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photo by Terry Todd |
Review Journal
August 20, 1964
Toy Cats the Coolest
By Donald Warman
A tried bunch of newsmen dizzy from two hours of shrieking
and angry at the roughness of a key up security force, trooped into a backstage
room of the Convention Center Thursday night for a close look at the Beatles.
The boys, obviously beat after 25 minutes of shouting back
at the ocean of screamers who faced them in the Rotunda, walked wearily onto a
platform. Side by side, like characters
in a police line-up, they submitted to a mass press interview.
The “Conference” – it was anything but- was as noisy, as
chaotic, as impatiently handled as everything else in that long afternoon.
But the Beatles graciously fielded, in their almost
inaudible speaking voices, a hodge-podge of questions which flew simultaneously
from most of the 100 persons who pushed and crowded their way to the platform.
Shouting over a forbidding cordon of private policemen, the
luckier reporters and radio men managed to attach themselves to one or other of
the Beatles at least for a few moments.
A Review Journal reporter, by a sheer stroke of luck, was
shoved right to the feet of John Lennon, an engaging, articulate, modest young
man who appears to carry the burden of the melody line in the Beatles arias.
Lennon, who is much better looking in real life than in his
photographs, leaned down and answered freely and affably to such inanities as
these:
Q: What do you do
with your money?
A: Put it in the
bank.
Q: What will you do
after this fad is over?
A: I don’t know.
Q: What is your
personal favorite among the gifts you have received?
A: An admirer in
Liverpool sent me 40 cats … not real cats, you understand, but ah, toy cats,
little things for decoration. I s’pose
they’re my favorite.
(if enough of the interviewers caught that answer, the toy
cat market will surely boom.)
Q: Which do you hate
worse? Reporter and their questions or
photographers who always want one more?
A: (with a boyish
smile) I don’t hate anyone. None of us
do.
Q: Do you regard
yourselves as being musicians?
A: (He appears never
to have been asked that question before) Well we’re in the union, so I s’pose
you’d have to say that, in a way, we’re musicians. But not really, I guess. WE don’t think about it much.
Meanwhile in the hubbub along the platform, Paul McCartney,
George Harrison, and that Ring fellow were fielding questions like “When are you going to write your next
book’?” and “What do you think of school dropouts?”
When the RJ reporter tried to edge his way along the
platform to catch the answer to that last one, he was abruptly lifted back to
his place by the coppers.
The mass interview, born in edginess and tedium, shortly
died of apathy.
Then the Beatles trooped, Indian file, to their dressing
room. It was a hard day. And the boys faced a hard day’s night ahead.
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