who go up to the roof to break up The Beatles last concert that we see in Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back, also on Disney+, and now a perfect pair with Beatles '64.
- Black teenage girls love The Beatles; black teenage boys do not, one of them saying, "I think they're [The Beatles are] disgusting." (But see Smokey Robinson, whom I'll discuss below.)
- Murray the K appears throughout the movie. The Beatles tend to think he's too "loud," John mocks him in the movie, and George Harrison remarks in an interview probably conducted in the mid-1980s that Murray, in effect, just glommed on to The Beatles and their first visit to New York. I actually worked with Murray in the early 1970s -- he invited me to come work with him after he read my 1972 article about him -- and I didn't find him too loud at all. He likely had mellowed by then.
- Smokey Robinson does an endearing performance of McCartney's "Yesterday" in the 1960s, and in a very recent interview explains that The Beatles had a tender, feminine way of expressing their emotions, which Smokey found very admirable. Jamie Bernstein (Leonard's daughter) and Betty Friedan echo and elaborate on this perceptive view. Clips from Leonard Bernstein's pathbreaking 1967 CBS show on The Beatles and the "rock revolution" appear throughout Scorsese's film (here's my review of Maestro which, amazingly, said nothing about that TV show).
- Back to Murray the K: he gets George in 1964 to introduce James Ray's "Got My Mind Set on You". Unsaid in the movie is that of course George would have a big hit singing the song in 1987. Hey, Murray at least deserves credit for introducing the song to George.
- Marshall McLuhan appears a lot in the second half of the movie, saying things like "JFK was the first TV President" and interviewing John and Yoko in Toronto at the end of 1969. I worked with McLuhan at the end of the following decade -- he was also the real thing, the most perceptive scholar I've ever had the chance and pleasure to work with (more on McLuhan in my just updated McLuhan in an Age of Social Media). Beatles '64 sets up The Beatles coming to America as the immediate sequence and desperately needed healing musical salve to the crushing depression caused by JFK's assassination, which indeed it was. McLuhan's breakthrough book, Understanding Media, arrived at same time. The Beatles helped heal America, McLuhan helped us understand what was happening.
- Harry Benson, a now 94-year-old photographer, tells us that Lennon "used to speak, of all things, about Lee Harvey Oswald ... he was worried about violence" directed against him and The Beatles in America. That brought me to tears. (I say more about Lennon's assassination, and how it brought me to write It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles, in this interview conducted just last week.)
- But on a lighter note, speaking of tears, I had to laugh when I heard that "George Harrison was near tears" when he and The Beatles were dissed at a reception for them at the British Embassy after their Washington DC concert. McCartney had a much better response.
- Also on a lighter note, and putting on my media theorist hat, I was pleased to hear the word "cassette," long before there were little tape recordings, back in 1964, used to describe a place that cans of soda inhabited, when someone said, "draw it [the soda can] out of the cassette".
- But the documentary returns to the assassination of JFK, which, along with the assassination of John Lennon, were the worst public events in my life. At the end of the movie, satirist and critic Joe Queenan, who appears throughout the film, tells us that his "father never recovered from Kennedy's assassination but we did". And that of course was because we had The Beatles. The "we" is my generation, and what Queenan says is all the more trenchant, since he earlier tells us that his father beat him, and also decreed that Queenan couldn't watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, which Queenan said was worse. But he managed to watch at his uncle's place.
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