The original cover for The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl
KPBS was showing a film I had desperately wanted to see but had missed in theatres and found the DVD too pricey even for me: The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years. This was a 2016 documentary directed by Ron Howard and featuring quite a few interviews not only with the Beatles themselves (the two survivors, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, shot new interviews for the film, and John Lennon and George Harrison were represented in film clips in which they talked about the Beatles’ past) but with a wide variety of social commentators as well as at least one bona fide rock ’n’ roll great in his own right, Elvis Costello. (I remember thinking in the 1980’s that Costello would be the one person who could legitimately have taken John’s place in a Beatles reunion — the glasses, the slightly nasal voice, the slashing wit and the penchant for politically conscious subject matter — and my hopes briefly went up when Costello and McCartney actually collaborated on a few songs in the late 1980’s.) Eight Days a Week — to abbreviate its title to something a little less cumbersome — was released in 2016 to quite a lot of ballyhoo, with claims that it contained previously unissued footage of the Beatles performing live (Howard and his crew actually put out ads asking people who had sneaked movie cameras into the Beatles’ gigs and filmed them live “in the day” to make their footage available, though since it was silent Howard dubbed in Beatles’ recordings and also much of it was colorized — you could tell because the dingy brown color scheme was all too typical of the inept early attempts at colorization, though come to think of it it’s also, regrettably, the default look for all too many films being made today and shot in color — I’ve often written in these pages about what a relief it is to watch an old-time color film and be reminded of when color films were actually colorful!) and an accompanying CD release of the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 live recordings at the Hollywood Bowl. These originally came out in 1977 as an LP (I remember being at a Wherehouse store in the East Bay and buying it in preference to Elvis Presley’s last album — or at least the last issued during his lifetime — Moody Blue) with remastering by George Martin, producer on nearly all the Beatles’ original recordings, of live recordings originally supervised by Capitol Records’ in-house producers in L.A. (Voyle Gilmore, who in the 1950’s had produced most of Frank Sinatra’s Capitol recordings, in 1964 and someone else whose name escapes me and whom I haven’t been able to find identified online, in 1965), and with a marvelous cover featuring copies of tickets for the two concerts and a lot of artful white space.
The LP was reissued on CD with four more songs included and a re-remastering by the late George Martin’s son Giles, who in justification for his latest reprocessing of the tapes said, “Technology has moved on since my father worked on the material all those years ago. Now there’s improved clarity, and so the immediacy and visceral excitement can be heard like never before.” Alas, instead of the beautiful original cover, the CD reissue had a horribly ugly one to tie in with the poster art for the film. When I started watching Eight Days a Week I had a feeling of skepticism — what more could possibly be said about the history of the Beatles, and in particular how much they accomplished in just eight years (1962-1970) as a recording act — and I heard a lot of well-worn anecdotes about their sudden popularity in their native Britain when, at the end of 1962, their second single, “Please Please Me,” hit #1 on the British pop charts. All of a sudden the Beatles were the biggest musical act in their home country, and British reporters started using the phrase “Beatlemania” to describe the intensity of the fan response — though a lot of people don’t realize that in 1963 they were still playing the rounds of concert halls and movie theatres, and weren’t always the top act on the bill. They did one British tour in 1963 opening for the now-forgotten teenage pop singer Helen Shapiro, who told Beatles’ biographer Philip Norman that during that tour John Lennon and Paul McCartney approached her with a song they wanted her to record, “Misery,” and had the air about them of schoolkids shame-facedly turning in a homework assignment late. They were also doing regular live broadcasts on the BBC, including a show of their own called Pop Goes the Beatles, and eventually these were culled into two CD’s that not only added extensively to the Beatles’ recorded repertory but were must-have material for Beatles’ fans. Then in early 1964 the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sneaked its way onto the top of the U.S. music charts — astonishing the Beatles themselves, who had always thought of the U.S. as the wellspring of rock ’n’ roll and had never believed a British act doing rock would be taken seriously here.
Philip Norman’s book describes how “I Want to Hold Your Hand” got popular in the U.S. — the girlfriend of a D.J. bought it in England and brought it over, he liked it and started playing it on his show, a few other D.J.’s got tapes of the record and added it to their playlists, and suddenly Capitol Records, the U.S. outlet for the British EMI company whose label Parlophone held the Beatles’ contract, finally decided there was a Beatles record that might sell in the U.S. (The previous Beatles’ recordings had been leased by EMI to other U.S. labels after Capitol turned them down — the first three singles and the first LP, Please Please Me, went to the Black-owned Vee-Jay label and its subsidiary, Tollie, while “She Loves You” ended up on an even smaller and less important company, Swan. This explains how on April 3, 1964, the Beatles managed to hold all five of the top five positions on the Billboar Beatle d music charts — those five records were on three different labels!) The Eight Days a Week documentary moves along pretty familiar tracks — the Beatles break through to the top of the U.S. charts, they appear on Ed Sullivan’s weekly variety program three weeks in a row (the DVD reissue of the Beatles’ four Sullivan appearances — including a return visit in September 1965 — is itself one of the most compelling documents in Beatleiana, showing that the Beatles staged their musical and cultural revolution in the heart of the old established order) and they play a few gigs, including one in Washington, D.C. that was filmed in black-and-white by a short-lived company called Electronovision. (The complete film survives except for the very last song, “Twist and Shout,” of which the last half was lost; I remember having a bootleg LP of the soundtrack in which “Twist and Shout” was replaced by another Isley Brothers’ song, “Shout,” which the Beatles had covered on the British documentary Around the Beatles. This was supposedly a live performance but was actually the Beatles just lip-synching to their records.) Eight Days a Week includes some crudely colorized clips from the Washington, D.C. concert, including a sequence in which the circular riser on which Ringo and his drum set sat is moved by stagehands — the concert was given theatre-in-the-round style and the Beatles were turned around during it so they could be facing each part of the audience for at least part of their set. As it progresses, Eight Days a Week gains strength as it gives us new insights into the experience of being a Beatle and in particular of being locked into a rigid schedule that gave them virtually no time for rest and relaxation.
Anxious to milk the Beatles phenomenon for as much money as they could in the short time they expected the band to be popular, the people around the Beatles rushed them into one gig after another — records, broadcasts, photo shoots, concert tours — to the point where they had virtually no time off. The famous line of Wilfred Brambell’s in the film A Hard Day’s Night — “I’ve been in a train and a room, and a car and a room, and a room and a room” — originally came out of the mouth of a Beatle to describe their hermetically sealed existence and was overheard and appropriated by the film’s writer, Alun Owen. Eight Days a Week includes the famous clip from Richard Lester, director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, that when he took on A Hard Day’s Night he was told it would be in black-and-white and would have a seven-week shooting schedule because the film’s producer, Walter Shenson of United Artists, was worried the Beatles would already be on their way out by the time the film was released. Incidentally, the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, comes off much better in this documentary than in some other recent depictions of him (which have presented him as a borderline incompetent whose only interest in the Beatles was the drugs and rent boys his 25 percent of them could pay for); he was actually a quite imaginative manager who refused to steer them into the conventional pathways of success for pop-music acts — the difference between the way he handled the Beatles and the way Col. Tom Parker managed Elvis Presley is ironically depicted in this film in a passing shot of a theatre marquee from 1964 advertising a double-bill of A Hard Day’s Night with Elvis’s latest film, Fun in Acapulco. While Parker was shoehorning Elvis into one crappy formula movie after another (even Elvis started referring to each film, contemptuously, as “my latest travelogue”), the Beatles’ first movie turned out to be a work of art, with their wicked wit expertly captured by screenwriter Owen, their freewheeling existence well dramatized by director Lester, which got great reviews even from older critics not disposed to like anything featuring a rock act aimed at teenagers, and has since had not only 40th anniversary but 50th anniversary DVD reissues. (Anyone remember the 40th and 50th anniversary DVD reissues of Fun in Acapulco?)
Naturally Howard can’t resist intercutting the footage of the Beatles’ U.S. tours with that of the John F. Kennedy assassination (a lot of writers about the Beatles have savored the irony that their second album, called With the Beatles in the U.K. and Meet the Beatles in the U.S., was released in Britain on November 22, 1963, and have suggested that the Beatles’ sweeping popularity worldwide was largely because audiences wanted an “upper” after the horrible “downer” of the Kennedy assassination), the civil-rights marches and race riots, and the Viet Nam war and the protests against that. Though it wasn’t until the Beatles were at the end of their run that John Lennon became openly political (and Paul McCartney followed after John’s death, as if John had willed him the social conscience), the Beatles found themselves on the cutting edge of a new youth culture that rejected a lot of the values the older generation not only held dear but regarded as timeless truths. During the years of the big world tours, 1964-1966, the Beatles not only became more radical politically, they became more radical musically as well, quietly introducing more complex lyrics and deeper emotions into their songs. Late in his life John Lennon mocked the early Beatles’ lyrics as “she loves you, you love her, they all love each other” — though as early as the Beatles’ first album John in particular was writing songs that revealed an astonishing level of emotional trauma and pain — notably the first Beatles’ song I really liked, “There’s a Place.” I couldn’t relate as a kid just about to enter puberty (and with little or no idea what that would entail) to songs about holding hands and going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” about a girl who “loved” me, but to a shy, introverted, intellectual kid (I probably would have been called a “nerd” if the term had existed yet) the words of “There’s a Place” struck me like a sledgehammer: “There’s a place/Where I can go/When I feel low/When I feel blue/And it’s my mind/And there’s no time/When I’m alone.” I suspect the emotional depth of the Beatles’ song came largely, at least at first, from their admiration for Buddy Holly — though the Beatles gave the requisite praise of Elvis in their interviews, it was clear that the white rockers of the 1950’s who had inspired them most were Holly and Carl Perkins, the only two 1950’s white rock stars who wrote most of their own songs; and Holly not only inspired the Beatles’ name (the name of Holly’s band, The Crickets, led John to name his own band after an insect) but anticipated the subtlety and complexity with which they depicted human relationships even when they were still writing love songs almost exclusively.
Eight Days a Week also depicts the bind the Beatles were in economically because after a year of desperately searching for a record company that would sign them, he had accepted a wretchedly bad deal from George Martin at Parlophone by which their royalties increased every year — by a farthing, a denomination worth so little that by 1963 the British Mint had stopped producing coins for it. Since they weren’t making any money to speak of from their records, they had to tour almost constantly to have any income at all, let alone enough to sustain a burgeoning organization. Brian Epstein’s management of the Beatles has been criticized because he didn’t squeeze every last dime out of the industry for them than he could have, but you have to remember that the Beatles’ long-term success was totally unprecedented and Epstein can hardly be considered incompetent for missing out on revenue streams neither he nor anyone in the business in the mid-1960’s dreamed would ever exist. And in late 1966 Epstein did renegotiate the Beatles’ contract with EMI, Parlophone’s parent company, and got his act enough income from their records they no longer economically needed to tour— a key point in their decision to stop touring that is curiously unmentioned in the film. What Howard does a good job of is depicting how the relentlessness of their schedule — just about every day of their lives was booked well in advance, either to record (and to write songs so they’d be ready to record, which is why a lot of the Beatles’ classics from the touring years were written almost literally at gunpoint in hotel rooms under deadline pressure), to do photo shoots, to play live or to make movies. The Beatles took to regarding the recording studio as their oasis, the playground where they could experiment with their music and concentrate on playing instead of performing — and performing before an audience that was so busy screaming at them as to render them nearly inaudible. Later, in an interview clip that isn’t included in Eight Days a Week but could well have been, Paul said it was like trying to play rock ’n’ roll on an airport runway while a 747 parked behind you and warmed up its engines for takeoff.
The original cover of The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl showed the Beatles trying to fill that enormous space with three little amplifiers that by 1977, when the record was first released, would have been the sort of thing you’d expect a high-school garage band to have, not a set of internationally famous superstars playing to an audience of tens of thousands. For the 1965 tour Vox developed a new set of amplifiers that went up to 100 watts — which is nothing today (the real revolution in amplifier design that made heavy-metal possible was done by James Marshall for Jimi Hendrix, who worked out a set of “stacked” amplifiers that allowed Hendrix and the people who followed in his wake actually to be heard by their audiences) — and instead of theatres the Beatles found themselves playing stadia, mainly (as explained in Eight Days a Week) because local police departments in the cities where they were planning to play told them and Epstein flat-out that they couldn’t guarantee security for fans if the Beatles continued to play smaller venues. After at least one riot in Manchester, England after the box office for a Beatles appearance closed and the disappointed fans who hadn’t been able to get tickets lost their temper and went crazy in the streets, local police and concert promoters in the U.S. started insisting that the Beatles play stadia so they could sell enough tickets that everyone who wanted to attend a Beatles’ concert could do so — even if they were too far from the stage either to see or hear much of anything. The Beatles’ live recordings at the Hollywood Bowl, which as I noted above were first released on LP in 1977, dropped from the catalogue in 1985 and not issued on CD until the 2016 release of this film, posed a major technical problem and went through three generations of filtering to try to turn down enough of the screaming so you could actually hear the Beatles’ performing. One other basic piece of equipment modern-day bands take for granted that the Beatles didn’t have was monitor speakers — the speakers that point away from the audience towards the stage, which are there so the performers can hear themselves. Without them, the Beatles frequently had to read each other’s lips to stay together in the song — and Ringo in this movie recalls taking his cues from watching Paul’s, John’s and George’s asses.
Ringo had said elsewhere that as the tours continued and the Beatles got more bored with them, he wasn’t bothering to play on every beat — he just drummed the afterbeats — and there are a few performance clips where he can be seen doing that (on the Beatles’ final Ed Sullivan appearance in 1965 he starts “Ticket to Ride” playing only the afterbeats, but quickly gets caught up in the spirit of the song and starts drumming normally), but for the most part the Beatles were conscientious musicians who did the best they could under virtually impossible conditions. They (or three-quarters of them, anyway, since Ringo didn’t join until 1962) had honed themselves as a performing unit in the basement clubs of Liverpool and especially Hamburg — it can be said that while the individual Beatles were all from Liverpool, the band was really born in Hamburg, playing under arduous conditions and for ridiculously long periods of time (seven days a week, eight hours a night — 45 minutes on and 15 minutes off — except on Sundays, when they played 12 hours). We have very little recorded evidence of what the Beatles sounded like then (there’s a live tape from Hamburg that was issued on LP but which Paul McCartney has successfully kept from being issued on CD, but it was made on December 31, 1962, after the Beatles had already recorded their first two singles and Ringo had permanently replaced Pete Best on drums), but we can hear the incredible tightness and indomitability in the Hollywood Bowl recordings and the other recorded live shows from the touring years even with the audience screaming and either wittingly or unwittingly trying to drown them out. Ironically, Eight Days a Week also hints that it was the end of the touring years that started the Beatles on the path to one of the most acrimonious band breakups in music history; as they worked together in the studio and created masterpieces like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, they also went off in different directions creatively, and the whole “Four Musketeers” us-against-them spirit that had held them together on the road started to dissipate. (Eight Days a Week includes a famous archival clip from John Lennon talking about Elvis and saying that what he thought did Elvis in was that he was totally alone — he had his entourage but no one who was actually sharing the experience of stardom — whereas the Beatles had each other and therefore had a support network Elvis lacked.)
There’s also a long coda to Eight Days a Week that shows just how the experience of touring wore the Beatles down — in 1964 they were getting insipid questions at their press conferences and became famous for giving flip answers that reinforced their lovable images; by 1966 a reporter in Hamburg (the town that, as I mentioned above, could legitimately claim to have “made” the Beatles) was calling them “snobby” and they got defensive and not at all funny. And there’s a fascinating glimpse of one of the early clashes between the youth revolution and the counterrevolution when John Lennon made his famous comment that “we’re more popular than Jesus now” to British reporter Maureen Cleave (who was also one of his girlfriends), and while the British readers didn’t make an issue of it, when the American magazine Datebook bought the U.S. rights to the story it became a cause célèbre among what would become the U.S. radical Christian Right. D.J.’s in the South organized events at which disgusted Christian ex-Beatle fans could bring their Beatles records and memorabilia to be publicly burned — how Joseph Goebbels! — and John had to issue a public apology saying that he hadn’t meant to imply it was a good thing that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and his remark wasn’t meant as an attack “on Jesus as a person, or God as a thing, or whatever” — it’s clear from this famous clip how uncomfortable he is and how much he desperately wanted to joke his way out of the controversy as he’d been able to do before, and how much he realized the stakes were way too high for him to make light of it. (What isn’t generally realized is that when he said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now,” John was literally signing his own death warrant. His killer, Mark David Chapman, was not — as he’s usually been portrayed — a “deranged fan” or a schizo who thought he was John Lennon and the real one was an impostor; he was a Fundamentalist Christian who had never forgiven John for saying he was more popular than Jesus, or for writing a song that included the line, “Imagine no religion.” Chapman had even been in a prayer group that prayed, “Imagine, imagine John Lennon dead.”)
Eight Days a Week is an inspiring and unexpectedly complex retelling of a story that continues to fascinate not only because the Beatles broke so many trails artistically, socially, politically and economically (after them pop music was Big Business in a way it hadn’t been before), but they did it in such a short period of time — eight years between their abortive audition for Decca Records in January 1962 and their final session as a group in January 1970 — and advanced so much musically in that period and rewrote the expectations of how long a pop group could last and how they could sustain success without having to compromise or rework their acts to appeal to older audiences the way previous teen idols — Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley — had done. What the Beatles accomplished in those eight years — making music that so dominated the world’s culture almost everyone in even remotely developed areas was listening to the same thing — hadn’t happened before and it’s come close to happening again just once (when Michael Jackson’s Thriller album had the same kind of overwhelming worldwide success the Beatles had achieved routinely). One interviewee in Eight Days a Week claims that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the greatest songwriters since Mozart and Schubert, and though that seems to me to be overstating the case a little, certainly in terms of the overall quality of their output they’re among the best of rock songwriters and rivals to the great pre-rock standards writers like Berlin, Porter, Kern and Gershwin — and I suspect it’s both the overall quality of the songs and the creativity and musicianship with which they played them that have kept the Beatles so popular for so long
