Welcome to our first Rabbit Hole, so named as a nod to John and Paul’s mutual love of Lewis Carroll, and because these bonus episodes will go down rabbit holes into a fuller discussion of useful things that there wasn’t room for in the main episodes of the Beautiful Possibility series.
For those of you who skipped the Preface, know that Rabbit Holes will be much (much!) less polished and also much shorter than the full-length episodes. Think of them as studio outtakes, rather than fully-produced bonus tracks.
So then, down the rabbit hole we go. And this first rabbit hole deals with the ubiquitous and puzzling theory that Beatlemania was caused by the assassination of President Kennedy, which had happened a few months prior to The Beatles’ arrival in America. This theory is so prevalent that even Paul reiterated a version of it in the 2024 documentary, Beatles ‘64 —
“When we came, America had been in mourning. It was quite shortly after Kennedy had been assassinated. Maybe America needed something like The Beatles to lift it out of mourning, and just sort of say, ‘Life goes on.’ The joy you see in these audiences is like they're being lifted out of sorrow.” — Paul McCartney
Paul’s right about Beatlemania lifting America — and most of the world — out of sorrow, and we'll talk a lot about that in the next episode.
As for the part about the assassination causing Beatlemania, revolutionaries rarely undrestand their own revolutions.
In the first episode we talked about the problem that the story of The Beatles as it’s currently told is filled with unanswered questions, blank spots, inconsistencies, logical fallacies, errors of chronology, and faulty cause and effect. The theory that the Kennedy assassination caused Beatlemania is an example of this.
There are all kinds of reasons this theory is nonsensical. The simplest reason is that it’s an obvious fallacy of cause and effect. You don’t have to be an historian — which I very much am not — to notice this. You just need to know how to use a calendar.
President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. At various times, the beginning of Beatlemania has been placed at the London Palladium show of October 13, 1963, the Beatles’ arrival in America on February 7th, 1964, and on December 27, 1960.
Obviously three different dates spread over four years can't all be the birth of Beatlemania. And by far the most credible of the three candidates seems to be December 27th, 1960, at Litherland Town Hall, in a rough suburb across the river from Liverpool.1
We won't go into the details of the Litherland Town Hall show right now, but the best description I’ve found of that night is the prologue of Bob Spitz’s biography of the band. I hope you’ll do yourself the favour of reading Spitz’s version in full, because I think it’s among the best things ever written about The Beatles. Spitz doesn’t just tell us what happened, he gives us the experience of feeling what happened— and as we’re going to talk a lot about in this series, without an emotional experience of this story, it’s impossible to get even close to understanding it.
Here’s just a little sample of Spitz’s description of the Litherland show. The full version is twelve pages long, so obviously this is massively condensed for length—
The hall was packed with teenagers, many of whom had gathered at card tables along both sidewalls to await the next act. The audience stirred and half turned when Bob Wooler crooned into an open mic: “And now, everybody, the band you’ve been waiting for. Direct from Hamburg—”
But before he got their name out, Paul McCartney jumped the gun and, in a raw, shrill burst as the curtain swung open, hollered: “I’m gonna tell Aunt Mary / ’bout Uncle John / he said he had the mis’ry / buthegotalotoffun…”
For a tense moment, the crowd just stared, awestruck, trying to take in the whole disturbing scene. Four of the musicians were dressed in...beautiful cracked-leather jackets... black T-shirts, and silky skintight pants. With instruments slung low across their bodies, they looked like a teenage-rebel fantasy come to life...
As if someone had flashed a prearranged cue, the entire crowd rushed the stage, pressing feverishly toward the footlights...
The band... began working the crowd into a sweat... they twisted and jerked their bodies with indignant energy. John and George proceeded to lunge around like snapping dogs and stomp loudly on the bandstand in time to the music... And when John Lennon stepped to the mic and challenged the crowd to “get your knickers down!”... the house erupted in hysteria... the band concluded its half-hour set with a rousing version of “What’d I Say,” in which Paul McCartney jackknifed through the crowd, whipping the kids into rapturous confrontation. Over the last wild applause, Bob Wooler managed to say, “That was fantastic, fellas,” but it was doubtful anyone paid much attention to him. They were too busy trying to connect with what had just gone down on that stage, what had turned their little Christmas dance into a full-scale epiphany.
...the band had somehow squeezed every nerve of the local rock ’n roll scene, and that scene would never be the same. In the wall of grinding sound and the veil of black leather, they had staked their claim to history. And in that instant, they had become the Beatles.2
The full version is way better, but hopefully you get the sense of it — although I very much doubt Paul jumped the gun by mistake, as Spitz implies. They had just returned from their first Hamburg residency. They knew full well how to make an entrance, they understood intuitively the power of subverting established convention, and they’d set their sights on the toppermost of the poppermost.
It’s these little missed details that add up, you see, when it comes to understanding this story.
When we re-tell the story in the second part of this series, we’ll probably devote an entire episode to the weeks leading up to and following the Litherland show. First, because it’s one of the places in the story as it’s currently told that’s the most misunderstood and incomplete, which matters because, second, if my research and analysis is correct — and that’s always a big “if” — it might be one of the most important pressure points in the history of the band, and one of the keys to understanding the breakup.
We’ll get to all of that in good time. For here, what matters is that over the next two years, what exploded into being that night at Litherland Town Hall became a regional phenomenon and then a national phenomenon, reaching London in 1963, where it was “discovered,” finally, by the national press following a performance at The London palladium on October 13th.
By February of 1964, when The Beatles landed at New York’s JFK Airport for their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and were greeted by thousands of screaming, ecstatic teenagers, Beatlemania had already been making British teenagers lose their minds and wet their seats for almost exactly three years.
Like I said, you just need a calendar to sort it out.
And it also helps to have an awareness of what we politely call American exceptionalism. Americans tend to believe that everything that really matters starts in America, and if it didn’t start in America, it must not really matter. But important, world-changing events do actually originate in places other than the US, and Beatlemania is one of them.
There’s no doubt the Kennedy assassination was a deep and lasting wound to the American psyche. To say absolutely nothing new, America’s innocence and sense of invulnerability was forever shattered on that November day in Dallas. And there’s little question that in a time of national mourning, the arrival of four irreverent lads from Liverpool and the joyful noise they made together3 was a much-needed balm for the wounded spirit of a grieving nation.
And of course, making it big in America was a gigantic milestone in The Beatles’ climb to the ‘toppermost of the poppermost.’ More accurately, America was the toppermost of the poppermost. As we talked about in the first episode, America came out of World War II as the world’s dominant power, economically, politically and culturally. There’s absolutely no doubt that any band that wanted to make it to the toppermost had to make it in America.4
It’s also possible, and even likely, that Beatlemania in the US had an extra edge of intensity because it exploded within a few months of the assassination. But an extra level of intensity is not the same thing as causing it — either in the US or in the world as a whole.
In addition to failing the calendar test, the Kennedy assassination theory also fails both the common sense and the gut test.
If the Kennedy assassination really had caused Beatlemania, even just in America, that would make Beatlemania a reactionary event — an effect rather than a cause, dependent on an external event and not on the inherent power of what the Fab Four were putting into the world with their music and their attitude. And if Beatlemania was merely a reaction to an external event, then any reasonably interesting band that just happened to be in the right place at the right time might have sparked the same reaction.
But everything about this story, including our instinctive understanding of it, makes it abundantly clear that The Beatles are not just any reasonably interesting band that just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The unprecedented reaction to The Beatles in the form of Beatlemania happened because The Beatles themselves were unprecedented, not in reaction to a single external event in a single country that was late to the party anyway.
I suspect what most historians mean when they say Beatlemania started in America is that American Beatlemania is what sent the whole thing into the stratosphere, which is accurate. And I’d add that American Beatlemania is what made The Beatles so big they became a mythological story — not just in America, but in all of Western civilization. And we’ll get to that in the next episode.
I also suspect historians have decided the Kennedy assassination caused Beatlemania because they have no actual idea what caused Beatlemania and they feel like they ought to have an answer, so that’s what they came up with. It’s easy to understand why this would be — we live in a culture where we’re not supposed to admit we don’t know things, especially if we’re meant to be experts on the subject, and historians aren’t immune to this any more than anyone else is.
For now, I hope you’re already starting to see that there’s no reason an historian would likely understand what caused Beatlemania, at least not completely — because Beatlemania was a mythological event more than a historical event. And because as we’ll see in subsequent episodes, Beatles writers — and maybe especially historians — may be especially vulnerable to not understanding key elements of this story.
In the next two episodes, we’ll talk about the mythological roots of Beatlemania and the Love Revolution that it sparked — and we’ll discover that the cause might be much more complex and, more importantly, much more life-affirming than the assassination of a president.
Until next week, peace, love and strawberry fields.
Faith
Pete Best and company claims that Beatlemania actually started two weeks prior, on December 17, 1960, at the Casbah, the basement coffee bar owned by Pete’s mother, Mona Best.
The December 17 show was The Beatles’ first booking upon returning from their first Hamburg residency. It’s certainly possible that Beatlemania started at the Casbah show, although given other events surrounding their return, it seems less likely than Litherland.
Despite their newfound mastery of the music,The Beatles left Hamburg under a dark cloud of chaos and despair, and arrived in Liverpool fragmented and uncertain of their future. As good as they almost certainly were at that Casbah gig, it’s likely they didn’t quite have their act put fully back together enough to cause a Beatlemania-level reaction. There are no accounts that I’m aware of, of anything like that from anyone who was at that Casbah gig, nor are there any Beatlemania-esque accounts of their show a week later, on Christmas Eve, at the Grosvenor Ballroom.
Also, the Casbah is tiny. I mean, seriously tiny. Tiny enough that there was no real way to offer any sort of dramatic stage presentation, and certainly no room for the sorts of gyrations and frenetic activity that marks a Beatlemania outbreak, without people getting seriously hurt or worse. Meaning if there’d been an outbreak of Beatlemania at the Casbah on December 17, it seems likely people would remember and we’d have heard about it already.
It seems more likely the Casbah was a sort of a dry run. That it was clear at the Casbah show that they’d come back a changed and markedly superior band, but that it took a couple of gigs to get their full mojo back, before it all came together on December 27. It’s easy to get confused between crowd enthusiasm and Beatlemania, and that’s maybe part of what’s happening with the Casbah story — but if you read the descriptions and see the footage of Beatlemania, it’s not just crowd enthusiasm, it’s a whole different and distinctive reaction that borders on violence, as the Litherland show did. If that had happened in the tiny cramped confines of the Casbah, people would almost certainly have gotten hurt, and we would almost certainly know about it.
For a vivid and somewhat terrifying account of early Beatlemania, read the description of the 1965 Cow Palace concert described on pages 152-3 in Ken Womack’s book based on Mal Evans’ diaries, Living the Beatles Legend. It will quickly dispel any illusions you might have that Beatlemania is anything other than a singular phenomenon distinct from even outsized fan enthusiasm.
Also remember that the Best family has a vested commercial interest in claiming Beatlemania started at the Casbah. They operate tours of the Casbah, and own the Beatles Museum on Mathew Street, and last I was there, they were converting the top floor of the house where the Casbah is located into a hotel. So there’s marketing incentive to claim that the Casbah is the birthplace of the Beatles that — as we’ll talk about someday — seems to frequently get in the way of historical accuracy when it comes to the Best family’s version of events.
The Mathew Street Beatles Museum, owned by the Best family, is an international treasure, though — a diamond in the crown of Beatles historical archives. Don’t miss it when you’re there. Just don’t believe without question whatever they tell you about the history.
Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, Little Brown & Co., 2005, p. 10-11.
This was radically edited for length. The full version is much too long to quote in a footnote. I tried to capture the essence, but do yourself a favour and find a copy and treat yourself to those first twelve pages.
Thank you to biographer Peter Ames Carlin for the phrase.
One of the best parts of this story is Marsha Albert, a 15-year-old American teenager who is in her own way an accelerant of American Beatlemania. You can read an account of her role in all of this at http://www.beatlesebooks.com/hold-your-hand.
Btw, I think the version in the link is somewhat cribbed (uncredited) from Bill Harry’s book, The British Invasion (2004) because the account in Harry’s book is strikingly similar.
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