Beatlemania!

For as influential as the Beatles were to pop culture, to music, to people's lives, it's truly amazing how little coverage they got in the nation's newsmagazines.  Newsweek gave this cover to the Beatles when they first came to America during that magic February of the Ed Sullivan shows and Beatlemania.  Time didn't get around to a cover until three years later when they featured them in their Sgt. Pepper regalia as distorted puppets.

Bugs About Beatles
February 24, 1964

Here's one weird anamoly to start with -- the article inside about the four musicians we know as John, Paul, George and Ringo is called "George, Paul, Ringo and John."  Go figure.  And, boy, did Newsweek just not get it.  They started that article like this:

"Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair.  Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody.  Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."

It's hard to believe, isn't it?  The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn't just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty.  I remember watching that Ed Sullivan Show where they performed for the first time.  My father, not much of a music fan to begin with, dismissed them by saying he couldn't understand how anybody could stand to listen to "that goddamned caterwalling."  Being part of the status quo, he just didn't get it any more than Newsweek did.  They ended their article with:

"The big question in the music business at the moment is: will the Beatles last?  The odds are that, in the words of another era, they're too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture.  It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict."

I've got tickets to see McCartney this November at Staples Center.  Somebody should have told him.