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| Beatlemania |
Actually this should have been Part 1 but never mind.
I know where I was on 4 December 1962.
I was at home sometime between 5pm and 5:30pm with my younger brother watching Tuesday Rendezvous on BBC's children's hour television. I remember this particular time and date because I had a life changing experience as I approached my 11th birthday that year.
I saw the first British television appearance of The Beatles on this most unlikely of kids shows.
As wikipedia says about the programme:-
"Howard Williams (replaced by Wally Whyton), Muriel Young and Bert Weedon (the famous guitarist) presented the show between 1961 and 1963, assisted by glove puppets Pussy Cat Willum (devised and animated by Janet Nicholls) and a dog puppet called Fred Barker (created by Wally Whyton of skiffle band, The Vipers)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuesday_Rendezvous
My life and indeed the whole world was about to be turned upside down by this band and even to this day more than 50 years later, I can remember the excitement and the fascination of seeing and hearing The Beatles for the first time.
They did their new single 'Love Me Do' I was totally hooked.
The Beatles also played the B-side...'PS I Love You'....Nothing else was required I was a devotee to this fascinating band that both my parents hated and that my elder brother (who wasn't there at the time) also was a little sniffy about as I recall.
It was all seen by my slightly concerned parents as a 'craze' I'd soon grow out of....some craze.... it has lasted all my life since that fateful day and I haven't grown out of it yet.
If the logic of launching the Beatles on children's TV was to catch 'em young, it certainly worked on me.
I tend to think of life and especially my musical life as being before The Beatles and after The Beatles.
Before was boring so far as I was concerned.
I turned my back on Cliff Richard and Adam Faith who were leading British pop stars in the late 50s and early 60s...I thought nothing was ever going to be the same again and I was right, nothing was.
We had just come through the Cuba Crisis a few weeks before when it looked like the world would end and if ever anyone needed to celebrate life, culture and music, it was my generation of terrified and traumatised post-Cuba Crisis children.
A new beginning was opening up and everything that happened in the 1960s happened in the shadow of the threat of Armageddon...it changed me forever.
My earliest memory that I can date is the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, around the time I started school. I was listening to the news on the radio of Hungarian refugees fleeing from the Russian advance.
I asked my mom what 'refugee' meant.
She told me it was 'people running away. I remember it clearly and I remember feeling very sad for people who I thought were 'hungry'... because they were from Hungary a place I had never heard of before. Hungry people running away from soldiers as I understood it, seemed the most awful thing I could imagine at the age of 4.
So throughout the 1950s and the Cold War, a shadow was cast over our lives, the Cuba Crisis looked like the final curtain and we all were going to be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration.
.
After that exitential near-miss youth culture really took off, greatly aided by transnational capitalism, debt fuelled prosperity and the global music market of course, but the spirit that drove the 1960s had rather deeper origins than that I think.
It was a massive worlwide gasp of relief from a generation that lived under the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction) the doctrine of the times and I am convinced that this was the precurser of the Summer of Love and the Peace movement.... which of course The Beatles in general and John Lennon in particular eventually came to symbolise as icons.
Your memories are a timestamp in which I can sort of see things from a personal perspective, rather than typical and sometimes boring historical book or movie perspective. I really enjoy that AA, so thanks for sharing again.
ReplyDeleteThanks Scott, I'm grateful for your kind words of encouragement. Your comments are much appreciated. I hope I can continue to write stuff that attracts your interest as I plow on with the Second City Subversive series of recollections.
DeleteI remember that time, but I do think your memory of the Russian invasion of Hungary when you were so young is pretty remarkable. I think I was totally politically UNaware at that age, in fact the earliest significan events I remember well were the Cuba crisis and JFK's assasination, which was quite a few years later.
ReplyDeleteI rememba the Beatles though, who doesn't?? prior to the Beatles it was Cliff Richard, mums old musicals( South Pacific and such like) and maybe even a little Elvis. I remember Bert Weedon and Pussy Cat Willum too.............
Its nice to remember, :-)
Thanks Loretta.....I don't think I was politically aware when I was 4 or 5 lol... but I did take an interest in things going on around me and I remember the conversation with my mother when I asked what refugees are very clearly.
DeleteThis is a memory that I can date to that time of course. Its just one of those moments that stuck with me. I also remember the JFK assassination much later on, we had been visiting my parents friends and when we got home and put on the TV my dad was struggling to find out what had happened, when he suddenly announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated, which I think was the first time I'd come across that word too.......All those mums old musicals like South Pacific and worse still the Black and White Minstrels, Mike Sammes Singers and the White Heather Club I now remember as being absolutely awful, although I have come to like some of the songs since, they stood for everything that was tired old and antiquated so far as I was concerned back then.
I like a lot of others budding Eric Clapton's had Bert Weedon's guitar tutor 'Play In A Day' which was a rather extravagant title that was bound to disappoint any 11 year old I think....I've just got to page 14 lol.
Funny how every one remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the JFK assassination. I remember being in the living room with my two younger sisters just after tea. The 6 o'clock news came on our little TV and the first thing the newsreader announced was the assassination of JFK. I didn't know much about the world back then but instinctively I knew it was important, I went into the kitchen where mum was doing the washing up and dad was drying. I announced that Kennedy had been shot and he was dead, my parents looked at each other, my dad looked at me and said 'are you sure it's Kennedy?' and I said yes they just said so on the news, then they both rushed past me into the living room to listen the news. I remember dad standing there with the tea towel still in his hand. I think that is the first really distinctive memory I have. There are other earlier memories, but this one is vivid.
DeleteAnd yes...........I remember watching the White Heather club on as a family, I think it was on Sunday evenings. Also remember the black and white minstrels, I didn't understand why they had black faces and huge white painted on lips, I remember not getting a satisfactory answer when I asked why they looked that way. I think I was told something like, 'it’s just what they do for the programme' which didn't really make a lot of sense either. As for the musicals, I didn't really mind them; I learnt most of the songs. I remember Carousel being my favourite at the time.
Being the one who broke the news on Kennedy to your parents was a pretty important thing for any child to do I think Loretta. Oh no not the White Heather Show...maybe girls liked it better, well some girls anyway? Obviously I don't know, I'm just guessing but there was nothing I liked about it. Like you I thought the Black and White Minstrel Show was just plain weird, but my mom loved it and my dad put up with it.....my memories of the 50s are grim and boring... fog and formica. There may be a gender difference on musicals too, but that is pure hypothesis with no evidence to back it up....for all I know it was only me who got fed up with 'Bali Hai is Calling'?
DeleteI do know I felt liberated by 'Twist and Shout' though.... and the Rolling Stones first single 'Come On' ....suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel!
You do have a remarkable gift for memory, AA, and putting it into context. That you were a confirmed Beatles fan from that show is to be in on the ground floor of the biggest cultural quake to come out of England since the birth of steam power and the industrial age. (I might be getting a bit carried away there, but not by much.) Your remarks on the Liverpool lads and their first national "coming out" in the wake of The Cuban Missile Crisis proves Napoleon's old adage that it's as important to be lucky as well as prepared. The Beatles first #1 hit in the USA was, of course, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in January 1964 and came just at the right point: a couple months after the nation had begun to fully absorb the loss of John Kennedy and what effect that loss of princely vigor might have to the zeitgeist. Enter a cocky-but-benign quartet from Liverpool, and all the great bands that followed, all playing music reconstituted from American roots in blues and rock. Something new, vibrant and not altogether unfamiliar right into a nation that was as young in demographic number as it had likely been in the 20th Century.
ReplyDeleteMy first recollection of The Beatles was their cartoon series that played on Saturday mornings in 1966. The voices were not John or Paul or George , but the songs were: fun songs like "Ticket to Ride" and "Can't Buy Me Love". it took me a while to take to their Sgt. Pepper material but I got there eventually.
I also remember how much adults (anybody over 30 at least) on television professed disdain at their long hair and the way kids would go crackers when they pop up on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and the like. The protests against accepting nuclear terror and the Cold War among other things drew young people away from conformity in droves and they needed a place to mark the new direction. For many The Beatles were that spot.
Thanks Doug, I have been thinking about these memories of late and have realised that most of my most vivid ones are associated with words.
DeleteI clearly remember conversations from different times in my life in which I discovered the meaning of new words, these to me are the building blocks of recollection.
When words are set to music they are doubly potent memory vehicles I think and that was what I found so absolutely compelling about Bob Dylan whose role in my life comes next in the story.
I never saw the Beatles cartoon series you mention, I'm not sure if it was shown here? The disdain of adults that you mention was an important part of the attraction of these bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones I think.....this reached fever pitch in my household when my parents were first exposed to Jimi Hendrix....the more they detested my heroes the more I adored them. If the elders were trying to make us see sense it had completely the opposite effect on me and I suspect many of my peers.
By the time I reached my early teens these performers were supplemented by timeless heroes from the arts like William Blake, Heironymous Bosch and a whole pantheon of immortals from global culture. My friends and I immerese ourselves in literature, philosophy, politics and the arts......and that was what was so different about this new emerging 'youth culture'.... it referred back to the past, it was global and universal, we could trace our origins to bygone times in ways previous fashions had never done.
To me then and to me now this was a cultural revolution and its ramifications have never ended.
I looking forward to your follow up on Bob Dylan of course, who I think was a "gateway" figure for a lot of great poets of the past for many, not least of which being the discovery of Dylan Thomas himself.
DeleteI was eight years old when Kennedy was assassinated. I was in school and they called all of the teachers out of the classroom and then my teacher came back in, she was crying and told us that President Kennedy had been shot. She was crying......it was all rather strange to me at the time. These days it would just be another day in a world gone mad for most kids.
ReplyDeleteI was also eight years old when I was first exposed to the Beatles and I immediately fell in love with Paul McCartney. Looking back, I think it was more akin to lust, but I was only eight years old so I had not concept of what lust was haha. Funny how our perceptions change through the years. I don't find Paul McCartney attractive at all these days........
Great post dear AA. I love your old memories