The Beatles Are Here! (19 page)

THE BEATLES WERE
very nonintimidating. They were cute. I loved their voices, their harmonies, and their British accents. They were very sweet and I think that was part of their appeal to girls our age. It was about love. They were writing from their hearts, without pyrotechnics and costume changes, and that’s what I loved. It was rock ’n’ roll, just music from the heart.

Most of us were innocent. A lot of us girls were probably between thirteen and fifteen—that was probably the average age. We weren’t sexually active, we didn’t have boyfriends.

I wasn’t a fantasy person who would fall in love with someone they didn’t know. But there was just something about them. . . . I even remember guys at my school who were really taken by them. You had your favorite and whoever that was you had a love crush on him. You thought, “Maybe I’ll get to meet him one day.”

I know a lot of girls thought that if she could only meet her Beatle he’d fall in love with her and she’d get to marry him. He’d choose her out of, you know, 500 million other girls. I always thought that was a little farfetched. I was more of a realist.

Years later, when my daughter Kristin was sixteen, I took her to hear Paul McCartney when he played in Tempe, Arizona. When they came on stage she was in awe. She said, “This is the best concert I’ve ever been to.” We stood up, both of us, and waved our arms back and forth and sang the songs at the top of our lungs. She later told me, “Mom, I loved watching your eyes light up and you were so very happy.” It gave her a glimpse into my teen years. I loved being able to share that part of my life with her.

I THINK IT
was in October 2007 that Vickie called and said, “You’ve got to get a copy of
Vogue
magazine, the August issue. Call me back when you get it.” I said, “Vickie, I haven’t seen you in ten or fifteen years, you don’t say ‘Hi, how’re you doing?’ You just say to get
Vogue
magazine? This is crazy!”

She told me to call her before I opened it, but I looked anyway. I thought it must have something to do with the Beatles. I turned to the article and all of a sudden I saw that picture and I thought, “Oh my God, there we are!” Then I saw your name and realized you must be the girl who was in the middle with the reddish hair.

Honestly, when Vickie called me it came at a time in my life that my heart was so very broken. I was devastated. My daughter, Kristin, had cancer. It, along with the chemo, was ravishing her body. At that point I was so depressed.

I hadn’t thought of the Beatles in a long time. . . . When I saw the
Vogue
article it pulled me up. It was a little bit of a positive kick. It kind of brought all that happiness back and that fun and that excitement. It really lifted my spirits.

I remember making a photocopy of the article and sending it to my daughter. I was so excited. I was trying to make her happy. I knew that the article and photo would do just that. She grew up with a mother who loved the Beatles. Every birthday I would play her the song “Birthday” by the Beatles, or sing it to her, and it became a tradition.

Kristin passed away a couple of months later, in January 2008, when she was thirty-four. She was my only child. After she had passed, I was back here and very depressed. I was so down and distraught, I can’t even tell you.

Then my neighbor told me about a local Arizona group he heard called Marmalade Skies that plays Beatles songs. They’re not imitating the Beatles, they’re a tribute band. I thought, “I have to find out more about this group!” I signed up for their e-mail notifications. Believe it or not, the first one I received had that photo of us in it! There we all were, screaming behind the sign.

I just fell in love with this band. They’re really great musically and just really nice people—all seven of them. I got to know them over the past years and it brought back some fun and some joy and some happiness. They just love the Beatles and were influenced by them growing up. One of the band members told me, “This is the best music in the world. The magic is in the music.”

I don’t think of things as coincidences. I think of things as being spiritual and “God things.” When Vickie called it was such an uplift. It was the same with Marmalade Skies. Every time I see or hear that group I’m fifteen again.

Into the Future

by Pico Iyer

SUDDENLY, THERE WERE
black insects being shown crawling over our (black-and-white) screen on the 7:00 p.m. news broadcast, and the rather droll, highly cultured newscaster was saying something about beetles taking over the world.

I was only seven years old then, and not much ever seemed to happen in grey and red-brick North Oxford. My parents and I tuned in, near-religiously, to watch Lucille Ball and Dick Van Dyke on our rickety little monochrome TV, and occasionally got even stronger whiffs of the exotic new culture of glamour across the ocean when Perry Mason or the Beverly Hillbillies paid a house call. America, largely known to us through images on big screens, was everything the academic, tradition-heavy environment around us was not: open, spacious, freed from history. Outside our damp little rooms we trudged in the footsteps of ghosts who had been walking the same narrow pathways for centuries; onscreen—in our imaginations—we were free to take flight.

We’d heard of Mods and Rockers then, of teddy boys and skinny boys in skinny suits and ties standing rather woodenly on “Top of the Pops,” playing sweet melodies and fast guitars. But we hadn’t yet heard of the Who or the Stones—not in backward-looking Oxford—and this newscast was telling us about those mop-haired boys we’d previously associated with wanting to hold our hands and loving us yeah, yeah, yeah. Every time I came back from the little hairdressers in the Turl, our cleaning lady, Miss Bennett, would say, “He looks like a right little Beatle, he does.” We hadn’t yet moved on to discussing which one.

In the years to come, after we made our own move to America, sixteen months later, my father would sit in his study in the dry hills, rattlesnakes and tarantulas sometimes visible in the brush outside, and explain to his wide-eyed (and often psychedelically altered) students about the cover of the
Sgt. Pepper
album and what sitar ragas really meant in our ancestral India. The Beatles, very soon, would make the anarchism and the transcendental states of being my father liked to talk about fashionable, even de rigueur.

But for the moment they were the path-breakers while we, in dripping, slow-moving, ancient England, where shops never opened on Sundays and horizons seemed cut short by the grey walls next door, were watching their ascent with a mingled pride and envy. These peppy, well-mannered boys from Liverpool, whom you could easily imagine introducing to your mother, were taking off; England, which drew so much of its cultural energy and freshness from America, was threatening to offer something potent in return.

The copies of
The Listener
piled up in my father’s study. “The popular newspapers [carried] pictures of girls screaming their heads off at concerts,” as J. M. Coetzee wrote of the same period, in his memory book,
Youth
. Soon the Swinging Sixties would come to London, and Twiggy and David Bailey and Alfie and the rest might all seem to be coproduced by the Beatles. But for now the Beeb [BBC], in its auntish way, was making jokes for entomologists, and pretending that a lower form of insect was somehow taking that renegade colony across the water hostage.

It would be years before I realized that the name was actually spelled with an
a
and in fact represented a subversion much deeper than the BBC could acknowledge. Britain was no longer trapped inside the past and was offering the New World something even newer, more radical and current. The day the Beatles landed in New York City was the day the United Kingdom could finally see that it wasn’t just yesterday’s power, on the decline, but part of what would form tomorrow’s trans-Atlantic axis. They were flying into the future, really—our future—and the next thing we knew, Britain would be branding itself as the new America, freshly awake after twenty years of deepest postwar sleep.

Fran Lebowitz, nonfan

AT SOME POINT
in my adult life, probably about fifteen years ago, I was at a dinner party in New York City and Paul McCartney was there. There was a piano in the house and I was sitting on the piano bench before dinner talking to people when Paul McCartney came and sat down and started to play the piano. I turned around and said to him, “Hey, I’m trying to talk here.” He was quite stunned.

It did not stop him from playing the piano. Everyone else, of course,
wanted
him to play the piano.

That’s the level of Beatles fan I am.

THE ARRIVAL OF
the Beatles didn’t affect me at all. It wasn’t just the Beatles, it’s all pop music. I’m probably the most unreceptive person to pop music that ever existed. The Beatles made very little impression on me.

In the long run, they must have influenced my life in some way because they were such an enormous cultural influence. I mean, I know probably a million Beatles songs because you can’t
not
know a million Beatles songs. But at the time, they barely registered, although I do remember watching them on
Ed Sullivan
.

Soon after they appeared on the horizon a boy in my junior high school class in Morris Township, New Jersey, came to school with his hair combed down like theirs. Boys had fairly short hair then and he had just combed his bangs down. I thought, “What a ridiculous thing to do.” I thought he was a fool, a clown. I was like thirteen years old, fourteen years old. I thought it was clownish to imitate someone else.

He was also, by the way, taken to the principal’s office. The school forced him to comb his hair back. I remember his name but I’m not going to say it because of course there’s never an end to when you can be sued in this country.

Girls were buying these Beatles magazines and they were divided into armed camps over which Beatle they liked the best. All those people seemed ridiculous to me. It just seemed foolish.

I’M NOT SAYING
that the Beatles are bad or that they aren’t good. It’s just that I don’t care that much. I never found them exciting the way I did find the Stones exciting. I never quite understood the kind of erotic excitement of the Beatles. They always seemed so soft.

When the Stones appeared, I much preferred them. I would not say I was a rabid Stones fan, either, but I definitely preferred the Stones to the Beatles when that became a dividing line. There was a kind of warfare between Stones fans and Beatles fans.

I wasn’t even in that war. I would say, “I like the Stones much better,” but I didn’t really care. I have a friend who just says to me, “You’re just not a fan, Fran.” I don’t understand why people follow sports teams, I just don’t get this whole thing.

I was even at that young age, as I am now, kind of a floater. I had close friends but I was never in a clique. I would just float around. The upside of this, which I’ve found to be true my entire life, is that you don’t have to ascribe to the rules of each little group. You can just drop in.

I MAY NOT
have cared that much about the Beatles, but if someone asked who my favorite was I always said, “Oh, I like Ringo.” I like drumming quite a bit. I’ve been a drumming fan for half of my lifetime. I’ve even drummed myself.

I liked the personality of Ringo Starr. I still do. He was not, of course, the favorite in my school among the girls. Paul McCartney was far and away the favorite. He was the cute Beatle. So it was probably just a contrarian position to choose Ringo Starr.