Beatle Myths and Legends 1 – Sid Bernstein Addendum

EXCEPT:

Sid Bernstein

I, personally remember standing in the shower of a house we lived in for only a few months in winter of 1963 and wondering how this British fad my then husband told me about spelled and/or pronounced their odd name: “Beatles” or “Beetles”. I heard about Fluxis from him as well and I assumed at the time he’d learned of both from some publication available at the Peabody College Art Department.

So, does anyone have a clue what Sid Bernstein and John Kavich read in Feburary, 1963 that mentioned The Beatles?

Beatle Myths and Legends 1 – Sid Bernstein

Most of us know the story about Bernstein taking a class in the winter of 1963 that required him to read an English newspaper once a week. From these papers he learned about the rise of Beatlemania in Britain and he decided to promote a concert for them in the US. In February of 63 he got in touch with Brian Epstein and they informally contracted for two concerts at Carnegie Hall for Feb. 12, 1964.

It’s a lovely story but it’s unlikely to the point of impossibility. In Feb. of 63 the Beatles issued their second single, Please Please Me which went to the top of most of the British charts. Later that month they recorded 10 songs in less then 10 hours for their first album. Certainly the music press did carry notices of the song reaching the charts and no doubt the Liverpool Echo carried some sort of story about ‘home town boys make good,’ as well as Tony Barrow’s Disker column. Was Bernstein reading the British music press? (Were these specialist newspapers available on New York newsstands?) Could he have read a copy of the Liverpool Echo or the Manchester Guardian which probably carried some sort of story about girls mobbing the Beatles after they recorded a TV appearance there? Was he reading Mersey Beat? :(sarcasm alert)

Certainly he did NOT read any newspaper about “Beatlemania” as he claims because the word wasn’t invented until the first stories appeared in the “National press,” in effect the London dailies, until October 14, 1963 reporting on the crowd of fans outside the London Palladium the night before when the Beatles appeared on the British equivalent of the Ed Sullivan show.

The bottom line is that no matter what newspapers Sid read in Feb. 1963, he did NOT read about Beatlemania until the middle of October. I consider it rather unlikely that he read newspapers from a variety of English cities and towns in January and February of that year and if he had, there really wasn’t much written about the Beatles until a good bit later in the year. He may have kept up with the British pop charts in which case there wasn’t much to notice about the Beatles at least until their first album and third single came out later in the spring and rather quickly made an indisputable #1.

Because of London’s prejudice against the North of England and the “odd” fact that until the Palladium show somehow the Beatles didn’t play any real London venues on their tours, the national press didn’t know them and didn’t want to know them. It took months for Dezo Hoffman to talk his paper into sending him to Liverpool to take pictures of them as it did Maureen Cleve to get an assignment to write about the group. Certainly Tony Barrow had been trying, with virtually no success, to get stories in both the London papers and the national music press. It took a gathering of young people numbering something between 8 and 800 depending on who is talking to get the press’ attention – and a slow, Sunday news night.

The question is just what newspapers was Sid reading in January and February of 1963 that convinced him that the Beatles were making a big splash in England and that it would be a major coup to be the first to bring them to America. The answer is that there is no paper he could have been reading that would tell him anything much at all about the Beatles at that time. This is only one of the widely accepted Beatle stories that a look at a calendar will call into serious question.

Reviews — Again

I just finished reading The Beatles; Off the Record by Keith Badman and I recommend it heartily to serious Beatle students. There’s quite a lot there that I haven’t found elsewhere. One thing I like is that he gives the questions and answers before and after bits that have been quoted by everybody and frequently it puts a different spin on it then it had when presented as a stand-alone. It’s a ‘heavy’ read in both length and information content and also has some very nice photos that you don’t see everywhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed a page-plus on the Mad Day Out photo session. They were/are interesting photos and the commentary from one of the photographers involved was interesting. There’s simply too much in the book to light on specifics and each of us will find diffferent things to be delighted with in any case.

I also recently got the DVD Composing the Beatles Songbook http://www.blastmagazine.net/dvd%27s/dvd%20reviews/composingthebeatlessongbook.html

They picked a dozen people, mostly musical folks and discussed John and Paul as composers. I have really fallen in love with it. I’ve played it twice, paying very close attention each time and I expect to watch it several times more. One thing that really turned me on is that one of the participants, Chris Ingham (musicologist, author, Beatles Academic) chose to really look at For No One, a Paul song that I had some time ago identified as an extremely insightful and serious song that has been completely overlooked.

You may not agree with everything on it, I certainly don’t but it does really add to an understanding of the music.

I apologize yet again. It’s obvious that I’m not going to be able to post regularly. This time it was health, family concerns and computer complications. The computer problems seem to be completely solved — at least as much as such are ever solved — and hopefully that will help keep the other things from having such a negative effect on my work.

The Beatles Comedy

”Rabbi Winkler wrote: The Zohar says “There is no wisdom as wholesome as that wisdom that comes out of silliness. Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”

What they did best was nuttyness, a distinction without a difference perhaps. I have seen Yellow Submarine (in the theater at the time of its release so I don’t remember all that much!). I remember an early “music video” in which The Beatles are playing leapfrog over a well-dressed gentleman leaning over something on the sidewalk. It has no particular meaning but it’s amusing as is their capering on an anonymous beach in striped vintage bathing dress. These had nothing whatsoever to do with the songs. But you watch it and you enjoy their enjoyment of what they are doing.

I have to suppose that outside of The Beatles’ natural style of wisecracking, the style of physical comedy demonstrated in the clips and movies may have been more the idea of Sir George Martin then anyone else. Martin was the head of the Parlophone record label who offered The Beatles a recording contract after they had been turned down by just about everyone else. Although he was a trained musician (piano, oboe), he went to work for EMI record company, where he recorded such comedians as Peter Sellers and Spike Mulligan. Sellers as well as a very broad assortment of music from light pop to symphonic. I know he did a good bit of intellectual comedy but also indulged in what I call “romps”; a special way of handling mostly physical comedy without much attention to plot, continuity or, indeed, story at all.

The Beatles at that time were barely older then schoolboys and you can see in A Hard Days Night comedy recalling a kid grabbing someone’s hat and playing keep-away. Adolescent boy fun is funny, so long as it’s not your cap! Added in was as lovely a Keystone Cops sequence as anyone’s ever seen and Ringo’s threnody on the canal is way beyond criticism. Was Ringo consciously playing the Little Tramp? He says he was so hung over that morning that merely walking took all his time so I can suppose it was simply one of those miracles

]Not that The Beatles film depends on either physical comedy or on adolescent boy fun, the writing in some places in A Hard Days Night is delicious. John’s conversation with the plump lady in the hall wherein the “him” John does or doesn’t look like is left undefined is surely a triumph of underwriting – so terribly hard to do! However, it took the eye of an artist (or a really good cameraman) to see the possibilities of 4 skinny young men in black clothes romping in a mowed field. Is it funny? Not exactly; but it makes you feel good and feel good about the actors.

It’s very amusing to read the slightly offended surprise of the movie critics reviews. (Both in the original release and the more recent re-release to theaters.) While some of the sources say that the script was carefully written to be easy for inexperienced non-actors, Ringo’s “hiding behind a smokescreen of bourgeois clichés” isn’t my idea of an easy line! I have seen the I Am the Walrus cut in Magic Mystery Tour and it lacks the spontaneity and fun which are not entirely absent from the rest of the piece. It seems to me that there was too much self-consciousness and an attempt to get some sort of message across. I do find the lyrics of Walrus over studied and artificial. I feel sure that Ringo is right in that by broadcasting it in black and white the BBC ensured it’s critical disaster. On the other hand, the particular magic that made The Beatles is beginning to fail because the group is beginning to fail to be a group. Even in Sgt. Pepper you can see that there’s a bit of a hitch in their interpersonal harmony. It comes back here and there but many of the clips show three bored session musicians trying to get the ‘great one’ through one last take.

The Beatles comedy at its best a combination of innocent fun and sophisticated badinage that transport the viewer to the world of everyone’s dreams, one which never existed. I find reviews that name it as archtypical of its time and yet it survives to this time and people without my memories enjoy it now.

Set List for Paul’s New Tour!!

Actually I certainly do not mean to tell Paul what he should do particularly since I’m unlikely to be able to attend any of his concerts. I might buy the video though so I’ll make some suggestions just in case he’s interested in suggestions from fans.

I do not say that these are in appropriate order!

Things We Said Today
For No ONe
Why Don’t We Do It In The Road
Two Of Us
Ram On
Monkberry Moon Delight
Sing Along Junk
Hope of Deliverance
Off The Ground
Songs We Were Singing
Picasso’s Last Words
Feet In The Clouds
How Kind Of You
If You Wanna
Pipes Of Peace
The World Tonight
Penny Lane
London Town

Beatle Books I Recommend

If you are looking for a book about the Beatles because of a realization of what great music they made, begin with A Day In The Life by Mark Hartsgaard. It focuses on the music but covers enough of the life of the group to satisfy a moderate interest. The author carefully documents his facts and if he puts more trust in certain biographers then I do, well it’s a matter of opinion isn’t it? His commentary on the music is concise, readable for the non-musically educated and betrays less favoritism for one or another member of the band then most.

If you want to know more about the individuals who were members of the Beatles – but not ever possible obscure detail, read The Beatles by Hunter Davies. This is a well-written book with an added forward if you end up with one of the later editions (It was first published in 1968).  It is an authorized biography and Davies had a good deal of access to all four Beatles and most of the people around them. It was edited, in a few cases heavily, by the Beatles and/or some of their relatives (as explained in the commentary to the revised edition.)

During the live of the band, and for some years after, some facts about their beginnings, particularly details about John’s family, were deliberately suppressed. Given the world of 1963 this was an appropriate decision. Davies book reflects most of these limitation although there are some hints for the attentive reader.

For those who want nothing but the facts and all of the facts I recommend Mark Spitz The Beatles. Unless you are willing to wait for Mark Lewishon’s 3-volume history (2010 – 2020) this is about the best you can do. It is far from perfect but of those available, it’s certainly one of the best. It’s complete with 100 pages of footnotes, which I note the reviewers found quite impressive. Unfortunately, a fair number of debatable issues do not have any footnote and a large proportion of the footnotes are quite trivial.

If you are curious about what happened to John, Paul, George and Ringo after the Beatles broke up, the situation isn’t too good. The supposedly best bio of John is not only nearly as big as the Spitz book, it’s pointedly avocatory. Ray Coleman was a reporter who covered the Beatles during their popularity and he is very sympathetic to John’s point of view. I’m willing to take his word for objective facts but his focus is always as Lennon’s friend.

I think the best book on Paul is Barry Miles Many Years From Now although it does not give you much on Paul’s post-Beatles career. It focuses on the things Paul was doing besides being a Beatle and is written by someone who was there and a friend. Howard Elson’s McCartney, Songwriter, is the best of the books I’ve read that includes Paul’s post-Beatle career although it was written and published in 86 and therefore a good bit isn’t there.

I haven’t found a good book on either George or Ringo. The books I’ve read that attempt to follow all four of them after the breakup are extremely sketchy. I have to say that you’ll probably get more out of a study of their official websites and the better of the fan websites.

Paul’s divorce

[Please note: the following is a spoof, sarcasm! It is not fact, it is not a prediction for the future, it’s a JOKE!]

Paul McCartney and Heather Mills have had their days in court and all that’s left for them is to wait for the judge to sort out the money. We’ll get a huge number of newspaper and tabloid guesses about how much, none of which are all that likely to be accurate.

HM’s appeal was turned down on the grounds that if she chose to spend her entire settlement on a “victory party” that’s her problem, not his and that she failed to produce medical evidence that she suffers from Tourettes and therefore cannot be held to a gag order. She also failed to prove that a victim of that syndrome is per se unable to keep their mouth shut. The offer from her ex-husband to provide a full-time special minder to gag her any time she slips and starts to talk about their relationship was refused.

HM then appeared on Good Morning to the Whole World accusing Paul of errantry, barratry and rolling an old lady in a barrel as well as referring impolitely to her wooden leg. Oddly enough, the News of the World has joined The Mail, The Globe and The Mirror in a lawsuit filed against Ms. HM alleging barratry in that she threatened those papers, together and separately more then 150 times in one 12-hour period. Leading barristers have opined that it’s an open and open case.

In separate suits HM also claims the royalties from Paul’s new #1 hit album titled After the Ball is Over saying that she actually wrote and sang all the songs in it as well as playing all the instruments.We expect a statement from MPL as soon as the laughter dies down.

The tell-all book for which HM received a $1 million advance on royalties has after 18 months failed to earn the cost of printing and the publisher advises us they will sue her to recover the advance as the book sold only 423 copies – all to her dearest friends. The book is now available on half.ebay.com, new, for $0.25 plus postage.

Bea goes to boarding school so her mother can spend at least nine months of the year someplace other then Great Britain. Paul’s world concert tour enjoys unprecedented success although he breaks and returns to England for every school holiday.

HM suit appealing for a restraining order preventing her former personal trainer from telling reporters about their relationship (even though, of course there was no personal relationship between them) is scheduled for next week. This follows upon her earlier attempts to get such gag orders to cover five former nannies, 12 dismissed security guards, 14 chauffeurs, three bike mechanics and a trash collector.

HM’s dearest friends report that she is happy and delighted to be free from all the hubbub and also to be free of “that dreadful old man” and that she is seriously depressed, on vast amounts of medication and a suicide watch must be provided by her ex-husband.

 

Seriously for a moment–Point 1: could be please forget about the accusation that it’s all Paul’s fault for letting his little willie overrule his head and lead him to marry this woman. If there’s one fact about HM’s past that is completely beyond dispute it’s that she is world class as convincing men, whether old or young, that she is the most desirable female they’ll ever get a chance at. Every single man who has spoken of his relationship with her emphasizes that at first she’s absolutely perfect and that it takes quite a while to realize that it’s all a scam. She’s fooled plenty of men who didn’t have Paul’s romantic outlook and made major fools out of them as well.

Point 2: “They” haven’t been battling in the press; HM’s been battling in the press. Paul’s issued a very few statements, mostly direct, simple denials. He did change the locks on the two houses he was living in. Considering that he’d had his phone tapped and that we now have her “word” that she had secretly taped and video-taped him before she moved out, I personally think it was a minimally smart move.

Yoko’s lack of knowledge of the Beatles

I clearly remember my husband telling me about some new English band that was causing quite a stir back in February, more or less, of 1962. I remember because I went over how they spelled the name and how it might be pronounced in the shower and we only lived in that house with that particular shower for a few months. We were both art majors and members of the old Bohemia that immediately preceded the famous 60s counter culture. Not quite Beat Generation – that has mostly petered out and not completely a part of the foundation for the next. At any rate it was a group that paid attention to what was happening in politics, in the arts and letters, and in entertainment. I remember only that they were English, in England and that there was something different about them.

I relate this because while we were in Nashville, Tennessee and Yoko was in NYC we were essentially members of the same little group. We heard about the antics of her general artistic movement though I doubt we heard of her in specific – she didn’t make a very big splash at that time. I remember that there was a review in the underground newspaper on the University of Tennessee campus the fall of that year. My point is that her crowd must have heard of the Beatles if that knowledge had filtered down to US in Tennessee. Knowing what was going on was one of the base lines of that movement!

One does remember that HM also claimed ignorance of who the Beatles were as well as calling the fans “Beatle nutters” – roughly the same attitude that Yoko seemed to have at that time. I assume they both thought it would make their “falling in love” with a famous man seem to be simply an ordinary person falling in love with another ordinary person and that it had nothing to do with their fame and fortune. Umhmmm.

What if Decca had signed the Beatles?

I just heard the complete tapes the Beatles made on New Years Day, 1962 for Decca. I have to strongly suspect that Brian Epstein chose the songs because it’s a straight pop set with barely a hint of rock and strongly featured Paul’s undeniable abilities as a crooner. So what if Decca had liked the audition? Well, first, we’d have had Paul McCartney and the Silver Beatles. So there’d be no real Beatles. Second, the time of the crooner was not 1962! They would have had a small success in Britain and that would have been that.

It’s not that they didn’t do pop very well indeed. And it’s certainly not that Paul didn’t have the looks and the voice. Four or five years earlier he could have been another Vic Damone or Eddy Fisher! One could have an excellent nightmare out of the knowledge that we only just missed having another out of date crooner with a pretty good backup band instead of millions of screaming girls and some of the most innovative music on the planet. (and some bad stuff as well but that’s ok) In that case, John Lennon wouldn’t have been John Lennon but just some dude that played rhythm guitar.

I really can’t see any A & R man giving a group as much freedom as George Martin did the Beatles. Anyone else would have told them to shut up and do How Do You Do It. Nobody else would have listened and tried to find out what was in their minds, nobody else would have hired half a symphony to do 24 bars!! They would simply have been fed into the machinery and come out looking just like everyone else. Almost worse, the Rolling Stones would have turned out looking, and probably sounding, like the Dave Clark Five!

Tribute Bands

Copy-cat bands don’t seem to have begun until more then 10 years after the Beatles stopped touring (1966) and the Beatles seem to be the first band to have been copied (Beatlemania, 1977.) The Beatles considered attempting to stop the production. There are now scores, if not hundreds of Beatle tribute bands as well as a wide variety of tribute and cover bands devoted to just about every pop group you can think of, not to mention about a million Elvis impersonators. *A tribute band usually attempts to sound and look like the band they take their inspiration from although there are some, like Beatallica who play Beatle songs in the style of Metallica. Cover bands do a particular bands music giving it their own style and interpretation.

Among Beatles fans there is a dichotomy between those who enjoy the fun and nostalgia of attending an “almost Beatles” concert and those who either consider it a rip-off or who see no reason to dilute their memories of the real thing. I’ve heard one of the “antis” say that she understands the attraction for people who didn’t see the originals, whether due to lack of interest/opportunity at the time or due to the fact that they were born to late. I was around at the time and actually lived only a few blocks from DC Stadium in 64 – 66 so I could have gone. Being older then most Beatle fans and hating to be caught up in a crowd situation, I never thought of going.

I’ve been to see two tribute bands, courtesy of my daughter, and enjoyed them very much. I was amazed to see that most of the audience at both concerts were probably too young to have been allowed to go to a Beatles concert and a great many too young to remember the 60s. Both concerts were very well done. The group 1964 very simply recreated a real Beatles concert working on a bare stage with only the appropriate instruments and taking the music only to Paperback Writer and Rain as the Beatles as a group did none of their later songs live. They wore the Sullivan show dark suits and white shirts. I felt rather disappointed when they really did not include the Beatles movements and manner in their performance and I got more the feeling of precision from the band then the fun the real Beatles communicates – or course, it could just have been a bad night or disappointing audience.

Beatlemania Now included several costume changes: dark suits, Pepper uniforms and white tie and tails. Visuals, primarily from the Anthology videos, were projected behind and beside them. I enjoyed the multimedia presentation and the performers of Beatlemania Now were far more active and more nearly recreated the way the Beatles performed rather then merely recreating their music. The musician playing “John” had his stance down really well as did the “Ringo”. The “George” looked very much like George but hadn’t quite perfected the way that George curled his upper body over his guitar nor did he do any of George’s attention gathering leg moves. “Paul” was played by “Paul Ramon” indicating to me that he probably was not the “Paul” who generally worked with the band. His voice was excellent as was his bass playing but he did not have the stance, the stretch up to the mike, or the bounce so characteristic of Paul.

I do like tribute bands, perhaps mainly because I didn’t come to Beatles fandom until a couple years ago. I also like the audiences which were mixed in age and apparent economic level if not in race. The audiences were enthusiastic although, thank goodness, not prone to the screaming of the originals. I also tend to believe that tribute bands, far from damaging the Beatles legacy or taking money that should go to the originals, have done a lot to keep their memory alive. I doubt that anyone sees a tribute band as taking the place of the originals either in their heart or pocketbook. They simply are another way of remembering the group that lodged in so many peoples hearts and can never appear for us again.

There is a legitimate question about the ethics of copying a group’s (or individual’s) stage performance and getting paid for it. (Tribute bands no doubt pay composers’ royalties to Lennon/McCartney but you can’t copyright a performance, only the film/tape it’s on.) I suspect that it was the performance that the Beatles originally thought of as writing a song. That’s merely my opinion and although I am a writer and have suffered a good deal of internet copyright infringement, I remain on the somewhat looser side of the question. I sensed that the 1964 band was bored with their own performance – I have the feeling that they have been doing it too long. Many tribute bands are made up of young musicians who want very much to play their own music but the pay, as an “imitation Beatle,” is far better and infinitely more dependable then the pay for an unknown group. It’s easy to understand both the temptation to go for the bucks and the wish that they could make money doing their own thing. Beatlemania Now, in contrast, really seemed to enjoy being the best “Beatles” they could be and their staging kept our entertainment jangled attention span focused for the whole concert.