Life With the Beatles (Part 4) How the West was Won (1964)

 

Life with the Beatles

How the West was Won

By George Harrison

Liverpool Echo

February 28, 1964

    Before our cheerful troubadours, The Beatles, left New York by plane on the 1,000 mile hop to Miami Beach on the Sunshine State of Florida, 1,000s of pictures had already been published of them and millions of words written or spoken about them from one end of the United States to the other. Out of all this publicity, there emerged one interesting fact: the scoffing and sneering came without exception from commentators and columnists who had never actually met the Beatles, those who had frankly confessed, "You start off expecting to hate their guts, and you finish up loving them."

     One word used more than any other by the American teenagers to describe the boys was "different". The newsmen and women frequently used it too. They seemed unable to grasp that John, Paul, Ringo and George are just four darn nice Liverpool lads with a wonderful sense of native wit and a complete disregard for pomp and circumstances. Their appeal was by no means limited to the young of America. Under a big heading, "Adults like them too," The New York Journal -American published a long section of Reader's letters from all men and women praising the boys like these:  a grandmother living in the Bronx. "I don't blame teenagers for acting the way they do. The Beatles have done a wonderful thing for people of all ages. They have made us feel like laughing again."  A woman from Rosedale, New Jersey: "I don't think it's fair for adults to be so critical of the Beatles. After all, we had our stars who sent us off the beam years ago. Let's let the Beatles entertain us all. And I might add that there's a lot of adults who think these fellows are okay."

     You couldn't turn on a radio or television without hearing Beatles records or seeing newsreel shots of the boys. Practically every standard explanation in the book was offered by psychologists and psychiatrists for Beatlemania. They seriously told us in newspaper articles and interviews that the effect the boys had on American youth were symbols of adolescent revolt against parental authority status that comes from belonging to a group, in this case, of other Beatlemaniacs.

     Sex-- both from the driving nature of the Beatles music and the way they perform it, and from their choirboy like appeal to the mother instinct. Success -- by persons who are seen as fellow teenagers and as underdogs from the wrong side of the tracks who have made good and the frenetically felt urgency for having a good time and living life fast in an uncertain world.

     "How,"asked the New York Times could four mop head Neo-Edwardian attired Liverpudlian accented guitar playing, drum beating little boys come  from across the ocean, come here and attract the immense amount of attention?  They did it by stomping and hollering at songs and a musical idiom that is distinctly American. As the typical Beatles fan is female in early teens," said the Times "And she will say this because they're so cute and so different", but cute or not, the Beatles certainly pose some mighty tough questions for the police forces in the places they visited. 

    Miami was no exception, although it had the examples of chaos in New York and Washington in which it could have patterned its defense measures against the invasions of teenagers, two Miami radio stations with disc jockeys programmed aimed solely at the youngsters, kept up a constant barrage of plugging for Beatle records day before our arrival and for the 48 hours immediately beforehand, the kids were urged by the jockeys to get to the airport and give the Beatles a real Florida welcome. 

    With schools finishing at 3pm and the Beatles plane not due until an hour or so later, there was time for some 8000 girls,  and a few 100 boys, to get there on their own or found parents car. In Florida, by the way, driving licenses can be obtained at the ripe old age of 14, and many of the school kids have automobiles. Something like 2,000 cars more than normal were jammed on the airport parking lots as the young folks poured in. And when those 2,000 extra cars all started trying to get out together two hours later, Miami became bogged down in the biggest traffic jam in its history.

     Again, I took the precaution of flying down an hour earlier than the plane carrying the boys. So again, I was able to get a fan's eye view of things. Every vantage point around the tarmac was packed with youngsters long before the Beatles arrival. Many of them  were carrying huge yellow and black banners proclaiming, "Beatles, we love you." They swarmed in droves all over the place. In every corridor and on every concourse, hundreds of them were lying in wait around the baggage room, where arriving passengers go to collect their luggage.

     A girl of 16 who seemed to be a cheerleader, confided to me, "We've got every exit covered, and whichever one the Beatles use the gang there will let out such a yell that we shall all get the message and get down there." One Deputy Sheriff told me, "We got 500 men on special Beatles duty today. We don't aim to have trouble like those New York cops. Everything's going on nice and quiet ." Hours later, with every road in and out of the airport block solid and an unbroken five mile line of crawling or stationary automobiles, I saw that Sheriff again. He was a worried man, and he shook his head sadly, as he said, "Never saw anything like this in my whole life. What's got into these kids of ours? What have the Beatles got that makes 1,000s of Florida youngsters act like crazies? I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself."

     What had happened was this: because of the possible danger of physical damage to the boys if they tried to get into the airport buildings in the usual way, arrangements had been made by the radio telephone with their aircraft to have them met outside on the tarmac by a limousine and whipped away through a distant exit, leaving their baggage and instruments to be picked up by other members of their party. But the teenage crowds were unaware of this ruse, so they began looking for them. In the mad rush that followed, something like £700 worth of damage was caused to furnishings, glass doors, chairs and windows. 

    Miami Beach Chief Jesse Barkett told me later, "It was fortunate for us that there weren't many troublemakers among the kids, or we would never have been able to contain them."

     This time of the year, Miami Beach is having its high season. Every hotel is crowded with wealthy refugees from the snows of the North who spend a vast sum, up to £1000 a week for a suite to soak up the Florida sun. And despite the obvious fact that the great majority of their quest for tickets for the Beatles appearance on TV had come from their young fans far and wide, the people responsible for  disturbing the precious briefs, took good care that most of them went to the guest staying at the one or others of the hotels. The result was that when the big night arrived, we had about 4,000 middle aged or elderly people in the audience, and only the odd 400 or so teenagers brought in to introduce the screams.

     I was inside, and I cannot say what the television show was really like to the 60,000,000, audience outside who watched it, although subsequent reports gave it very good remarks. But from on the spot, it lacked the fervorish excitement that youngsters always bring with them. On these occasions, they also switched off the amplifiers inside the room to prevent audience sounds coming over too loud and spoiling the sound quality for the television viewers. 

    The technician explains this meant that we could see the boys singing, but couldn't hear them at all. Well, Ringo Starr was upset about the setup when I spoke to him afterwards, "It was dismal, plain, dismal," he said. "Why did they fill the place with old fogies like that and keep out the chicks?" He fumed, "We never got through to them. They were dead, right, dead." And he was absolutely right. The only squeals came from a bunch of kids around me in the back rows of seats when they found out that I was English, from Liverpool, traveling with The Beatles, and that my name was George Harrison. They nearly mobbed me for my autograph. They flatly refused to believe that I could have so many tie ups with George Beatle Harrison and not be related. 

    Next day, the hotel and Miami Beach tourist authorities apologized for the ticket business. More than 1,000 ticket holders had been unable to get through the long queues inside and outside the Deauville before the doors were closed at the start of the transmission. There wasn't an empty seat in the Napoleon Room, so we must have had a lot of gate Crashers. 

    This was the last business engagement for The Beatles in America. From then on, they were free to enjoy the rest of the sunshine, provided the crowds, reporters and the cameraman could be dodged. It took some doing. By now, the boys were big news, and every move they made brought headlines. Thus we had Paul McCartney's four day friendship with film starlet Jim Jill Haworth become boosted into a romance, although those of us in the know were aware that a little lass named Jane Asher back in England, rated as Paul's real heartthrob. Even delightful platinum blonde Cynthia Lennon, the wife of John, came in for attention from fans and newspaper men, despite all her efforts to keep way out of the limelight. Their nightlife was subdued and circumspect, limited to occasional club visits with their friendly policemen Sergeant Buddy Dresner as guide. No breath of scandal touched them and that appeared to cause Miami great surprise.