I Was a Teenage Existentialist #19 Everything Started Over with The Beatles.

Our Lifeline to Hope

Memories from before The Beatles feel like a kind of pre-consciousness, pre-historic. I remember what radio was like before them. I used to help mom make the beds, it was a chore, but as in something we did when it needed doing, and I didn’t mind helping out. The radio was on, WCCO -AM. It was one of the first radio stations in Minneapolis, the call letters came from Washburn-Crosby Co. Washburn and Crosby were two guys who started General Mills, makers of Wheaties and Cheerios, which we ate every day. The mills were founded at the waterfalls at St. Anthony, the only waterfalls on the whole of the Mississippi River, the water power that was the source of the Mill City of Minneapolis.

Anyway, ‘CCO dominated the airwaves. They had like 60% of the market share for decades, doing news features, crop reports, popular songs of the day, Joyce Lamont with recipe ideas, and weather forecasts. It was like a General Store. You tuned into them for school closings when there was a lot of snow. This was before Public Radio.

The news was mixed in with playing a variety of music; country songs, Broadway show tunes; Vic Damone, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Bent Fabric, Perry Como, Dean Martin, Doris Day, Andy Williams, maybe the latest Bobby Darin. Most of the male singers were low-rent Italian clones of Sinatra. I don’t remember any Elvis. Prince talked about growing up listening to all styles of music, that was ‘CCO, because there was no such thing as a Black radio station in Minneapolis, the Black population was very small.

When my brothers moved out for college, I moved downstairs, and listened to the two AM rock stations, KDWB and WDGY late into the night. They competed for the youth vote. They had stuff like Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary (the cleaned-up Dylan), but also The Supremes, James Brown doing “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (which I thought was about A Bag), the Chiffons. There was “Wolverton Mountain” or Gene Pitney singing “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”. If you look at “Hits from 1963” you’ll see a pastiche of styles; “He’s So Fine” and “Be My Baby” from Motown, “I Will Follow Him” from the soapy white romance department, “Sukiyaki” from the novelty section, and the Four Seasons, from the white vocal groups with a castrati doing falsetto lead, trying to sound like a white version of do-wop harmonies.

So when the Beatles came, it was a sudden sensation. At first, I did not know what I was looking at. I remember watching them on Ed Sullivan with my mom, when I had just turned 9, on a black and white TV. Mom was a skeptic. They did three songs, and two of them were “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” That was Brian Epstein’s idea, to go hard-sell on the hit single. Mom said “They did that one already” and concluded “I don’t see anything so special.” But no offense, Mumsy, you were a suburban midwestern housewife, who grew up on Bing Crosby, now a mother of 5 and not exactly in the market for teenage heart-throb music. Mom thought the long hair looked “gimmicky.” To us, it was cool, it was British, even European (It was actually Hamburgian, but we didn’t know anything about that, it was original Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe’s girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr who gave him that haircut, and she was German). The hair was Teenage Rebellion, big time. Bad Boys in the best way. We had never seen anything like it. I guess the girls thought it was Cute because it wasn’t a military buzz cut.

As time went on in 1964, the Beatles seemed to be everywhere. They had built up hit after hit in Britain, but their American distributor, Capitol, refused to put them out. By the time they did, with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, the Fab Four had a backlog of hit singles, and they launched them all, one after the other. It made history by having all five top spots on the singles chart and the top two in the LP charts at the same time. Bob Dylan reflected later that “This had never happened before.”

It got so that if there was a new Beatles song, the kids would talk about it in school, and if you hadn’t heard it yet, you felt Out Of It. This is, like, 4th grade. The kids who could keep up with the radio were cool.

I also felt kind of out of it because everything was happening elsewhere. Bob Dylan was in New York, the Beatles were in Swingin’ London, the Beach Boys were in Surfin’ USA, California. Also, my brothers were starting to filter out of the house, starting when I was 10, so my connections to what was cool were getting more and more remote. The countervailing, opposite experience was that we were in the center of everything, that we weren’t swept away by any one thing or another. It was both/and. But wherever it came from, Music is what we had. It wasn’t just the Lonesome Prairie anymore.

The Beatles were IT for us. As Paul Simon said, “Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.” We could not get enough of them. There was a new sensation with every release, and demand just built. So our attention moved away from everything else. The radio was our focus. It was free, and dad would not pop for movies; “Waste of money.” Other groups started to soak up the spotlight; the Beach Boys put out a dozen hits about surfing, then another dozen about cars. They were about harmonies and California, but the Beatles were about harmonies, guitars, hair, clothes, Europe, and this mysterious thing called Girls.

Why were they so nutty about the Beatles? I can look at old videos now and spot a few things. One, They were all cute, but Paul was Very cute. Two, each girl could have a different favorite. One friend of mine said “I was in love with George, then I saw his ears and became terribly frightened.” Three, the harmonies were Great, but that beat that Ringo put down was Sensational. Ringo made it happen as a live band. Four, the girls screamed because Paul screamed, and so they screamed back, he unleashed the sexual hunger of the post-war Eisenhower 50s, and as the Baby Boomers came of age and reached puberty, it needed to go somewhere. They were Elvis Times Four.

That’s all the surface stuff. That’s what I recall about the experience. By the time I was seeing all this, Elvis was old hat. He had been in the army, he was no longer cool, he was past his peak, from another generation, to me he was kinda Over. He was a 50s act, an Oldies act. He’d show up on the radio with maudlin crackpot junk like “In the Ghetto” which was an attempt to be hip, but now seems unbearably racist. So we were not looking for an Elvis follow-up, like Jerry Lee Lewis or even Little Richard. Them was from the Olden Days.

Our radio stations started to feel like launching pads for the British Invasion. This was New, this was Ours, it’s good that Mom and Dad don’t get it. Anything coming out of England would get a listen, and we ate it up. The Kinks had a few Hits, the Dave Clark Five had a bunch of great singles- the Beatles said they were the only ones that the Mop Tops worried about. The only lasting competition was The Rolling Stones. The Beatles thought the Stones were a blues cover band that got lucky by copying them, and the answer is Yes, Exactly. The Stones could keep up with the Beatles in quantity because they only had to write half as many songs, the rest would be legit blues numbers and old R&B that America didn’t know anything about. Just committing to the Blues gave them built in commercial appeal, because artists like Eric Clapton and John Mayall had legitimized it, they pioneered that field of interest. Blues stayed because of that wave of British Blues, and Black Artists like BB King were grateful, because it dramatically expanded their audience. It wasn’t cultural appropriation, it was passing on a tradition.

But the Beatles were not bound to blues, just as Dylan was not bound to folk. Everyone else followed the trend set by the Inventive Creative Beatles because they had to. Look at Flowers or Satanic Majesty by the Stones and you’ll see the Fab Four’s fingerprints all over it. Hell, Jagger gave the speech at the Beatles induction into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame by reminding everyone that the Stone’s first hit single was “I Wanna Be Your Man” which was a Lennon/McCartney rocker for Ringo, in other words not a single for their own band. The Stones dressed it up like a Blues song, with Brian Jones on slide. And it launched them, because the Stones had the stamp of approval from John and Paul. Mick Jagger was a student at the London School of Economics, and told his dad that rock music “is a good way to make money” and he and Keith triangulated the British Blues and the Fab Four to build a trajectory that has worked well commercially to this very day.

All that window dressing aside, there was this thing that any Beatles fan knows: They showed us how to do it. John was the dominant song-writer at first, and Paul dominated later. John was a better songwriter, especially lyrics, and Paul was a better musician, Paul had a better ear for hits, John had a better brain for Ideas. Paul had a better voice, but John was a better singer. Put John’s “This Boy” up against Paul’s “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Put “Revolution” up against “When I’m 64.” Their combined chemistry was Magic.

One could fill acres of space talking about them, it’s happening every day still, but I will summarize, because we don’t have much time: Paul made them successful, John made them cool, George made them a band, and Ringo was the Binding Force.

But their echo goes on in this; that they made being in a band something everyone wanted to do, because it looked like so much fun. Jerry Garcia said that. More fun than Dylan was. They made Making Music Cool. You could learn their songs, you could sing along in the car before it was over, and figure out how to write songs yourself. Vic Damone and Bobby Darin didn’t write their own songs. They depended on The System. When the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack came out, the Beatles had written Every Song; that had never happened before either. Everything that followed came from this idea, that it was their own. It was John’s pain, his commitment to thinking of himself as an Artist, not just a Musician, and to being bigger than Elvis, that put them in a class by themselves. That was the air we breathed. It became bigger, it wasn’t Just the Beatles, it was Music Itself that captured us, it was our telegraph from the counterculture, it was the Sound Salvation (as Elvis Costello put it). It was Ours, our Very Own Thing, it was the rebirth of teen culture, Elvis Part 2 Times Four.

And the music has owned us ever since.

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