The Beatles Are Here! (16 page)

Vicky Tiel, fashion designer

I
WAS IN
fashion school at Parsons. I had this fabulous apartment in Greenwich Village on Jones Street between West Fourth and Bleecker. All the girls in school stayed in dorms and had to live in shared apartments but, thanks to my father, who was a builder in Washington and was very successful, I had a floor-through in a brownstone with two working fireplaces and a brick wall all along one side.

I had created a business, selling dresses in my apartment for cash. I had hung the clothes on nails in the brick wall; there must have been twenty items there. I concentrated on leather, which I thought was a really good thing. I sold leather coats and miniskirts—they were the first minis ever—and suede bags. I fringed them all and worked beads into the fringe. I had fringed vests and skirts.

The Cafe Wha? down the street was the center of life at that time. Dylan performed there, although he was known as Bobby Zimmerman then. But he wasn’t the number one singer at the Wha?—that was Steve DeNaut, who was then my boyfriend. Steve didn’t sing hillbilly music or soul music but a combination of everything else. His music, like that of Dave Van Ronk and Dylan, was folk, bluesy, country all mixed together. I’d say Woody Guthrie was the biggest influence. Nobody had anything new.

One night in October or November 1963 Steve came to my apartment, put a 45 [rpm record] on the record player, and said, “Listen to this, baby.” He set “She Loves You” to repeat on the record player. Steve and I started to make love. At the point where it changes beats he stopped in the middle of having sex. “Listen to this!” he said. The music went down to another beat. He said “Nobody fucking
does
that! That’s
no!
And the ‘yeah yeah yeah’? That’s fucking
no!
Nobody
does
that!”

I asked him what he meant and he said, “It’s a new type of music. I’ve never heard anything like it. And it’s fantastic.” And then he added: “I’m finished. It’s over. It’s over for all of us.” (It wasn’t long before he left town and became an actor in California instead.)

AFTER THE BEATLES
came over and that time with Steve, I went to Paris. It was the spring of 1964, and I took miniskirts I created with Mia [Fonssagrives, who became the other half of the fashion label Fonssagrives-Tiel], [the photographer] Irving Penn’s stepdaughter. Mia and I ended up getting photographed all the time and we made the front page of the
International Herald Tribune
and then we made
Life
magazine—I had five pages in
Life
. We were in the London
Times
.

We got hired by [the British chain] Wallis Shops to make clothes and I met the Beatles at a party given by Victor Lownes. Lownes was the owner of the Playboy Club, which was in a five-story building near the Dorchester Hotel. He owned a town house in London—the whole building—and every Saturday night all of London went to his parties. I had just graduated from fashion school and I met the Beatles there. Ringo’s wife, Maureen, liked what I was wearing and I immediately made some minidresses for her. I didn’t know Ringo then, I just knew Maureen. I dressed her for two or three years.

I had started the minidress. Then Mia made a wrap skirt which she wore with a vest. We made a wrap dress for a 1967 movie called
Candy
, which starred Ringo. He takes the dress off Candy in the movie—that’s how I got to know Ringo. By the time we did the movie he had divorced Maureen and married a very famous model, Barbara Bach, a beautiful girl.

I created the costumes for that movie in 1965. Ringo was busy unwrapping the star of
Candy
three years before Diane Von Furstenberg “invented” the wrap dress! Fashion is such BS, you know?

Tom Long, fan

MY MEMORY OF
the Beatles’ splash was at St. James elementary school in Syracuse, New York. A classmate, Leon Shattel, brought in his older sister’s records to play in our fourth-grade classroom.

St. James was staffed by Franciscan nuns who were generally older, dour women who weren’t afraid to practice corporal punishment on students at any given moment. I was in my fifth year of parochial education by now and you had better have figured out what not to do to avoid being beat with a hardwood pointer.

Not all of the penguins were old. I recall a younger recruit that year who allowed these Beatles records, 45-rpm singles, to be played in class. The teacher would sing along almost hypnotically, as if an out of body experience was taking place.

This was all very interesting to observe. The message was mixed, at best. A nun, who was undoubtedly living a very austere existence dictated by older, possibly sadistic nuns, singing along to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

I later made a career in rock and roll, as a soundman and roadie. I don’t want to say that this moment set me on that path, but it could have been when that kind of music entered my life. Whatever it was, I filed it under one of my father’s many classic quotes: “Life is
Mad
magazine.”

Janis Ian, musician

I
DIDN’T GROW
up on pop music, I grew up on classical and jazz and folk. The first time I ever paid any attention to a pop song was whenever the Beach Boys came out with “Little Deuce Coupe”—I couldn’t believe how great the harmonies were.

Otherwise pop was really off my radar. When
A Hard Day’s Night
came out in 1964 I was thirteen and attending summer camp with a bunch of other campers, including my friend Janey Street who was a
huge
Beatles and Stones fan. We took the camp truck into town, to the local movie theatre in Pawling or Poughkeepsie, New York, to see the film.

I came out of that film a convert. We sang Beatles songs all the way back to camp, singing them just as we would have sung folk songs, and we all started learning them next day on the guitar, and that was kind of it.

For me the Beatles were an introduction to a world of completely different energy than that of folk music or classical or jazz. The energy when Lennon and McCartney joined voices and harmonized and sang in unison was astonishing.

My favorite Beatle was George because I thought he was really adorable. But also because I thought he was the most musicianlike of the four, although in retrospect Ringo probably was, in a lot of ways. Still, George seemed like the one who was the hungriest to become a great player—and that’s what I was interested in.

I was already writing songs by then. I wrote “Hair of Spun Gold” at twelve and “Society’s Child” at fourteen. As I began writing songs, I began reaching out for a broader influence than what I’d grown up with, which was already pretty broad. Once I started writing for myself, I, like any artist, became a sponge.

THE BEATLES WERE
fully formed by the time they started recording. From then on they just amplified what they were doing. If you listen to that first album,
Meet the Beatles
, it’s incredible. It really shows how much time they spent on stage, working out arrangements.

They were on stage constantly, honing their performances and honing themselves. I think the impact of all that time on stage together is very clear, particularly in the first and second albums. There’s a very different dynamic that happens to a song when you’ve played it live a lot in front of audiences. It’s completely different from playing it in rehearsal or in your bedroom. The song itself morphs, and the arrangement morphs. Everything changes.

The Beatles have talked often enough in the press about how a lot of the time they were the only people they would see on a day-to-day basis other than their tour manager and manager. When you’re in that kind of maelstrom, forced to spend a lot of time together but alone, you either get creative or you get stupid. They got creative.

Plus, they were
young
. It’s a lot easier to move and to change when you’re that young. We tend to forget that they were in their teens and early twenties when all of this happened. Their entire career arc as recording artists was all of seven years! I think in retrospect that they handled themselves remarkably well.

WHAT WAS IT
about them musically? I think it was everything. It’s that chord at the end of the intro to “A Hard Day’s Night”—to put a 6th in there or a 7th add 13, I think it was?—in any case, it was an astonishing chord that you totally didn’t expect. It may have been George Martin’s chord, I don’t know.

In a lot of the earlier Beatles albums the interesting chords smack either of Martin or of American pop music influences, as opposed to rock and roll ones. The fours and the suspended chords, the flatted nines, things like that, were not what you were used to hearing in pop. They also show what a great hand of a producer the Beatles had in George Martin. And wasn’t Geoff Emerick the engineer on a lot of their record sessions? So, great engineering as well.

I DON’T THINK
you can overestimate the Beatles’ influence. They changed music forever, just as Dylan did. Nobody had done what they did—as writers, arrangers, singers—since jazz started and Bessie Smith had the first million seller.

The Beatles’ impact was astonishing. And the fact that they accomplished everything in, what, seven years? It’s unbelievable to have that kind of impact in that short a career span.

What a monumental influence they were on everybody!

I don’t think we can discount the influence John Lennon had on poetry and stream of consciousness writing when he came out with
In His Own Write
. But then, you could argue that he was being just as influenced by the people he was being introduced to, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Bob Dylan’s liner notes certainly influenced Lennon, as well.

So, it’s hard to say where one shoe leaves off and the other one drops. . . .

A Way to Live in the World

by Carolyn See

MY HUSBAND AND
I had just made a momentous move. We’d bought a house, but it was a house in name only—a cabin high in the wilds of Topanga Canyon, a firetrap settlement just north of L.A. No road led to the cabin, it stood at the top of a cliff. You climbed up a switchback path to get there, and there was a tram line, the kind Humphrey Bogart had in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. In the daytime, sun filtered through the slats of the walls, and the place was infested with scorpions, tarantulas, black widow spiders, and the occasional snake. Our friends had helped to move us—we were still in graduate school and honorably poor—but most of them had gone home, leaving just one friend, a folklorist named Marina.