The Beatles First U.S. Visit Documentary Will Make You Smile

This week I have been watching a 1991 documentary about The Beatles first U.S. tour, aptly titled, The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit. It begins with the Fab Four getting off a plane in New York and includes all the usual "moments" that we've seen briefly in other places, such as their Ed Sullivan Show appearances, screaming fans, traveling by train to DC and the performance there, press conferences and more.

The film was produced by Al and David Maysles, who produced 30 films including Gimme Shelter (1969 Rolling Stones tour that ended in tragedy at Altamont) and Grey Gardens, about the decay and decline of a once-wealthy mother and daughter in the Hamptons. There's nothing fancy about the films which almost seem like home movies, thus their effectiveness

A lot of the Beatles' success had to do with timing and serendipity. Events preceding the U.S. tour certainly helped set up their stunning reception. Did you know that on November 22, 1963 a young Mike Wallace did a news story on Beatlemania. It aired that morning and was scrapped for the evening news because of the much larger story that cast a dark shadow on everything, the assassination of JFK. 18 days later Walter Cromkite was looking for a positive story to add a lift to the evening's news and found this Mike Wallace bit. This and several other concurrent events helped put The Beatles in play.

When The Beatles finally arrived in early February, the Top 100 list peppered with Beatles hits. The film here shows Brian Epstein receiving a phone call that The Beatles owned the top three slots of the Top 10. It doesn't get much better than that. The Ed Sullivan shows were just icing on the cake, certifying their legendary stature.

In the first Ed Sullivan show they did three songs in their opening set: All My Loving, Till There Was You and She Loves You. The screaming girls in the audience were as important to the cameramen as the performers themselves.

Before introducing them later in the show Sullivan read part of a telegram to The Beatles from Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker "wishing them tremendous success in our country." With a wave of the arm he turns as the curtain opens to I Want To Hold Your Hand. Screams erupt even before the arm gesture is complete and if you look close you can see the usually serious face is breaking into a grin. "This is just too over-the-top" one can imagine him thinking, all the while thinking of the ratings coup.

Once more we see the familiar camera closeups of girls ecstasy. Big smiles all around. Ed Sullivan can't contain himself. And even I couldn't remain indifferent.

Cigarets seem ubiquitous in this film. George smoking while the Beatles were being interviewed in a New York press conference. All of them smoking on the train. "Marlboro," John says, grinning.

Their easy-going charm, hamming it up in NY, hamming it up everywhere they go, certainly contributed to their fame.

I remember some of this footage from the Washington DC show. Despite the poor sound quality you could feel their energy, which no doubt was amplified by the fan energy. Look how small their sound equipment was. A few amps, speakers, drum kit and three guitars, skinny boys with tight slacks and Ringo on his pedestal. What a contrast to the McCartney shows several decades later with 25 million dollar laser light shows and SFX, or any Super Bowl Halftime Show for the last thirty years.

* * * *

Notes from the Washington DC show:
I Saw Her Standing There
Energy
Big bow after each song.
Ringo takes his turn singing I Wanna Be Your Man

Re-Arrange themselves on the stage.... "Thanks for buying this record."
She Loves You... More screams.
Compelling.
Four boys having a blast ......

* * * *

It was certainly a time of innocence. I borrowed it from the Duluth Public Library. If you can't find it elsewhere, you can read the reviews here, which will motivate you to try a little harder.

Woodstock Myths and Realities

For the past several weeks I’ve been planning to write something about Woodstock, simply because the theme seems obligatory at some point during the month of this 40th anniversary year. When I stumbled upon the article The backlash against Woodstock's 40th anniversary it seemed like a good start point.

Michael Lang’s article is mildly tinged with a cynical contempt for the overindulgent homilies to this symbolic moment in time. He begins in this manner:

Reaching the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival can only mean one thing: nostalgia. It’s been in plentiful supply during the past few months. Predictable retrospectives have been written. An obligatory Blu-ray DVD of Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary Woodstock has been released, with a multitude of extras and a hideously tacky dashiki cover. Even the director Ang Lee is capitalising on the occasion with his portrait of Elliot Tiber, a key figure in finding the festival site, in the forthcoming feature film Taking Woodstock. While those boxes of remembrance have all been ticked, an official 40th anniversary concert is off the agenda.

I myself bought into many of the hippie ideals of the time, but I wasn't blind to the manipulations that were taking place as well. The notion of city kids dropping out and living off the land in communes was a fantasy no one in their right minds could expect to work for raising families, but there were a few kernels of value within the ideals, such as living more simply, sharing, the importance of community among others. Unfortunately, in a broken world these ideals tend to deteriorate in the face of rank selfishness and irritating pettiness.

Lang points out that the commercialism surrounding the anniversary has been part of the Festival since the beginning. He also addresses the co-opting of the Flower people by political machinations.

In truth, the rebellious flower-power spirit so closely intertwined with the American pop culture of the 1960s was in its death throes by the time Woodstock happened. The youthful push towards liberal politics, social unity and higher states of consciousness reached a peak in 1967 with the Human Be-In, in San Francisco, which popularised hippie culture, giving rise to the so-called Summer of Love later in the year. Subsequently, the term “counterculture” became a part of the national idiom, but the hippie movement’s rapid growth also signalled its dilution. In 1968, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the ensuing chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, left political reformists floundering. The slaying of Martin Luther King Jr further polarised the civil-rights movement between nonviolent protesters and the growing “by any means necessary” contingent. Meanwhile, the nationwide unrest over the escalating Vietnam conflict grew ever more pronounced. Perhaps most damning for the hippie populace, however, was Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election — something he achieved, in part, by appealing to that “silent majority” of the electorate who viewed the counterculture as an ugly blot on the American landscape.

The article is worth reading only as a balancing act against the nostalgic hype, though frankly it (the hype) has been much less than I expected actually. Forty years is about the right amount of time for nostalgia to come to fruition. Barbie and Slinky each made a brief comeback at forty.

For an alternate view of how the rock festival scene played out, check out the film Gimme Shelter, a documentary which follows the Rolling Stones who went on tour in late 1969, culminating in the ugly out-of-control free concert at Altamont Speedway in Oakland. Not pretty. And the Isle of Wight festival that followed was even more harrowing.

Hopefully idealism among youth will not be a passing fancy. I'll be more disappointed if we find our young people to be cynics from the getgo, attracted more to apathy than to dreams of a better future for those generations to come.