Still Fab - The Beatles and their timeless influence

Reason, June, 2001 by Charles Paul Freund

Leading-edge boomers engaged in the same sort of cultural appropriation: When they flocked to Humphrey Bogart film festivals in the 1960s, they used his character and films for their own purposes, which were no doubt different from the purposes of the films' original Depression-era audiences. Now they are on the receiving end of the same process.

But there's another nagging question raised by the new Beatlemania. Not just who are the Beatles now, but who were they then? New fans may be using the group for their own purposes, but then so did the original generation of fans. The years since the group's breakup have seen a lot of myth-making and obscuring, in order to fit them better into a pliable narrative of the era and its aftermath. It is worth pausing to listen to the group anew in the context of their own time, because there are some lost chords in their music waiting to sound again.

It was 38 years ago today

The Beatles--image, music, and text--are obviously bound up with 1960s teen life, taste, and mentality, and from this vantage point that seems both natural and inevitable. But was it? The fact is, the American teenage audience that lost its head over the Beatles was the group's second American audience. The foursome entered American culture through a different portal: They came in through the MOR window.

It is well-known that American record executives originally regarded the Beatles with complete indifference. The label with the American rights to the group was Capitol, and it refused to release any Beatles records. A notorious 1963 Capitol memo that curtly dismisses the group ("We don't think the Beatles will do anything in this market") is now regarded as a prime instance of bovine corporate stupidity. But Capitol actually had some evidence to support its dim view of the group's U.S. prospects. It could have cited three specific reasons to ignore the Beatles.

Those three reasons were "Please Please Me," "From Me to You," and "She Loves You." While Capitol originally wasn't interested in these songs, some smaller U.S. labels were willing to take a chance with them. All three of these records were released in the U.S. market in 1963, two by Vee-Jay and one by Swan, albeit with minimal promotion. What happened? Nobody played them. "From Me to You" did chart on the long Billboard list at No. 116, but neither "Please Please Me" nor "She Loves You" charted at all.

Late in the year, however, a Washington, D.C., disc jockey named Carroll James ("CJ the DJ"), started to play the British pressing of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." James had a girlfriend who worked for a British airline; she had observed British Beatlemania firsthand, and brought back the group's latest 45. The Washington audience loved the song. Capitol noticed. The big label had already agreed to a limited U.S. release of the record, with an unambitious pressing that reflected the label's low hopes and lack of interest. Now, Capitol considered releasing it quickly in the Washington area.