The Beatles took America by storm in 1964 – but it was the beginning of the end

It’s like the light came on, after total darkness,” is how author Joe Queenan remembers the arrival of Beatlemania in America at the dawn of 1964. He’s not alone in citing the coming of the Fab Four as the true beginning of the 1960s, of the modern era, of a transformative period driven in no small part by the music, words and actions of four young lads from Liverpool. But if you were a teenager in America when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived on Boxing Day 1963, then it’s personal. And if you caught any of the concerts on their first US tour in February 1964, or watched their performances on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show, or stood outside Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel hoping for an autograph, it’s likely you’ve never forgotten their impact.

That first US tour and the special relationship between The Beatles and America are explored in depth by the new documentary Beatles ’64. “The trip was a dream come true for [them],” says the movie’s producer, Margaret Bodde. “They’d always loved American music, and now they were coming to the home of everything they’d dreamed about.”

But America was going through some issues. The nation had spent a bleak winter mourning its princelike president John F Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas that November. “JFK represented hope, youth, the future,” says the movie’s director, David Tedeschi. “A gloom had descended upon the US. One interviewee told us his girlfriend locked herself in her room for four days after the assassination.” But just as it seemed like this grief would never abate, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” arrived, topping the charts. “From that gloom,” says Tedeschi, “there was this spark of life and optimism and joy.”

Tedeschi’s movie chronicles this cultural moment through the words of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (and, via archival footage, the late John Lennon and George Harrison) as well as interviews with Beatle heroes such as Smokey Robinson and Ron Isley and the then teenaged Beatlemaniacs like Queenan and Jamie Bernstein (daughter of composer Leonard). Much of the film originates from footage shot during the tour by Albert and David Maysles, later recognised as pioneers of the modernist documentary form via masterpieces like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, but only just beginning their careers when Granada TV commissioned them to film the 1964 documentary What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA.

“They weren’t ‘the famous Maysles brothers’ yet,” says Tedeschi. “They’d only made one short film. They weren’t Granada’s first choice. But the footage is remarkable. Right from the start, they have this intimacy with the group. Paul says the band asked the Maysles, ‘What do you want from us?’ They said, ‘Just be yourselves’. Paul told them, ‘Oh, we can do that. That’s something we can do.’ The Beatles were artists, and so were the Maysleses, and for them to come together was a great accident of fate.” The brothers shadowed the band from press conference to concert to post-show hotel room hangs, their cameras always rolling. They shot about 11 hours of film, which Tedeschi watched, multiple times. “The challenge,” he says, “was choosing what to leave out. It was a thrill just watching The Beatles idly sitting around in their hotel room.”

On the evidence of Beatles ’64, it’s not hard to see why America fell so hard for the Fabs so quickly. There are some absolutely thrilling live clips, in particular an electrifying dash through “Long Tall Sally” at the Washington Coliseum, with a young McCartney howling with such abandon he could give his hero Little Richard a run for his money. And while at one press conference early in the trip they’re described as “four Elvis Presleys”, they’re more like four Groucho Marxes: irrepressibly hilarious, effortlessly anarchic, clowning for the media but, just as often, clowning a media that had so swiftly become obsessed with them. “There had been news reports about them for days before The Beatles’ arrival, mocking their hair,” says Tedeschi. “They were ready to eat these guys alive.” But as it became clear that the Fabs were no mere stage-managed teen idols – that they were smart and funny and could more than hold their own – the press quickly took their side.

“Having throngs of young people meet them at the airport and chase them down the street gave The Beatles confidence when dealing with US journalists,” adds Bodde. “And this charm of theirs never felt like something they could switch on or off. They were just being who they were. And that authenticity was a big part of their appeal.”

open image in gallery

As well as filming The Beatles, the Maysleses cannily captured the phenomenon surrounding the group, from the omnipresent screaming fans to the sticks-in-the-mud who refused to be seduced by this British invasion. Here, we see a world The Beatles hadn’t yet conquered, peopled by patrician older men deriding the band as “sick” and sneering at the teenage girls losing their absolute minds with joy. They’re like dinosaurs mocking the meteor about to wipe them out, the advent of Beatlemania already an inevitability. “There’s always been middle-aged guys like that opposing every new thing in history,” says Bodde. “It’s the classic generational and cultural divide...”

The teenage girls, meanwhile, almost steal the movie from The Beatles, with their Noo Yawk accents, wicked humour and their fierce devotion to the Fabs. As the Maysleses follow their attempts to sneak into the Plaza and locate their prey, it’s clear you’d be wiser to separate a mother bear from her cub than get between these fans and their beloved Beatles. The reflections on this intense devotion, 60 years on, yield some of the most resonant modern-day interviews in the movie.

“It was great to have the opportunity to give voice to those fans,” says Bodde. “They were always dismissed as screaming teenage girls, but they were ahead of everyone else, they were onto something. They spoke about gender and romantic notions and impulses. They knew this band was different... that The Beatles still had an edge, were countercultural, but that young girls could relate to them and not feel threatened by them. It was a phenomenon that young girls could feel really excited about, that they owned. This was their band.”

It was on this American trip that The Beatles began to truly feel their power, their effect on the world. Lennon in particular relished the disruptive force of rock’n’roll. “He loved how it was rooted in Black music,” nods Tedeschi. “The establishment had been trying to stamp out rock’n’roll from the very beginning because the innuendo in the lyrics and the way the young people moved their bodies made Wasps so uncomfortable.” The Beatles managed to disrupt the racism of the era, to transcend the segregation that infected even the music scene. “There was a camaraderie between The Beatles and the bands they loved, with The Beatles covering Motown songs, and the Motown artists then covering The Beatles. Smokey Robinson told us how this love they shared overcame prejudice and segregation. He was so gratified that The Beatles covered his songs.”

If The Beatles were a liberating presence in America, they also sensed the liberating power of a nation where they weren’t solely judged by their class and background. There’s a telling moment when they attend a party in their honour at the British embassy and are mistreated by staff, groped and manhandled and called “yobs”. “It seems very ‘old world’, that classism they experienced at the embassy,” says Bodde. “In theory at least, America is, ‘What can you bring? What are your skills and talents?’ rather than, ‘Who are your parents?’” Tedeschi notes the tour as the beginning of a special relationship between The Beatles and America that outlived the band. “John moved to New York. Ringo essentially lives in Los Angeles. Paul married a New Yorker. George married a woman from Hawaii.”

The movie depicts a breathless, exhausting, unforgettable fortnight for the Fabs, evoking how intense and overwhelming this experience must have been. The late Ronnie Spector, leader of girl group The Ronettes, recalls sneaking the band out of the Plaza and into the nightclubs of Spanish Harlem, where they could briefly escape the scrutiny of the press and the fans for a night because “everyone just thought they were a bunch of Spanish dogs”. Later, a bewildered Ringo apologises to a pack of TV cameramen pursuing him along a train platform, after saying, “It’s great to be in New York” when he’s actually in Washington DC. “I’m just moving so fast,” he replies.

open image in gallery

“John later said they were shuffled from room to room, and every once in a while, he’d wake up and think, ‘How did I get here?’,” Tedeschi says. “It was one surreal moment after another.”

It seems the Fabs’ response to the crazy circus around them was to make each other laugh, to revel in the ridiculousness of it all. “In the band we were normal, and the rest of the world was crazy,” says Harrison in the movie. “Everybody got into the mania. You could make a film just showing how idiotic everybody else was whenever The Beatles came to town.”

It wouldn’t always be this way. Within two years, the futility and frustration of being drowned out by audiences in such deafening states of mania sent The Beatles off the road forever. Within six years, the group were done. “They were in constant motion,” Bodde says, of The Beatles of 1964. “They must have understood that touring at that level couldn’t have lasted, that it was unsustainable.” Bodde sees Beatles ’64 and Disney+’s previous Beatles documentary Get Back – Peter Jackson’s exhaustive chronicle of the making of their final album Let It Be – as “bookends” to the band’s story. “Our movie is near the beginning. Get Back picks up a couple of years later, and everything has changed, it’s the end. But still, the bond is so clear. They’re still brothers, they’re just going through a family feud.”

open image in gallery

The public’s fascination with The Beatles seems “insatiable”, she adds. “There’s a finite amount of film material of them, but it doesn’t seem to be a finite amount of interest. Each generation discovers The Beatles – every parent who grew up on that music wants their kids to know them. There’s something about The Beatles – the joy, the innocence – that spans generations. If the music didn’t have that kind of staying power, that interest would have waned.”

Certainly, their switching the light back on in the midst of America’s dark night still resonates 60 years on. “They were a new kind of rock’n’roller,” Tedeschi says. “They were humble about it, and certainly never pretentious about it, but our enduring interest in them has to do with what The Beatles did for society, as much as what their music does for us in the moment.”

‘Beatles ’64’ is streaming on Disney+