Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time. This was exactly my experience when seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period, culminating in February 1964. It was a wonderful sensation because they plunged me right back. Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of the Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers just over two years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America – New York, Washington DC and Miami – to the land where, at least in our minds, music’s future was being born.
The truth is that I have always been interested in photography, from the time I was very young, when our family owned a little box camera in the 1950s. I used to love the whole process of loading a roll of Kodak film into our Brownie camera. I would ask my brother, Mike, to take a picture of me outside a hotdog store – an American export to a country that had never previously known hotdogs. And from those early years, we would use the camera to take pictures of each other. This was not just a McCartney family hobby. Every family we knew would take a camera on holiday, as in “Here we are on holiday in Blackpool” or “Here I am with Auntie Dilys and Uncle Harry”, as we did when we went to Butlin’s holiday camp. As our group made its way to DC and then to Miami, my camera was attracted to this new American universe of common people. There’s a man with a shovel in front of the Pennsylvania freight car in Washington DC, standing raptly watching, or four aeroplane mechanics clad in white at Miami airport. These are my people. This is where I’m from. I grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool, so I could never detach myself from people like these. I wanted to be right in the middle of them. My relatives were exactly like these people. You’ll find them – the bus driver, the postman, the milkman – not only in my songs but in many of these photos.
Although we had no perspective at the time, we were, like the world, experiencing a sexual awakening. Our parents had fears of sexual diseases and all sorts of things like that, but by the middle of the 60s, we’d realised that we had a freedom that had never been available to their generation. Travel was one thing our parents had never done. They never had money, either; you have to appreciate how hard things were both during and after the war. You might be surprised to learn that I was the first person in my branch of the family who ever had a car. People just didn’t have them; they depended on public transport, which all of us were used to in Liverpool. Only later did I come to realise that we were in the forefront of these new changes, this abrupt shift in the youth that in hindsight seems to have crystallised in 1964. Rediscovering the photographs I took in my early 20s inevitably makes me reflect on much larger questions. I think it’s the same as it would be for anyone, that when you look at pictures of yourself when you were younger – in my case, a lot younger – there are a lot of emotions. On the most basic level, you think, “Boy, didn’t I look good?”, but we all look beautiful when we’re young, and I’m proud to have been through that and to now have the privilege of revisiting so many of those moments. I realise that many people get sad when they pore through old family albums, but I don’t feel that sense of loss, even though quite a few of the people who are portrayed here have died. It’s not so much a feeling of loss but a joy in the past. When I look back and think, I have to say, “Wow” – we did all that, and we were just kids from Liverpool. And here it is in the photographs. Boy, how great does John look? How handsome is George and how cool is Ringo, wearing that funny French hat? I’m also drawn to the pictures of the photographers, who were never our enemy. They bring back memories of what it was like being in New York for the first time, being taken down to Central Park, with all those hard-bitten cameramen shouting out, “Hey Beatle, hey Beatle, hey Beatle.” And we’d look at them and they’d take the picture, and then one more, always just one more. I’m reminded of so many things: of an England that was more my parents’ generation than my own; of the early concerts and those original fans; of “Beatlemania” and of a London that in 1963 spoke of promise and ambition and everything new to four young men from the north. And I’m reminded of an America that I know still exists, somewhere. I remember all those stories, some of them real, others imagined, from looking out of the train window, seeing American freight trains, American railway yards. I like American trains to this day. I like to think that I can hear “that lonesome whistle blow”.
~From Eyes of the Storm by Paul McCartney
In Their Own Words 