John Lennon was shot on December 8, 1980, finally laying to rest the dream that the Beatles would rise again. Lennon's murder guaranteed the legend of the Beatles. History is kind to those who do not die in their beds. And the massive mourning surrounding Lennon's death confirmed the opinions of those who saw the Beatles as not only singers but symbols. A generation that had come of age to their music now mourned not only a hero but a lost hope.
In 1963, when the Beatles emerged from Liverpool onto the national scene, England was in radical transition. The society was changing from being top dog to becoming America's poodle, from 13 years of Conservative rule to a Labour government. It was the era of the miniskirt and the twist, when the English were beginning to move to new rhythms and to adopt new styles. "I saw no reason why childhood shouldn't last forever," the fashion designer Mary Quant said. "I wanted everyone to retain the grace of a child and not to have to become stilted, confined, ugly beings. So I created clothes that worked and moved and allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom." The Beatles, those "lads" who mixed Cardin chic with Liverpool cheek, embodied the daydream of abundance and eternal youthfulness. Their success was as exciting as their songs. By late 1963, even if Britannia no longer ruled the waves, the Beatles dominated the airwaves. They were at the center of the new boy network of renegade energy and classless achievement. The Beatles' songs and their public high jinks gave British life the backbeat of promise.
The Beatles coincided with the renaissance in English theater, and they learned to "make show." The phrase, "Macht show, Beatles! Macht show!" was screamed at them by the owner of the Hamburg club where in 1961 they were losing listeners and business to the livelier bands along the Reeperbahn. Stomping, gyrating, shouting "Nazi" and "Sieg Heil" at the customers, the Beatles soon figured out that a little stage anarchy went a long way at the box office. Having named themselves in homage to Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Beatles also aped, in their stage carryon, the frenzy of Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and the other American rock 'n' rollers whose pulverizing energy they loved. "We had cooked up this whole new British thing," Paul McCartney later recollected of the Hamburg days, when they were an amalgam of American sound and European fashion. "We had a long time to work it out and make all the mistakes in Hamburg with almost no one watching…A lot of things had been happening with our chemistry…We'd put in a lot of work. In Hamburg we'd work eight hours a day while most bands never worked that hard." By 1962 the stomping and the "Beatle" hairstyle they'd carried back from Germany (it gave them the look of cuddly Teddy Boys) had turned them from a rock and dole group into the most popular scouse (that is, Liverpudlian) band. Playing lunchtime and evening gigs, the Beatles packed the Cavern, a subterranean rock 'n' roll club which tapped the army of adolescents who wanted to get high on music instead of on draft Guinness. The Cavern, which became the Mecca of the Mersey sound after the Beatles vaulted to superstardom, offered a venue for the proliferating number of local bands. Rock 'n' roll, like the American kid acts in the early part of this century, put a premium on energy, not expertise; and places like the Cavern were a new kind of vaudeville. As with the vaudeville of yesteryear, the ill-educated, the outcasts, renegades, and dropouts with an ambition to shine but no credentials for conventional success, were attracted to it. They could act out their daydreams of vindictive triumph and get paid for it. "I was always different," Lennon recalled in Jann Wenner's Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews (Penguin), voicing the infantile longing behind every star's obsession. "Why didn't anybody notice me?"
Lennon especially was noticed by Brian Epstein, the 27-year-oId businessman turned impresario, who had an eye for the boys as well as business. A failed actor who had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Epstein encouraged their off-stage theatricality while he coaxed them out of smoking, swearing, and eating on stage. "We were very popular, not being goody-goodies," Lennon recalled of their success with the tough Liverpool kids. But once Epstein had finally gotten them a record contract (he purchased 10,000 copies of the debut single "Love Me Do" to ensure the Beatles made the Top 20), the act was tarted up for the mass audience. The image of stomping tear-aways was tossed out with their Hamburg leathers. The Beatles now only shook their forelocks. They were "lovable mopheads" and "happy little rockers." While other English groups like the Rolling Stones and the Who followed the hot, horny message of rock 'n' roll and sold the postures of aesthetic outlaws, the Beatles were spectacularly ordinary. They presented themselves as decent English blokes at heart. When they asked for love in their early hit songs, they didn't shout; they said please. "Oh please, say to me and let me be your man," they pleaded, wanting only to hold hands. Their songs were more about camaraderie than conquest. "Please, please me," they sang, just as they had politely bleated on their first record, "So ple-e-e-ease, love me do."
Before the Beatles, rock 'n' roll stars were faces and voices. The Beatles changed that. They took rock 'n' roll off the entertainment pages and put it in the headlines. "We turned everything into events," Lennon said of the group's genius for making a spectacle of itself, Between October and December 1963, the Beatles, by then boasting a fantastic list of hits including "Please Please Me," "Ask Me Why," "From Me to You," "She Loves You," were on the front page of at least one major English paper every day. Their music was fresh and fun, but hardly extraordinary. There were Lennon-McGartney songs (like "One After 909") that only showed them to be slick hit-makers who could sometimes write as shoddily as the next man:
Move over once
Move over twice
Hey baby, don't be cold as ice.
The Beatles succeeded and survived because they were theater. They turned a press conference into a cabaret and treated the reporters like the Hamburg audiences for whom they made show. Their ad-libs had the wit and vivacity of comic cross-talk:
RiNGO: A guy at Decca turned us down.
PAUL: He must be kicking himself now.
lOHN: I 'ope he kicks himself to death.
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