Category Archives: Beatles

When Elvis visited Nixon, December 1970

26 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by in Beatles, Elvis Presley, Federal Hall National Memorial, Richard Nixon

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Yesterday I finished David Paul Kuhn’s important new book “The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution.” The book is about the lead up to, the clash, and aftermath of the brutal confrontation that took place between blue collar construction workers and Vietnam War protesters in downtown Manhattan on May 8, 1970. Most of the hardhats were men currently working on the construction of the Twin Towers a few blocks west and north of Federal Hall, where the incident began before moving northward to City Hall and Pace University. (Federal Hall itself was closed for renovation.) The event took place four days after the shootings at Kent State and the same day as Game Seven of the 1970 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks, which the Knicks famously won when Willis Reed limped out of the locker room and gave the hometown team just enough to defeat Wilt Chamberlain and the Lakers. I cannot recommend “The Hardhat Riot” strongly enough, especially for anyone who wants at better understanding of our current historical moment. Events and people are complicated. Individuals can be both perpetrators and victims, worthy of sympathy and censure simultaneously. Kuhn shows us that complexity. I cannot imagine the work that went into reconstructing the riot into a narrative, though the author gives us some idea in the bibliographic essay in the back matter. It is all the more extraordinary because even half a century on there were people trying to keep him from records and details that could help that story.

Elvis and entourage in the White House, December 21, 1970 / National Archives

It was thus a little serendipitous then when yesterday evening–Christmas Night–a friend sent this article written by White House staffer Dwight Chapin explaining how he facilitated the December 1970 White House encounter between Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. I won’t go into the details because Chapin has already done that so well. The short explanation is that Elvis wanted to help Nixon bridge the Generation Gap, especially in the fight on drugs. (Oh, the irony). Presley saw himself as a figure who could bridge the generational chasm, and in a way was suited to do so. I have a good friend, a baby boomer born in 1956 who grew up in typical boomer fashion: suburbia, multiple siblings, stay-at-home mother, WW2 veteran father, the whole works. He explained to me more than once that Elvis Presley was within the consciousness and paradigms of his parents and their friends in a way that the Beatles could never be—and never were. There was something within Elvis to which even full-fledged adults—people who had grown up during the Depression and had gone through the Second World War—could relate. I suspect a large reason for that is because The King was so deeply rooted in the blues, country, and gospel traditions and was working within frameworks recognizable even to adults of the 1950s. That would not be the case when the Beatles came to America in February 1964. Though my own father was not of the World War 2 generation I know that he could never relate to The Beatles, and even got a little angry and upset when my brother and I listened to them in later years when we ourselves were coming up. By the time The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show my parents already had two kids.

To Baby Boomers themselves though, Elvis must have been something from the Remote Past in the waning Age of Aquarius. In December 1970 at the time of his White House visit he was less than three weeks shy of his thirty-sixth birthday. For those not inclined to trust anyone over thirty, he was ancient. Elvis was in the middle of his comeback—his post-1968 output is my personal favorite—but culturally the world was moving on. By December 1970 The Beatles had already been broken up for six months. Black Sabbath’s first album had come out that February. In October Jimmy Page and his bandmates released “Led Zeppelin III.” That was the historical moment when Elvis walked in to the White House for his thirty-five minute audience with President Nixon fifty years ago this week.

Newport 1965: Dylan plugs in

25 Saturday Jul 2020

Posted by in Beatles, Bob Dylan

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Bob Dylan performs an acoustic set at St. Lawrence University, November 26, 1963, just days after the Kennedy assassination and a year and a half before “going electric” at Newport in July 1965

Today is the 55th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s so-called plugging in and going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan at Newport in ’65 is one of those now Well Told Tales, recounted today by hundreds of thousands but witnessed in real time by a fraction of that number. The story has been mythologized, and to a large degree overblown, for more than half a century now. In the standard telling fans were outraged that Dylan would deign to forgo his folk roots and pollute the purity and sanctity of Newport with electronic sound. That doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, there had already been electric music played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; the Paul Butterfield Blues Band had done that very thing, as had others.

What is more, Dylan’s most ardent followers would have already known the directions he was already taking; his fifth album, the half-electric Bringing It All Back Home, had been released four months earlier in March. It seems the real issue with any booing–and it’s not really evident that there was that much–had to do with the sound quality of the stage set. The festival had been growing exponentially each succeeding year and organizers were having difficulty accommodating the thousands of listeners who converged on that New England seaside community fifty-five summers ago.

Nineteen sixty-five was a tipping point in the decade. Malcolm X had been assassinated in February, the Johnson Administration was escalating the American presence in Vietnam, Watts burned just two weeks after the Newport Festival. By the years’s end the Beatles would release Help! and Rubber Soul, and Dylan himself came out with Highway 61 Revisited. I was talking to someone a few days ago about this heady time when the Beatles and Dylan were taking over popular culture and he described it saying that it felt like the world was transforming from black-and-white to color, which in many ways it was via photography and television. It is no wonder people remember–and misremember–the moment so “clearly.”

(image/1964 St. Lawrence University yearbook)

 

“The Crown”

29 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by in Beatles, Philately, WW2

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I hope everyone had an enjoyable and restful Thanksgiving. We have spent much of the past few days binge-watching The Crown, which I had never seen before. Apparently the story will follow Queen Elizabeth II from her 1947 marriage through the Thatcher era. The 7-8 episodes we have watched so far have been set in the 1950s. Watching them drives home, among other things, just how much England lost in the Second World War. The two decades after the war’s end were the years of Austerity Britain, with its food rationing, coal gray skies, and declining empire. When the Beatles woodshedded in Hamburg in the early 1960s one of the things that struck them the most was how much farther along was that German port city’s recovery than their native Liverpool’s. While Germany was rebuilding, Liverpool–and even London–were still scarred with roped off bomb craters a full decade and a half after the war.

I suppose the queen’s 1953 coronation was an important reminder to the British people of their heritage, which is why they were so enamored with the twenty-six year old monarch. The nascent media of television helped too, humanizing the young queen and bringing her and her family into people’s homes in a way literally never seen before. The royals are all too human and it is wise not to idealize them too much, or even at all. At its best however the Crown as head of state represents continuity even in the most challenging times. One of the reasons I became interested in philately as a teenager was the manner that French and British stamps evolved in the 1950s & 60s during the transition of their colonies to Independence. Sometimes the nearness and immediacy of these events get driven home even in the course of daily life. Just this past week I had a conversation with someone born in the early 1970s in an island Commonwealth country in a hospital dedicated by the current Prince of Wales earlier that very year. Charles’s mother–Elizabeth II–had herself very publicly visited this same small country herself around this same time. Two decades into the twenty-first century Elizabeth II is still serving.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend.

(image/Australia Post)

Sunday morning coffee

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Beatles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Style, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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A First Army field jacket seen at Brooklyn Flea, March 2019

I hope everyone’s week was good. Blogging will continue to be light in the coming days while the semester is in full swing. There is just so much going on. Yesterday I began Eric Rauchway’s new book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt and the First Clash Over the New Deal, which is about the four month interregnum between the November 1932 election and March 1933 inaugural. Almost fifteen years ago now I read Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America for a class on the Gilded Age with David Nasaw. I’m only about fifty pages in but the tone so far is very harsh toward Hoover. I’ll come back to it with more observations when I finish the book.

I was at Brooklyn Flea across the street from the Barclays Center yesterday, where I bough a small leather wallet and a pair of cuff links. I’m transitioning to wearing suits more and am making French cuff shirts part of my arsenal. I have three suits now and intend to get a solid grey worsted or flannel number over the summer in time for the fall semester. All in due time.

When I was at the flea market yesterday I saw what I though might be a pasteover Beatles Butcher cover. I don’t own any vinyl, nor do I plan on going down that rabbit hole, but when I saw a copy of Yesterday and Today in a bin I had to stop and look. The anodyne trunk photograph was pasted on, which led me to think it might have been a second state copy. I mentioned it to the vendor, telling him what he may have on his hands, and even got him to take a picture of me with the album cover. When I got home I examined the photo while reading online about ways to tell if a record is indeed a Butcher second state. (First and third state versions are obvious.) To make a long story short it was not a Butcher cover, and the giveaway was right there even though I was unaware of it in the moment: the copy I saw had an RIAA Gold Record seal, an indicator that this was a later pressing. And that was the end of that.

I did see and photograph the First Army field jacket you see above. Even had it been in my size I would not have purchased the coat. Putting it mildly, it is bad form to wear military gear with patches if one has not served with said unit. Seeing it though was something special. I always wonder when I encounter such things in second-hand places how they got where they did. Who owned it and where & when did he serve? Two years ago I bought a heavy winter coat, made in England many decades ago, in a thrift store in Pompano Beach. It is entirely speculation on my part but I can surmise that the double-breasted, full-length coat once belonged to a retiree who brought the piece down with him from the Northeast only to bring it to Goodwill upon realizing he would never need it in sub-tropical Florida. I think of him and who he might have been every time I put it on, and try to live up to his legacy.

Geoff Emerick, 1945-2018

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Beatles, Those we remember

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I learned yesterday of the passing this past Tuesday of Geoff Emerick, who engineered the Beatles’s catalog from Revolver onward. If the name does not ring any bells that is not entirely accidental: producer George Martin was fiercely territorial of his relationship with the Beatles in the recording studio and did not want others getting credit for what he saw as his domain. Emerick complained justifiably in his memoir Here, There, and Everywhere of him and others being minimized cavalierly as merely “the staff” despite their important contributions. Martin’s accomplishments were of course significant but one can state with strong accuracy that had Emerick not been there in the Abbey Road studios that Revolver and Sgt. Pepper in particular would not have been the albums that we have now been listening to for half a century.

Geoff Emerick in 2003

Emerick worked in a supportive role on Beatle recordings from virtually the outset in 1962 and became their chief engineer in April 1966 when Norman Smith left to produce Pink Floyd. The first song Emerick engineered was “Tomorrow Never Knows.” He was all of twenty years old. The Beatles went on the road that summer for what would be their final tour. When they regrouped in London later that year they began the Pepper sessions, beginning with the double-A side single of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” The pressure was truly on Geoff Emerick at this time because the Beatles had made clear to him that they would no longer be touring and that the studio releases were the band’s authoritative communications. It was his job to take their ideas and and find a way to get them on tape. That was no small task in the days before digitization.

It was a seminal year in British history; 1966 came fifty years after the battles of the Verdun and the Somme, nearly twenty years after V-E Day, and a decade after Suez. England defeated West Germany in the Word Cup that summer. Austerity Britain was giving way to Swinging London. Drab greys were giving way to the technicolor uniforms the Beatles would wear in 1967, the style inspired by the nostalgia for neo-militaria that was common in Britain in those years immediately after the Empire’s collapse. So much of that seems dated and overdone today, a relic of a time gone by. I suppose none of that really matters anyway. All that is left of true importance is the magic of what happened in those studios, in which Geoff Emerick played such an important part.

(image/Clusternote via Wikimedia Commons)

It was fifty years ago today

01 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in Beatles

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I was teaching a class this past semester in which the topic was the style wear of pop musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. (The course was on the business of the fashion industry.) Students had been tasked to find an iconic image of this or that pop star and discuss the hows and whys of the style of dress. I urged one student to analyze Elton John’s Savile Row bespoke white suit, for instance. Anyways I began the bibliographic instruction session with a discussion of the psychedelic military-inspired suits the Beatles wore on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The words were just out of my mouth when a student scoffed at my saying the Sgt. Pepper is probably the most culturally significant rock album ever made. Not necessarily the best rock album ever made–it might not even the best Beatles album ever made–but the most culturally significant, I averred. I was taken aback briefly until it dawned on me that said student, flush with the confidence of youth, probably had no concept of what Sgt. Pepper represented when it was released. Born in the mid to late 1990s, the student literally might not have known who the Beatles were. Rock music itself is no longer the cultural signifier it once was; rap and hop hop surpassed it a long time ago. Even the “record album” itself is passé; iTunes, Spotify, etc. are where today’s youth get their music. The album itself is no longer the unit of currency. I am not a Luddite but I would argue we have lost something in that, in particular the shared experience that a Sgt. Pepper represented to a cohort.

Sgt. Pepper has been going in and out of style of half a century now and paradoxically feels dated and relevant at the same time. It’s playing quietly in the background while I have my coffee and type these words. In that class a few months back I was trying to explain to the students how the muted greys of Austerity Britain were giving way in the tangerine brightness of mid-1960s Swinging London. Britain’s baby boomers were looking to their past, especially to the styles of pre-Great War Edwardian England, for inspiration. It’s not an accident that there was a clothing store in mid-60s London called “I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet.” I remember watching Nightline on June 1, 1987, twenty years after Pepper’s release, and the panel discussing the album’s social and cultural impact. That itself was thirty years ago. Look around today and I am sure you will see or hear a reference to the album the provided the soundtrack to the summer of 1967.

Crossing the Mersey

19 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in Beatles, Ellis Island, Heritage tourism

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Liverpool (above) was one of Europe's many port cities from which Europeans flocked to the United States prior to the First World War.

Liverpool (above) was one of Europe’s many port cities from which Europeans flocked to the United States prior to the First World War.

I noted with interest today that the city of Liverpool is to build its own immigration museum. This will not be the first museum in Europe dedicated to the mass exodus from the Old World to the New. Antwerp for one has its Red Star Line Museum, which opened in 2013. In my time volunteering at Ellis Island I always stressed that immigration to the U.S. at the turn of the last century was not a one way street and that the human drama was taking place on the other side of the Atlantic as much as it was at Ellis Island, Baltimore, Charleston, and the other port cities of the United States. Anything less is just half the story.

The Liverpool immigration museum seems to be part of city’s larger strategy to emphasize its cultural heritage. Most famously city leaders plug The Beatles and Mersey’s importance to the band’s sound and rise. And why shouldn’t the city do that?; the rough and tumble town was integral to who the group was. Hamburg, itself another port city instrumental to the Beatles development, opened its own immigration museum, the BallinStadt, in 2007. European immigration to the United States crested a hundred years earlier, 1907, but held steady until the onset of the Great War seven years later, when the sea routes were disrupted and Atlantic travel dropped off precipitately.

(image by G-Man via Wikimedia Commons)

The Cunard Building

17 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Beatles, Lusitania, New York City

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IMG_2185I was down on Lower Broadway the other day and took a few minutes to take these photographs of the Cunard Building. As the plaque indicates this edifice was IMG_2180constructed after the First World War and thus obviously after the sinking of the Lusitania. It’s strange how such events, tragic as they are, don’t prevent the world from continuing; officials announced this construction project in February 1918 while the war was still going on and very much hanging in the balance.

It is important to remember how long the transatlantic passenger shipping industry existed. It lasted well into the 1950s and even early 60s until the arrival of wide-scale and economical airline passenger travel. John Lennon’s father, Alfred Lennon, was a so-called Cunard Yank, a man who saw the world working shipboard. For years he was a waiter on different ships, entertaining passengers with his humor and singing voice. When the Beatles came to America in 1964 they flew in to JFK. The rotting piers were a fixture of the NYC waterline until just 10-15 years ago when city officials and urban planners figured out how to re-purpose them.

IMG_2181Investors purchased this site at 25 Broadway across the street from Bowling Green for $5 million in July 1919 currency and spent the same amount on the 48,000 square foot building. The construction went quickly; Cunard and other tenants took occupancy in July 1921. Investors purchased the building in 1962. Cunard remained as a tenant for a few more years and left around 1970, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.

index.php(bottom image/The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “The Cunard Building, New York” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1860 – 1920. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-aecd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

A Hard Day’s Night turns 50

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Beatles

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IMG_1045I had the day off today and, determined to do something that included air conditioning, went to see the newly remastered A Hard Day’s Night at the Film Forum. The film was originally released fifty years ago this week. I have seen the movie at least dozen times, including several on the big screen, and it never ceases to surprise. It is one of those cultural reference points that I revisit every 5-6 years and see through different eyes every time. What is on screen is the same; it is my perspective that changes as I grow older and develop. In that way I know the place for the first time.

A Hard Day’s Night strikes the perfect balance of story telling, musical montage, and seeming cinéma vérité. Seeming is the key word. Five decades on some viewers still believe they are watching a documentary. This is not surprising; the Maysles Brothers’ footage of the Beatles’s February 1964 arrival in the United States was one of the A Hard Days Night’s inspirations. It is easy to confuse the two. The whole movie is leavened with just the right dollop of magic realism, which is appropriate. The Beatles at their best contained just the right dollop of magic realism.

A few things I noticed this time around were:

the dinginess. This was the period of Austerity Britain, the two decades or so after WW2 when England was still recovering and London was not yet swinging. The peeling paint, damaged buildings, and bad roads were glaring in the remastered version;

the sprinkling of people of color in the crowd scenes. This was the era when the Empire was winding down and many from the Commonwealth were moving to Great Britain. Look closely and you will notice that some of the screaming fans are from India or other parts of the Empire. They did tour all over the world after all. Their fan base outside of Great Britain and America is an interesting and under-explored part of the Beatles’s story;

the North/South Divide. In England the caricature is flipped; Southerners are seen as being sophisticates and Northerners the rubes. This was especially true a half century ago. Unlike some scousers in show business at the time, the Beatles never hid their Liverpudlian provenance. I had never noticed the North/South jokes before today, probably because there is so much else going on.

The Beatles made a few more movies after A Hard Day’s Night, but none succeeded like this one. The later efforts couldn’t capture the wit and winningness on display here. It was a time when a rock group could share a variety stage with magicians, jugglers, and dancing acrobats without a trace of self-consciousness. It all seems so far away and yet so modern at the same time. Watch it again and you will see.

 

 

 

Sunday morning coffee

15 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in Beatles, Film, Sound, & Photography

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It is early Sunday. I am having my coffee and enjoying the quiet before heading off to Governors Island in a little bit. It is going to be a beautiful day, mid 70s and bright skies. You can feel that fall is around the corner. It will be a great day to be outside.

I got a chance to see Good Ol Freda this week. I would recommend the documentary to those who like the Beatles and want to watch a film that captures the excitement of Beatlemania. Ironically, the traits that made Freda such an important part of the Beatles’s inner circle–her tact, her loyalty, and sense of discretion–are what keep the film from being better. She was, and is, so loyal, that you don’t come away with much more than you already knew. Still, because I suspected as much going in, I cannot say I was surprised or disappointed with the film. If anything, it makes me admire her that much more. It’s no wonder the Beatles trusted her so implicitly. It would have been so easy for her to air the dirty laundry, and you have to admire her for not doing so. Like the Beatles at their best, Frida Kelly appeals to your better nature. Go see it if you can.

In the meantime, we will wait for Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which will be hitting bookstores in about six weeks. The pr machine is starting to kick into gear. I’ll let Mark Lewisohn explain. Enjoy your Sunday.