The Beatles Come to America
Martin Goldsmith John Wiley, 196pp, £13.50
ISBN 0471469645
In the summer of 1967, the Harvard academic-turned-evangelist of LSD Timothy Leary offered his opinion of the Beatles' new album, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Newsweek had already compared the group with T S Eliot, while the New York Times saw fit to proclaim "a new and golden Renaissance of Song". Leary had something a little more other-worldly in mind. He wrote:
The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God with a mysterious power to create a new species - a young race of laughing freemen. They are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars the human race has ever produced.
Such nonsense was typical of US commentary on the Beatles. The group's aura of otherness - haircuts, accents, music alchemised from American ingredients into something entirely new - prompted many admirers to speculate about what supernatural powers they possessed.
Sometimes, this had disastrous consequences. Two years after Sgt Pepper, Charles Manson, believing he could hear apocalyptic instructions in the crepuscular music of the White Album, persuaded his followers to assist him in the Sharon Tate murders. Less disturbingly, successive generations of American Beatlenuts have been happy to embrace the idea that, for as long as they were together, the group were little short of godlike. Only those delusional Liverpudlians, happy to crow on about "four lads who shook the world" (forgetting that the Fabs left town as soon as they could), come anywhere near such glassy-eyed fervour.
And so it proves in this rather bizarre monograph about the group's first trip to the US. As the recent release of a black-and-white DVD entitled The First US Visit proved, the story around which it revolves is drenched in both drama and romance, thanks in part to the Beatles' arriving in the US in the wake of John F Kennedy's murder. But for Martin Goldsmith, raised in Missouri and now director of classical music at XM Satellite Radio, this is not enough. By page four, he has already leapfrogged from politics, via "The Waste Land", to the legend of Camelot. "Is it giving the Beatles too much credit to imagine them coming to our wounded country in its time of trouble, wearing their Arthurian haircuts and singing their songs of love and joy, and restoring our emotional health and happiness?" he asks.
For roughly a third of the book, he prosaically retells the story of the Beatles' early rise to fame, relying heavily on existing accounts and occasionally getting his facts wrong. Given the familiarity of the story, he understandably feels the need to step back from the facts, but his attempts to do so are clunky. Describing John and Paul's first meeting, at a church fete, he writes: "The English pronounce this French word as if it were spelled 'fate' - which in the case of the Woolton Village Fete of 1957 is highly appropriate."
Eventually, after a strange detour describing his regard for JFK and his misery at his killing, Goldsmith finally gets to the Beatles' arrival in America in February 1964. And here, at least, the story acquires some drama. Small details reveal the beguiling culture clash. The group's debut spot on The Ed Sullivan Show, for example, was preceded by commercials for Aero Shave ("Keeps drenching your beard while others dry out!") and Griffin Liquid Shoe Polish.
Equally fascinating are quotations from those fusty Americans who, contrary to the common idea that Americans were united in adoration for the Beatles, wanted nothing to do with them. According to the Washington Post, they were "imported hillbillies who look like sheepdogs and sound like alley cats in agony". The New York Herald Tribune claimed that "Without their . . . sensational build-up, they would be four nice boys with a total of one weak voice and one weak beat that rolls more than it rocks."
With the piety and self-importance that often colour younger generations' view of the baby boomers, Goldsmith attempts to credit John, Paul, George and Ringo with creating one of the major political fissures of postwar US history. He writes:
As our generation came to consciousness, we came to realise that much of the older generation had gotten the two most important calls of the Sixties wrong: the Beatles and Vietnam. One was a decidedly deadlier mistake, of course, but we took cultural matters seriously. If they're so wrong about the Beatles, we asked ourselves, how can we trust them to make the right decisions regarding Vietnam?
If only they were around now, eh? With a shake of their mop-topped heads and a few bars of "Twist and Shout", the Bush administration would surely fall into the abyss and everything would be fine.
John Harris is the author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the demise of English rock (Fourth Estate)
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