In 1963, each of the Beatles had been given a Pentax. Still, McCartney tried to capture some of that New Madness through the lens of a camera. REPORTER: What would you call that hair style you’re wearing?Īsked, preposterously, to explain their own significance, they made fun of the question. REPORTER: Tell me, how did you find America? The band’s interviews became a signature, four very clever young men batting back reporters’ endlessly idiotic questions, a patter only barely fictionalized in the 1964 film “ A Hard Day’s Night”: Partly it was the magnificent irreverence, the affectionate cheekiness, the surprisingly soft sexiness. Time, writing about the Beatles, called it “the New Madness.” And something more, too, was catching fire: an unsettling, an upheaval, revolutionary. By the time they broke out, the sun had set on the British Empire, but the age of globalization had begun. Beatles records played on radio stations from Tokyo to Johannesburg. It’s even in the name: “the Beatles” is a mashup of the name of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets, and the Beat poets, a label that came from Black slang. They played nineteen-twenties British music-hall music, and rhythm and blues, and Black roots music from the banks of the Mississippi and the streets of Detroit. They wore Italian suits and Cuban-heeled boots and French haircuts popular with German students. As the historian Sam Lebovic has pointed out, they’d been shaped by a wide, wide world. In 1964, the Beatles became the first truly global mass-culture phenomenon. But what madness-what beauty, joy, and fury-would you capture? In 1964, you could hold your camera up to the world. Two days after Kennedy was killed, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. More pensive than wistful, he remembered that day, how it was surreal, unreal, but, then, everything about that year was surreal. We were in his office in New York McCartney, eighty, wore jeans and a pullover, slouching in his chair like a teen-ager. “We were backstage somewhere on a little tour in England when we heard the news,” McCartney told me last year. At 2:38 P.M., Cronkite looked up at the clock, and announced that the President had died. “If you can zoom in with that camera, we can get a closer look at this picture,” he told a cameraman, holding up a photograph of the motorcade taken moments before the shooting. You couldn’t see Cronkite the news had just come in on the wire service, and onscreen was a slide that read, “ CBS NEWS BULLETIN.” Minutes later, with the cameras finally on, Cronkite appeared in shirtsleeves, spruce but shaken. The sixties started in 1964, observers like to say, and 1964 started that afternoon, November 22, 1963, when Cronkite broke into “As the World Turns.” “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade,” Cronkite said, his voice grave and urgent. Kendrick’s report had been set to air again that night, on “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” The rerun was cancelled. “What has occurred to you as to why you’ve succeeded?” Kendrick asked Paul McCartney. The Beatles found it hard to take the search seriously. “Some say they are the authentic voice of the proletariat.” Everyone searched for that deeper meaning. “The Beatles are said by sociologists to have a deeper meaning,” Kendrick reported. “That’s not a collection of insects but a quartet of young men with pudding-bowl haircuts.” And, four days after that, “CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace” broadcast a four-minute report from “Beatleland,” by the London correspondent Alexander Kendrick. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Two weeks later, the band made their first appearance on American television, on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.” “The hottest musical group in Great Britain today is the Beatles,” the reporter Edwin Newman said. “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help,” John Lennon cried out to the crowd. On November 4, 1963, the Beatles played at the Prince of Wales Theatre, in London, exuberant, exhausted, and defiant.
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