The View From Inside Beatlemania

Many have argued that the Beatles embodied feminism or, in any case, advanced it. (“The feminine side of society was represented by them in some way,” Yoko Ono once said.) Partly this was a product of their own femininity—their androgynous appearance, their tenderness, their songs’ endless lyrics about loving women, learning from women, the sympathy, the compassion:

Whether it came from Lennon and McCartney’s relationships with their mothers or from Brian Epstein, their manager, who was gay and had his own sense of the fluidity of gender, this quality would only grow, sometimes appearing as a throaty neediness, sometimes as a solemn, wistful longing. And then there was the ecstasy of listening to it, the sexual release—“Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you / Tomorrow I’ll miss you”—or, for the very lucky, the almost unbearable excitement of getting a glimpse of the Beatles themselves, each frenzy taken as yet another symptom of the New Madness.  

The band had planned to fly to Washington, but a snowstorm forced them to take the train instead. McCartney took some of his best photographs on the trip. One image, from a Pennsylvania train station, shows two Black men taking a break from shovelling snow; in another, a Black worker strokes his chin on a station platform, a cargo car hulking behind him. In England, McCartney said, he’d seen scenes of civil-rights protests, the footage at Little Rock, “the two Black girls going into the school and the baying mob.” Now the more the band saw of America, the more they saw segregation. “It was, like, ‘God, is that really true?’ ” McCartney said.

Brian Epstein had warned the Beatles never to discuss politics in public; it would narrow their appeal. But there was no real way to avoid the questions of race and racial justice. The band knew that they’d brought something old, something American, back to America. “We used to laugh at America except for its music,” Lennon said. “It was Black music we dug.” 

Their contracts, at this point, included a non-segregation clause—though, technically, any segregated concert would have violated the new Civil Rights Act. “Segregation is a lot of rubbish,” Starr said. McCartney continued to be shocked by America. “Off in the woods somewhere, there would be these Nazis, and you’d go, ‘Oh, fucking hell, they’re loonies these Americans,’ ” he told me. “You knew about the Ku Klux Klan, you’d heard all that history about the lynchings and stuff. But you thought it was all over. You thought it was all better.” And then you found out it wasn’t all better.

From The New Yorker, 2023

The Nude Beatles

In 1968, Richard Bernstein created one of the most controversial pieces titled The Nude Beatles where he had superimposed the Beatles’ heads on nude male bodies in neon colors. A French judge ordered the prints to be confiscated and Apple Records (the Beatles’ label) sued the artist, but ultimately he prevailed. Bernstein, who later met John Lennon and discussed the painting, told him that the work would have made a great album cover. Very few of these prints exist today, but one was recently exhibited at MoMA in 2015 for the Making Music Modern exhibition.

Richard Berstein:  The Starmaker

One After 909

It’s something of an accident that Mike got caught on film at all when Michael Lindsay-Hogg was directing the original Let It Be movie. “I bought this bright orange shiny leather jacket, and I simply wanted to show it to our kid and the boys,” he remembers. Going to Apple Studios as a recording session was in progress, “I slipped in, closed the door quietly, and just stood at the back, and enjoyed ‘Get Back,’ a smash hit.

“Then suddenly I realized there’s a track right down the middle of the studio. There’s a big movie camera on it, and it started to come down towards me. God, how ridiculous – this is gonna see me at the back standing here in me lovely leather jacket. I’ve gotta do something. There was a piano on the right-hand side there, and this track went to the side of the piano. So I thought, well, I’ll get behind that and they’ll think I’m playing the piano.

“And it started to keep going. All the Beatles are playing, Billy Preston is playing on his organ on the left-hand side, I’m on the right. I’m thinking, it’s getting very near my piano, which had its lid closed. It was all last minute. I thought, Jesus, I better pretend to play the closed-lid piano and look as though I’m part of the group. It went right past me, so I had to be serious, playing the piano.

“I’ve been telling people that story all my life. I’ve asked Apple many times, Mike Lindsay-Hogg, and no one’s even acknowledged it. And the next thing is our kid said, ‘Oh, you’re in this film.’ ‘Am I? Oh? I wonder if it’s my bit.’ Then Peter Jackson’s right-hand lady says, ‘I’ll send you a photograph.’ There is me at the piano in me leather jacket. So I can now prove I’m part of that track.”

Mike also might have played a part in the group revisiting a Lennon-McCartney composition from their very early days that ended up on the Let It Be LP. As featured in the dialogue reprinted in the companion book to The Beatles: Get Back, when the group first rehearsed “One After 909” on January 3, 1969, Paul told the other Beatles, “Our kid’s been saying you should do that for years, you know.” Responds Lennon, “Yeah, he always liked that, didn’t he?” Chimes in George, “I’ve always liked it.”

According to Mike, “I was at our kid’s house in London. It was around the corner from Abbey Road. He said, ‘Hey, we’re having a dead time in the studio. We can’t think of a bloody thing. Can you remember any songs from Forthlin Road?’ I said, one I used to love was”—and he breaks off into a scat through “One After 909.” After which, he continues, Paul told his bandmates, “Hey, our kid just remembered this ‘One After 909.’ Remember in Forthlin? They all picked up their guitars and went into it immediately.”

Our Kid: Mike McCartney Captures The Early Beatles On Film