The Beatles Are Here! (7 page)

Jamie Nicol Bowles, fan

I
LIVED IN
this little town of Independence, Missouri, with ten thousand people and a little record store. We listened to this radio station in Kansas City that played the Top Thirty. We were all listening to Jan and Dean. We’d go into the little record store on allowance day to buy 45s and EPs.

The radio was kind of a glimpse into another world. Independence is now a suburb of Kansas City, but back then it was a really small Southern town. It was Harry Truman’s hometown. It was lovely but limited and limiting, so any vision of another world was kind of tantalizing. And my father was very strict, being an immigrant—I figured out later that it was an immigrant thing. (He grew up in Glasgow in dire poverty and came here when he was fifteen.) By the time I was growing up, he’d become the town banker, which for me only added to Independence’s claustrophobic, small-town feel.

The Beatles were a fast craze. When it happened, it happened really fast. DJs like Wolfman Jack, who was then working from a pirate radio station in Mexico, began playing some cuts from the band illegally, before they’d been officially released in the U.S. They played Beatles stuff early and suddenly the group was all any kid in the neighborhood could talk about.

In the early sixties, pirate stations had really strong signals and they came from all over the place. If they could reach Missouri, then they had strong signals. These stations were all we listened to at night.

Radio had incredible power then. It was our link to the outside world. TV wasn’t where we got our information about stuff, it was radio. I remember exactly what my first transistor radio looked like—it was beige plastic and it cost thirteen dollars, which was a huge amount of money then. You’d listen under the covers at night.

At least in the Midwest, hip radio stations printed out these narrow slips of colored paper that listed the top twenty each week. There’d be a pile of them on the counter of the record store and you’d use them to choose what you were going to buy that weekend.

These stores had listening booths, too. You’d go into the booth and listen before deciding what to buy. Record players, too—everyone had one in their room and they must not have cost anything.

It was such a totally different time.

The performance venues then were tiny and if a rock ’n’ roll band or someone came into town, they were always on the local radio station, you could call in and talk to them. It was very personal and accessible.

When the Beatles and the Stones came to Kansas City they played the ballpark, which now would be considered a really small venue. I think the Beatles were the first to play there. Other groups, like the Doors, played in this place in Kansas City, Kansas, that had only about three hundred seats. And all the jazz and blues musicians played in very small clubs.

The first time the Beatles came to Kansas City, I was probably thirteen. Our seats at the ballpark were in the first balcony and we had a great view. They played all the songs we all knew and we all sang along and screamed. I don’t think anybody was listening.

If we wanted to hear them, why were we screaming all the time? But we were, screaming and leaping up and down. The day after the concert was just de facto that you couldn’t speak because you’d been screaming so much. It was a badge of honor because it meant that you’d been there.

You defined yourself by which Beatle you liked. And you sort of knew about people depending on the Beatle they liked. My sister liked Ringo, which was really strange, and I liked Paul and we shared a room so her side of the room was Ringo and mine was Paul. We weren’t allowed to put anything on the walls so we took pictures out of the fan magazines and taped them together in long strips that we hung on the molding. My sister was actually more advanced—she liked the Stones and I thought they were creepy and that Paul was cute.

I was sent to a boarding school that was run by nuns when I was only seven. It was in Kansas City—I’d return home for weekends—and all the classes were in French, including science and math. The school was all girls and there was probably much more focus on the Beatles than there would have been at a coed school. I don’t think boys liked the Beatles as much. They all started growing their hair, but they weren’t out there screaming, that’s for sure.

There was a huge radio tower in Kansas City that I always thought, since I was just a kid, looked like the Eiffel Tower. I’d sneak down sometimes into one of the classrooms and there it would be through the window, this big beautiful, lighted tower. I was so unhappy at the school that it seemed like a beacon of another world.

I don’t know if I made the connection then but, like the radio—and the music it played, especially the Beatles—it was offering me a vision of something beyond the Midwest.

Billy Joel, musician

THE SINGLE BIGGEST
moment that I can remember of being galvanized into wanting to be a musician for life was seeing the Beatles on
The
Ed Sullivan Show.
Now, I didn’t have a television when I was growing up, which is funny because my father actually worked for a television company: DuMont.

I don’t know if anybody ever heard of DuMont? We had a little Levitt house and the DuMont was on the rack and you pulled it out of the wall. It broke when I was about five and my mother and my father split up and nobody fixed the TV so that was the end of TV. It was this big glass thing on the wall.

I listened to classical music. I always loved it. I was enchanted by music. I would have to say that Beethoven would be my favorite classical composer. Beethoven was titanic. He lived, he breathed, he ate music. Everything was music with this guy! I understand he didn’t even leave his house a lot of the times. It was like [imitates Beethoven and friends]:

Don’t bother me.

But it’s a nice day.

Fuck
a nice day!

Come on out?

Can Ludwig come out?

So Beethoven was a big influence on me. Mozart. Chopin. Debussy. I mean, that’s in classical music.

But the Beatles? I’m over at this guy’s house. This guy I was going to say was a friend of mine. He really
wasn’t
a friend of mine. I hung out with him ’cause he had a TV. I was a Machiavellian little kid, you know:
Yeah, I really like you. Let’s watch TV!
So I’m over at his house and the Beatles come on TV.

Now you gotta understand this is in something like February 1964. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in November of 1963. The country was in a funk, we had the blues. I mean, for this man to be taken away. . . . This young, vigorous, vital man who represented youth and progress and the future—he was snatched from us. And the country
really
had the blues. And who became president? Lyndon Johnson, you know, politics as usual [imitating LBJ]:
I’m speaking to you tonight with a heavy heart and big ears.
And it was like this man didn’t capture
anyone’s
imagination the way Kennedy did.

Now, this is also in an era when Hollywood tried to take control of rock ’n’ roll. They understood that young people liked rock ’n’ roll [imitates a producer]:
Hey, the young kids like the rock ’n’ roll stuff, why don’t we cook up a couple of rock stars right here in Hollywood, we’ll find a nice-looking boy with a great big pompadour and we’ll put him out there, and we’ll get some snappy tunes and he’ll be a big hit, a rock star.

And, you know, you had Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Annette Funicello. And they were putting Elvis in these awful movies! [sings] “Clambake! Clambake!” Everybody who liked Elvis was like “What the hell happened to this guy?”

Also, this was during the Civil Rights Movement, and a lot of radio would not play really good rhythm and blues. There was Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett. James Brown. But they weren’t playing this stuff on white radio. Why? [imitates a producer]:
It got the kids all sexed up, got them all to get excited, they’re going to want to do this grind dance!
So they tried to pretty it up, they tried to sanitize it. They came out with Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell. All these boring bullshit guys.

Then all of a sudden there’s this band with hair like girls’. It really wasn’t, but to us the hair looked hugely long. You know, 1964. They played their own instruments and they wrote their own songs and they didn’t look like Fabian. They looked like these working-class kids, like kids like we all knew. And John Lennon had this look when he was on
Ed Sullivan
like:
Fuck all of you.
This is such total bullshit to me.

And we knew. You could tell.

And I said at that moment, “That’s what I want to do. I want to do that. I want to be like those guys.”

Swimming to John

by Noelle Oxenhandler

IT’S STRANGE THE
day you realize you’re older than the Beatle you love. But as the years go by and your Beatle grows younger and younger than you, time does even stranger things to your mind.

I was twelve when I fell in love with John. Back then, childhood lasted longer than it does now, and in real life—as in so many fairy tales—twelve was a threshold year. For me John was the threshold god, the magical ferryman who arrived precisely on time to lead me from a relatively placid girlhood into the dark, throbbing heart of adolescence.

Looking back, I can see that I was always drawn to older men who came from different backgrounds than my own. In my California elementary school, I had a crush on Mr. Red, the black custodian. Whenever someone threw up in class, he arrived with such dignity carrying his broom and a bucket of sawdust that my best friend and I were both convinced we would marry him when we grew up. When I was a little older, I attended the American School of Paris for a year and fell in love with my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Sang. He was a British man of Chinese descent, with a shock of black hair that bounced when he laughed. Once, when I missed the bus after school, he took me home on the back of his motor-scooter. There I was, holding on to Mr. Sang in his black leather jacket as we zipped through the streets of Paris. It was paradise.

After my family returned to the States, I entered a long limbo period. During this time, I might have had a mild, junior-high crush on this boy or that, but there was no one to really capture my heart, no definite Object for the quiet but inexorably gathering force of my romantic longings. Then, over the course of a single evening, that vague limbo was suddenly transformed into a state of absolute, diamond-sharp focus.