Life With the Beatles
What Makes the Beatles Tick?
By George Harrison
Liverpool Echo
March 2, 1964
And so we come to the hour of our partying with fair Florida. Outside in the blazing sunshine as we packed, the girls were parading with banners and emblazoned "Come Back Soon, Beatles We Love You!" At the airport, hundreds more waved and screamed their farewells from the concourses and the rooftops everywhere. The cry was the same: 'Please come back to us.'
"And like the end of any marvelous holiday", said Ringo, "You don't want to go, but you've got to go." John and Cynthia Lennon smiled together as they counted the hours to London for the reunion with their baby, which grandma from Hoylake had been looking after for them. Paul, with girlfriend Jane Asher, waiting eagerly in London for his return, and George, heading for a 21st birthday celebration, soon cheered up too.
But the usual buoyant Ringo couldn't so easily get rid of the clouds. "This American tour has been the greatest time of my life," he said to me, "especially the last week in Miami. It's been out of this world, and I'm sorry to be leaving it. That's all." I tried cheering him up by saying, "Don't forget, you've got an Australian trip coming up in June or July. That's going to be something to look forward to. And it's almost a certainty, I understand from Brian that you'll be returning for another American tour, probably in September," I added. And he started perceptually to brighten.
Due to a change in schedule, we arrived in New York more than an hour late and had only about 15 minutes to transfer from the plane to our Pan American jet airliner bound for London. But in that quarter hour, 5000 at least of New York's adoring beat-chicks who'd been waiting nearly all day, gave the lads a send off they won't forget.
Scores of the girls were in tears as they cried out, "Don't leave us. Fly back soon, Beatles. Beatles, please come back!"
Then the doors were closed. The engines roared and taxied along the runway, and we were away into the darkness. Six and a half hours after leaving New York, we were back in London to a reception that was even greater than anything the boys had ever received in the United States. "It's good to be back among the English", said John Lennon, waving happily with the others to that seething, cheering, yelling crowd at London Airport from the top of the gangway leading out of our Pan American clipper jet called "The Beatles."
"Agreed," said George Harrison. "Nice people, the English." "Yes", followed up Paul McCartney, "So unforeign, uh so sort of healthy and well British, if you know what I mean." And that was how the most entertaining and successful ambassadors for goodwill that England had ever sent to the United States, four chirpy young lads from Liverpool, returned.
It was typical of their carefree approach to any situation, calling for a little mickey taking either of themselves or of other people, or perhaps to play down emotion. When interviewers at the reception in the VIP lounge at the airport asked them, How did you find New York? They got the answer, "Find it. How could anybody lose a place that size? It's enormous, tall as well."That kind of crack trips off their tongues at a rate of knots. They are never at a loss for a phrase or word to make you chuckle, yet it isn't rehearsed, just natural Scouser wit.
Because I know the boys better than most, I was constantly being asked by Americans, particularly colleagues of the press, "Just what makes these Beatles tick?" Ringo Starr overheard that question being put to me in New York. Grinned as he said, "Tell 'em we aren't death -watch Beatles, we don't tick. Yet, it was a reasonable thing to ask. What really is the tremendous attraction that these four boys from Liverpool have for the youngsters of the English-speaking world?
I tried to study the phenomenon as they moved around the United States, causing pandemonium and near riots wherever they appeared. Undoubtingly, the powerhouse drive, an incessant repetition of their Mersy beat, was the basic and original cause. But as the Americans often pointed out to me, they, too, have thousands of rock and roll groups producing somewhat similar sounds without ever getting a raised eyebrow from the fans.
The Beatles look different. Their hairstyle started through economic necessity, because they didn't want to waste their hard-earned pocket money on haircuts. It has now become one of the finest publicity gimmicks anywhere in the world. On top of this, John, Paul, George, and Ringo are instantly identified by their Christian names these days. Surely the hallmark of true fame, plus they are only a little over teenage themselves, and extremely presentable. They have a charm of manner and a warm friendliness which appeals to people they meet, right from the word go, the additional point that three of them are bachelors and highly eligible bachelors too with a lot of money, is unquestionably another asset in the minds of the 10s of 1000s, say millions of girls on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ringo summed it up this way: "I reckon those chicks look at us and say to themselves, 'let's pretend I'm married to one of them'. And they sort of imagine themselves as Mrs. Paul McCartney or Mrs. George Harrison, or even as my missus. Then they get to thinking, 'wouldn't it be wonderful to be like Cynthia Lennon, and to be able to point to John and say he's mine? Nobody else can have him because he's my husband?' From then on, they get into a dream. They scream at us by name in the hope that whichever one of us they're yelling at will hear their cries and somehow acknowledge it to them only. They forget that when you're the target of squeals of 1000s of girls, all at the one time, you don't hear a thing except noise. "
Many times, I asked teenage girls, "Why do you scream at the boys?" The answer confirmed Ringo's view. Most of them said, "I scream so they'll look at me", or occasionally, "I scream because they're the Beatles, and you just have to scream at them. Everybody does."
In the lift of our New York hotel one afternoon, I met two girls who had come down from Toronto in Canada, where they had just formed a Beatles fan club. They told me, with stars in their eyes, that they had enrolled 15,000 members in one week, and because of that, they were being given the honor of a personal meeting with the boys. And I saw the same girls half an hour later in the Plaza foyer carrying autographed pictures of their idols. They could scarcely talk, so breathless with excitement, they were. "I can't believe it," one eventually whispered, "can't believe it. I've actually seen them and been talking to them. Oh, I could die."
Her 16-year-old pal was sitting pale-faced on a chair. "They're glorious, wonderful, beautiful, please, please, Beatles, come to Canada," she moaned softly, as if saying a prayer. What kind of hypnosis can bring about reactions such as this into sensible, well bred high school girls? I just don't know. For the lads had merely been their customary polite, friendly selves, nothing more.
When they had recovered their powers of speech and were talking normally to me over tea and cake in the lounge, the girls told me how dreadfully disappointed all the youngsters of Canada were that the Beatles tour did not make a visit to their country. "You just wait until they do come to Canada", said Jean, the younger one. "We'll set them up with such a welcome for them that they'll never want to go back to England again. No, not even John and his wife," she added firmly. "We sure will!" confirmed her friend. "You tell them that when you're with them, Mr. Harrison. We would have told them ourselves, but they're in their room, and we didn't seem able to talk much. You know, being so close to them and all, Oh, it was heaven!"
At the fantastic concert in Washington Coliseum, before 8,092 shrieking fans, when the boys gave their finest performance of the entire tour, I talked to a group of girls who were sitting two rows from the ring stage where the Beatles were playing. They seemed to me to scream throughout the entire show. "Did you hear any of the words to the songs?" I queried afterwards. "We don't want to," they said, limply. "We've got their records, so we know the songs. We just came here to see them and to scream."
Why did they do it? "Because it makes me feel all warm inside," one replied. "Because they're way out with their music and they make me want to go way out too", said another. "I don't know, confessed another. It's just that it makes me happy."
I guess the Beatles could not have done what they did in America without doing it here in Britain first. But having become a phenomenon in the beat market in this country, with 1,000,000 copies of each of their records being sold automatically, even before they reached the shops. Their invasion of America was made easy. The American youngsters, by means of newspaper articles, radio, magazines, newsreels, and television, were made fully aware of the static rapture and wild scenes of enthusiasm which greeted the Beatles wherever they appeared in Britain. In their own minds, I'm quite convinced the kids over there vowed, "When the Beatles come here, we will outdo the English in our welcome to them. It was a case of international rivalry with national prestige at stake. Anything they can do, we can do better.
And when the boys landed on American soil for the first time in New York, those 1000s of girls, plus a few 100 boys who had waited many long hours for that moment, put their vow to good effort. Meanwhile, of course, the Beatles' records have been released throughout the United States and have immediately scored into sales of millions of albums and singles to ensure an enormous following for them everywhere, and remember too, that before they left England, the boys had scored an immense personal success at the Royal Variety Performance in London. Pictures showing them being congratulated by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, coupled with reports of their Palladium triumph, hit every newspaper and radio station in the States. The whole country laughed at the story of them saying to the royal show audience, 'Those at the back, clap your hands. Those in the front, just rattle your jewelry'. It was a gag that America loved, and it helped their reputation as carefree kids who laughed at anything, savoring the pompous. So all was set fair for them to bring off as big a success in America as they had done in their homeland.
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