The Beatles Are Here! (14 page)

I saw all of the
Ed Sullivan
stuff from the very beginning. I wasn’t just flipping through the channels: I knew about the band, I knew some of their music. I don’t know if I had a Beatles album at that point, I probably just got 45s for a while. At any rate, I was very primed to go down that road when they came on the show.

I must have been in the ninth grade when they came. I attended an all-girls school called Ashley Hall—it’s still there. An all-girls school was wonderful for me. I liked hanging around with the smart, smart, smart girls.

In Charleston, you didn’t have to be very risk taking to be rebellious. Walking around barefoot in public or having a little bit of a short skirt would do it. It wasn’t hard to get a maverick sort of reputation.

By liking the Beatles we were definitely odd ducks. It was not as if their music ever became popular there. Just a handful of girls in my school—eight or nine of us—were what I would call Beatlemaniacs. I had a few friends, and we were not girls who were popular with boys, and we just all swerved off into this lane and had a great time for a few years, just being swept up and carried away and living in our own little club of a world.

Between the Beatles and the all-girls school, I didn’t have to bother with boys at all. There wasn’t a population of boys around me every day who could hurt my feelings by ignoring me. So that was gone. Plus, I was totally fascinated and wrapped up in these four other young men who were totally undangerous, so that was great.

From the point of view of conventional parents, conventional people, the Beatles were dangerous boys. They were nowhere near as nasty as Elvis was, though, not even close. I wasn’t into Elvis, I was a little too young for that, but it was all that again—teen sex and teens running wild, all those fantasies of adults that were never really true.

THERE WERE SIXTY
girls in my graduating class and, of those, about twenty were my cousins, second or third cousins. After the Beatles came to America, the parents of a third cousin in my grade were kind enough to take us to see them in concert, two years in a row. The first one was in Jacksonville, Florida, at the Gator Bowl; the second at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta.

They took about five of us and we had just a wonderful time. They let us just be crazy. They weren’t worried about us, they pretty much gave us free rein.

The Gator Bowl was a lousy little stadium compared to what it must be now—it’s been replaced, I’m sure. I guess we got there a day early. Our little motel was right next to the stadium and we crept around it that whole first day, scoping everything out. We were circling around underneath the bleachers when we came across a chain-link fence—I don’t know if it was a permanent installation or not. And there was the Beatles’ trailer just beyond it. It was so amazing!

We were the only girls down there, me and my friends, and we leaned on the fence and watched people come and go. We could just catch a glimpse of the Beatles, who must have been hanging out, drinking, and having a big old time.

There was a security guard there and we asked him to get us an autograph. He knocked on the door and came back with something that he said was Paul McCartney’s autograph and gave it to me. That night I didn’t have anything to compare it with so I thought it was authentic. Over time, as I saw more and more of Paul’s signature, I thought, “You know what? I don’t think so.” I think that security guard or somebody in the trailer just wanted to get rid of us.

Still, it was a wonderful concert. I think Dusty Springfield was the opening act and she was wonderful. But I was a screamer, a big screamer, and, between the screaming around me and the screaming that I was doing, I couldn’t hear any of the music very well.

After the concert was over and the Beatles were swept off in a limo to their hotel, we girls stayed in the stadium and just crawled all over everything, investigating. I took handfuls of gravel from below the bottom step, where you’d get down from the stage—they had to have all stepped down there. I kept handfuls of that gravel in a Baggie for years. Then I went on the stage and pried up splinters from where each one of the Beatles had been standing and singing. I was careful to document which splinter belonged to which Beatle.

I got other funky things at the Gator Bowl concert, too. People still had flash cameras then and there were light bulbs around that trailer. I picked up a lot of them—they might been involved in taking a picture of one of them, you know. I was just scavenging, pawing at everything I could get. The gravel and the splinters were particularly exciting because they certainly had had contact with Beatle feet.

It was sweet, it really was, when I think back about it now. I just can’t believe how sweet it was, really, to be so innocently occupied.

There seemed to be an innocence about the Beatles themselves, too, but that wasn’t the case at all. The stuff that you hear now about what was going on with them when they were riding that highway was amazing. They were quite promiscuous and quite experimental and ingesting everything and they were not what they appeared to be. They did not want to hold your hand.

THE NEXT CONCERT,
the one in Atlanta, was in a great big modern stadium for back then—bigger seats, bigger everything. Our seats weren’t in the front row but close to it. There was a drop-off between them and the stage. I’m not sure how high it would have been.

I was so excited at that concert, but then I had a moment of thinking I couldn’t hear them. I don’t know what came over me. I got mad—and I just made the decision that I was going to charge the stage. Which is really not like me. At any rate, I made that decision.

I made my way down to the railing between the seating area and the stage and I just went over it. I hung on the rail, then I dropped, dropped down to the ground, maybe eight or ten feet. And then I got up and started running toward the stage.

This is the best moment of Beatlemania for me. There was this din going on all the time and, when the screaming girls saw somebody going across the field, it just went up. Way up. It got louder—I don’t know how many decibels—and it gave me such a rush as I ran. I was just carried by that.

And then there were two policeman or security guards running toward me, running toward me, running toward me, and I managed to scoot right in between them and get away from them and there was even more screaming from the crowd. I managed to get to the stage—a kind of platform they’d put up—and throw myself up onto it. It was low, probably chest high. I dove onto the corner where John Lennon was, but the two security guys grabbed my feet and yanked me off right away.

They pulled me off and knocked the breath out of me so they had to give me some smelling salts. The show went on. The guards sort of pulled me around the back or something to give the smelling salts to me. I had waited until the end to make the run and it was the last song. The guards then escorted me out of the stadium, took me outside, and seemed to feel that I could find my parents and my ride on my own, which I could.

That was a big, big moment for me. I was as un-well-behaved as I could be without pushing things too far. It was great.

There was a little paragraph about it in one of the local papers that read, “Oh, and one girl, dah, dah, dah.” It was a thrill, it really was.

When I threw myself on the stage I was closest to John at that point. It happened too fast. I was diving onto the stage, so my head was down. I wasn’t able to look up and see the love in John’s eyes. [Laughs] That didn’t happen.

SHORTLY AFTER THAT
the Beatles’ music changed and I minded it a lot. It was probably
Revolver
. Wasn’t that the first one that was a little different? A lot different. It was political, it was druggy, it was not hand-holding music. I got to like that music when I was older but I felt somewhat abandoned when I was younger, when I was at that age.

In the course of that two-year Beatlemaniac period, a friend of mine and I wrote a book about how we stowed away in some kind of shipping boat and ran away to England and met the Beatles and all fell in love with each other, and they married us, of course. We each wrote alternate chapters.

It’s so funny, I came across it a few years ago and I just felt so tender for these little girls writing this book. I’m sure it’s different now because we’ve all got the Internet and nobody can hold anybody back.

I do look back on it all in amazement and I remember that moment of being mad. That was funny, you know. It just seemed so pointless to be standing there, screaming with a bunch of girls. It sort of galvanized me to take action.

We were growing up. We were growing up.

A Diary Entry

by Anne Brown, age 15

Springsteen’s Hair Stands on End

by Peter Ames Carlin

IN EARLY 1964
Bruce was riding in the front seat of his mother’s car when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” beamed out of the radio. “It’s those old stories, like when you hear something and your hair stands on end,” Bruce reminisced to [Steve] Van Zandt. “It’s having some strange and voodoolike effect on you.” Leaping out of the car, Bruce sprinted to a nearby bowling alley that he knew had a telephone booth, slammed his way into the box, and spun the number of the girl he was dating.
“Have you heard of the Beatles? Have you heard this song?”

“It stopped your day when it hit,” he said on Van Zandt’s syndicated
Underground Garage
radio show in 2011. “Just the sound of it. And you didn’t even know what they looked like.” Then the Beatles were shaking their astonishing mops on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
and then they were dominating the radio dial, with a wave of similarly tressed countrymen marching on their Cuban boot heels. When summer came, Bruce invested a few weeks painting his aunt Dora’s house, then used $18 of his proceeds to buy an acoustic guitar he’d seen in the window of the Western Auto store on Main Street. Next he bought himself a copy of the
100 Greatest American Folk Songs
songbook and committed himself to mastering the instrument.

FUN

by Véronique Vienne

I
WAS ON
my way out the door when someone turned up the volume on the TV and I spun around. I couldn’t see the screen—but there was this incredible sound coming from the tube. I can only compare it to the jingle of hundreds of slot machines splashing tokens into metal pans. Psychedelic tinnitus. Audible dopamine. The acoustical equivalent of vibrating synapses.