The Week The Beatles Conquered America.

This is a Miller Avenue Musings re-run.

By the beginning of 1964 I had stopped buying singles altogether but this didn't keep me from dropping into Village Music for a regular chat with Sara Wilcox. I did buy records at this time but they tended to be comedy or film soundtracks.

   The shop had moved from the Sequoia Theater building up to one of the new units on Blithedale just about where it made the transition from East to West.

   Sara was the nicest person that I ever encountered in any of the stores in downtown Mill Valley. She was smart, funny, beautiful, impeccably dressed and it didn't matter to her whether I bought anything or not. She enjoyed telling me all about the record company parties she regularly attended and her yarns were never dull.

   She spoke the jargon of professional sales and of the business she was in but her syntax was original and her stories were very funny.

   John Goddard, who I didn't know at this time but who subsequently bought the business from her, tells me that she was a reliable and entertaining source of dirty jokes and I certainly would have been open to hearing them and maybe I did but it isn't a detail which sticks in my memory. What I do remember was that she was constantly amused by the ludicrous lengths the record companies would go to in promoting their products and, as she was regularly attending record biz shindigs she always had a new tale to tell.

   My singles buying fizzled out throughout the year of 1958. I know I bought Tequila by the Champs and loved its infectious rhythm. I also had a few discs by Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis but by 1959 I simply heard the records on the radio rather than buying and collecting them. This didn't prevent me being brainwashed with all the new releases, some of which I liked and many of which I didn't. It is with profound irritation that I know many of these songs by heart to this day. Top of my 'Most Hated' list would have to be Tell Laura I Love Her by Ray Peterson. I despised everything about this song: The shameless melodrama, the whining crybaby voice and the ghastly use of sentiment combined to make it totally loathsome. It was, however, a well crafted number which got in your head and wouldn't go away.

   The early sixties played host to a mix of popular musical styles. Folk music was represented by the Kingston Trio as well as Peter, Paul & Mary. Surf music came in the form of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and there were dance crazes like the twist and mashed potatoes but, though I heard all this music on the radio I had become a passive listener.

   I remember being surprised by the film of Bye Bye Birdie which came out in early 1963 as it reminded me of the hysteria which had surrounded Elvis around the time he got drafted. Screaming girls were not something which accompanied any of the popular music of the early 1960s and Bye Bye Birdie reminded me that such a phenomenon had once existed.

   So I popped into Village Music one day after school in early February, 1964 and what should Sara be telling me about but this new British band on Capitol called The Beatles. She'd been to a reception and been given this roll of stickers with four mop topped hairdos and the slogan: The Beatles Are Coming!

   I had a look at the album cover and was immediately struck by the fact that the four Beatles all had haircuts like Moe Howard in the Three Stooges. That took a bit of getting used to as Moe was my least favourite Stooge. He was the bully amongst them who was constantly dishing out hideous punishments like eye jabbing and hitting over the head with hammers.

   The photo on the back had their names and I saw that Paul McCartney looked very much like my school friend Johnny Lem. Also the drummer was named Ringo like Ringo Hallinan. In fact another Ringo had been in the charts recently which was a single by Lorne Greene the star of television's Bonanza.

   I don't think Sara played the album for me but I soon heard I Want To Hold Your Hand on the radio and was very taken by it. I'd never come across a song about holding hands before and it seemed to speak to me about being a teenager. I was, at this time, sixteen.

   I certainly wasn't overly fascinated about The Beatles until the Friday night of this particular week. I was at our house on Catalpa getting ready to go out to a dance in Sausalito. I'd shaved what little beard I had and doused my face in English Leather. The television sat right next to our front door and Walter Cronkite was reading the news as I was about to exit. He reported the arrival of The Beatles at JFK Airport. I paused to watch hoardes of screaming girls and these four skinny guys with pudding bowl hairdos running down the steps from their plane. They were all laughing.

   This was the same phenomenon that Bye Bye Birdie had reminded me of with Elvis and had not been seen by me since.

   I delayed my departure long enough to watch all of the report and when it was finished, Walter Cronkite gave a caustic glance to the camera and said: "And that is what some people consider to be news. Good night."

   I have little memory of the dance in Sausalito except that the hall was up the hill above Bridgeway, the main drag through the town. The band might have been The Jesters which my friend Mark Symmes played drums for. If so their repertoire would have included such numbers as What'd I Say by Ray Charles. Within a few weeks that would be turned on its head as all the musical combos in Marin County would struggle to learn every number the Beatles recorded. This, however, was Friday night and the true conversion for millions of American teenagers would not come until Sunday when the Beatles made their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

   The Jesters were a fine group. Dave Shallock played lead guitar, Gary Fay rhythm and Jim Michaelson was on bass. In addition to playing the drums my friend Mark also sang as did, I think, all of them. They looked good and were always highly professional. Another classmate of mine who was a musician and always had a band working the dance halls was Bill Champlin. Bill and Mark Symmes were both dedicated students of Mister Greenwood who ran the music department at Tam High. They were both in his marching band. Another disciple of Mister Greenwood's was George Duke whose jazz trio was working professionally throughout his years as a student at Tam.

   One more schoolmate of mine was part of this musical club and that was Billy Bowen who I'd known well when we were in grade school at Homestead. I remember seeing Bill walking home from Village Music in the late 1950s carrying a Chuck Berry album and when I asked him why he had a whole album he told me it was to practice his drums to.  

   The thing which makes this particular dance at Sausalito something of a mystery to me is the fact that I'm pretty certain I went alone and without alcoholic enhancement. The usual routine for the weekend was to find a way to secure enough booze to become blotto then stagger onto the dance in Mill Valley in the hope that your inebriation would give you the courage to successfully pick up a young lady. The fact that this scenario never seemed to work out in no way discouraged me from trying again and again.

   One of the most stunningly beautiful young women in my year at Tam was Hollis Hite, someone I had an agonizing crush on ever since I had first met her. It must be mentioned here that I was tiny, looked much younger than my sixteen years and had become accustomed to the dreadful syndrome of unrequited love. I was constantly falling in love with unattainable women. Inside I was a handsome athletic movie star but the physical reality of my presence was something less impressive. I was so far from cool it made me ache.

   However, I happened to be pretty good friends with Hollis Hite and simply had to keep my feelings secret. She was, at this time going out with another pretty good friend of mine, Bruce Crawford. Bruce, unlike me, was tall, blond, extremely handsome and easy going in a way that I was not. 

   By the time Sunday came around I found myself up at Hollis's to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Bruce was there along with Christy Flagg and Chuck Collins.

   Ed Sullivan's show was one of those American institutions in the 1950s and 60s. He had a face like a pickle and the weirdest speaking voice. He always pronounced the word show like 'shoe' and seemed to be the most unlikely fellow to be in the entertainment business but in it he was. He and Steve Allen had a deadly rivalry for ratings being on opposite networks.

   There was nothing remarkable about The Beatles' first appearance on the Sullivan show except the screaming was pretty loud. As the camera did close-ups, the name of each Beatle would appear and I think by the end of the evening I knew John, Paul, George and Ringo by sight.

   They were something totally different. Their press conferences were terribly funny and they took delight in making fun of their inquisitors. In spite of the Moe Howard hairdos they seemed to have much more in common with the Marx Brothers than the 3 Stooges. 

   Their witty replies to the asinine questions of the American press were made all the more colorful by their thick Liverpool accents.

   From my perspective the Beatles seemed to take America in one week and by the end of that week I was, like everybody else, a Beatlemaniac. I bought the LP Meet The Beatles and just loved their songs. Paul McCartney had the most amazing rock and roll voice as demonstrated on I Saw Her Standing There and John Lennon's vocals had such a lyrical quality. Their songs were all about the agonies of teenage love but in a new and original way.

   Coming, as I did, from a highly non-conformist family, I did not often find myself going with the flow when it came to popular culture so it was a strange kind of liberation to be swept along with everybody else in total admiration for the Fab Four.

   I Want To Hold Your Hand went to number one which was soon followed by She Loves You and Please Please Me. 

   Before long the other British bands began landing on our shores. The Kinks were great even though all their songs seemed to have the same riff.  Much publicity was made of The Dave Clark Five but they were so mediocre that they faded fast. The Animals, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas, Peter And Gordon, The Zombies and Donovan all came across in what soon was referred to as the British Invasion. I remember a photo of The Rolling Stones was published in the Chronicle under the headline 'Here come five more!' They looked so ugly I couldn't imagine ever liking them.

   It is difficult to under estimate the cultural impact which The Beatles had on the United States at this time and their huge success was to change show business and the media in fundamental ways.

   Probably the most amazing thing about The Beatles was the fact that they kept coming out with amazingly fresh and memorable new sounds for several years to come and, together with Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds and countless sixties groups, provided the soundtrack for my teenage years.

   Of course there was more to come. The Vietnam War and the emergence of drugs within the white middle class of America stirred up a complex brew which gave that time a unique place in our history.

   But The Beatles came along before the confusions of the drug culture wrought such carnage and the horrors of Vietnam got out of control. For that brief moment in time these four giggling Liverpudlians led us, like the children of Hamlin, away from our otherwise undiluted Americanism. We would never be the same again.