Who knows why they came together when they did, and how they brought about such fabulous fabness around the world that still exists today and woke up a Father Knows Best world to the sounds and joys of what was dubbed Beatlemania?
I went from being asked to do The Twist after dinner for friends of my parents-it was a free floor show- and growing up with the music of everyone from the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Errol Garner, Julie London, Dick Dale and the Deltones, the Shadows, the Four Seasons, and Dion and the Belmonts to something never heard before by four young guys wearing collarless jackets named John, Paul, George and Ringo.
One of the older kids at KGV, the secondary school I was attending in Hong Kong- Phil Rosenberg- introduced us to a track by the four of them called “Love Me Do”.
Today, Phil would be an “influencer”. Back then, he was a kinda weird and friendly American guy who was somewhat ahead of the curve and was so casually laid back that he reminded me of a very cool cat- the four legged kind.
As for “Love Me Do”, maybe it was the way that the music stopped and Paul cooed the words, “Love me do?”, but there was something magical about this track and “PS, I Love You”, the flip side of their first single on Parlophone records with both songs written by the team of John and Paul.
It had to be magic, otherwise, how could Beatlemania have had the effect that it did on an entire generation of kids waiting for The Next Big Thing without even realising what this might be?
This Next Big Thing was collectively called the Beatles, a pop group from somewhere in Great Britain known as Liverpool.
Some of us in school wished we had been born in Liverpool, started speaking like Liverpudlians and calling girls “luv” and “birds” and impersonating The Goons.
The Brylcreem, and the even more gooey Brilliantine, was washed out of our hair, which was now combed forward kinda like Moe from the Three Stooges did.
We started wearing drainpipes and Beatle boots, whereas watching the lads in their first movie- “Hard Day’s Night”- took us into the world of the Beatles with their offbeat sense of humour, those brilliant pop songs like “I Should Have Known Better”, the way they were placed and moved onstage, and those dolly birds screaming to have a piece of them.
Going to school was no longer the same because the priority was to escape and fine tune our lessons on the birds and the bees with those “Dolly birds” we knew wanted to learn with us.
Our parents probably thought that our souls had been sold to the devil and how we were going to hell.
We were suddenly living inside every new album by the Beatles and studying those covers.
Then, “Sgt Pepper’s” came out- a record seemingly comprised of different types of trips and packaged by someone like Merlin.
This was the record my best friend Steve and I dropped acid to for the first time and went on what became our heaven and hell trip.
It lasted at least eight hours- probably twelve- and with “Sgt Pepper’s” playing on Repeat in the background.
I don’t know where Steve went to, but I visited Camelot, the Wild West, where I was shot in the back during a poker game, before finding my safety haven inside my mother’s womb.
Heavy.
Only Steve wasn’t really that bowled over by the Beatles. He was finding something more- but never enough- in the music of the Small Faces, The Who, the Pretty Things, and a couple of years later, Cream, Traffic, Poco and Buffalo Springfield.
Steve was different. He swam against the tide, lived in his own world, left this world in his twenties, and a brilliant drummer at 14, who had switched to guitar after hearing the first album by Bob Dylan.
He found the songs of Dylan to have more depth to them than pop music, and which inspired him to write originals. It also made me try my hand at composing my own songs, which was cheaper than going through therapy.
Before the real Beatles arrived in Hong Kong in 1964 for one very short and, frankly, underwhelming show at the Princess Theatre with Jimmy Nicol deputising for an ill Ringo, some of us had seen The Hijacks, the Beatles of the Philippines, at the Bayside, a very popular hangout in Kowloon. They had terrible wigs.
Hong Kong was never really that bigly on the Beatles. Many preferred the clean cut pop of the Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, Manfred Mann, er, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and the Bee Gees.
When the band grew moustaches and beards and George embraced the sitar and Eastern spirituality, a popular radio disc jockey in the city described them as looking “dirty and like beggars”.
The Beatles were changing, we were changing with them, and so was the world.
Somewhere and somehow, the Beatles had met Bob Dylan in the sixties and who was singing more introspective songs about love and politics and those masters of war and how the times they were-a-changing.
The enigmatic Dylan had an immediate impact on John Lennon and his songs “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” and “Norwegian Wood, whereas the beautiful “God Only Knows”, credited to the Beach Boys, but written, arranged and produced by the band’s 24 year old leader Brian Wilson, which really was a solo record, struck more than a chord with Paul McCartney.
That one record touched a creative nerve in the Beatle. He now had someone new to compete with other than John.
Whether it was the opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night”, the recording experimentations, first heard on “Rain”, then on “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the mini movies that preceded music videos, the animated full movie that was “Yellow Submarine”, all the characters in their songs, but with the genius of George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to guide them, the Beatles were a band on the run and on their own magical mystery tour.
It was all about discovery and more discovery and exploring music with different chords and lyrics and melodies and production techniques.
It was turning off their minds, relaxing and just floating downstream to wherever and whoever might be waiting around the corner- Guinevere, Merlin, The Lady Of The Lake or Peter Sellers.
I’ll never learn enough about the Beatles- not more about their personal lives, but, for me, about the intuitive management skills of the openly homosexual Brian Epstein, the circle that magically formed around them, especially the role of their extremely savvy “strategist” and circus ringmaster Derek Taylor.
Of course, the Beatles weren’t perfect, but that was okay. No one was. There was always all the music, and how it came together and progressed at Abbey Road Studios with producer George Martin guiding them through the different stages of their journeys until they could look after themselves.
We’ve changed, we’ve made changes to our lives and will continue to make changes because nothing stands still and time waits for no one.
We have lost two Beatles, and the two remaining members are in their eighties and still out there touring.
It’s not for the money. It’s because they enjoy what they give audiences and what they get back from them- love and happiness and hope.
The music of the Beatles and reading about what they were going through with lawyers and those “funny papers”, buying every bootleg released via the Yellow Dog label from Italy at Rock Gallery in Wanchai and hearing all those very telling outtakes, the Get Back Sessions documentary, and having met two of the fabs, no doubt affected some of us like me in more ways than others who we know.
Working on television commercials filmed and directed by the one-time Beatles official photographer Bob Freeman when he lived in Hong Kong for a few years and listening to his stories while sharing a joint was rather fab.
Also fab was having a regular curry lunch at the Conrad Hotel in Hong Kong with the great Bhaskar Menon whenever he was in town.
This was after he had left running EMI and EMI was scared and falling apart. The great music company had been sold to private equity misfit Guy Hands, who knew about fixing up toilets on the autobahn, but nothing about music.
Bhaskar, who played a major role in signing the Beatles to EMI and the Parlophone label and introduced them to George Martin and helped George and Ravi Shankar with the Concert For Bangladesh, shared much about each Beatle- nothing bad- and was a good sounding board for me regarding next career moves.
I would like to think that I learned much from what were the Beatles, and when the band went their separate ways, especially understanding the meaning of real love, accepting hurt, understanding people better, not being as forgiving as I once might have been, and, these days, having no problem cutting people off from my life who have nothing to give, accept their baggage.
I don’t need many friends these days and those closest to me have some intangible “thing” that reminds me of what I got out of the Beatles- never to be scared to have an opinion, knowing when to walk away from people and things that weigh you down.
It’s all about how everyone is replaceable except in your heart and where there’s an entirely different and completely real world going on in there.
And let’s not forget that in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
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