I Met the Walrus_ How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever - Jerry Levitan [2]
Most of the songs were familiar to me. You had to have been on the moon not to have heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” or “All My Loving.” The less-played songs were visions into the group’s future. George’s “Don’t Bother Me” with the bongo beat. The minor chord in “Not a Second Time.” The affectations had already become pop legend: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The harmonica. Inventive harmonies. Ringo shaking his head and all those crazy rings. Examining that album and listening to the songs over and over while we neglected our project was like going through a portal to a new dimension.
Meet the Beatles was released on January 20, 1964. The release of the singles “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was already causing sensations everywhere with their distinctive, joyous sound. The harmonies and hooks were different and enticing. The Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and the Rolling Stones would all travel the intercontinental road to America paved by the Beatles. North America’s appetite for a new style of pop and rock had become insatiable.
By 1964 the charts were being filled with a different range of music than the safe and clean tunes of just a year before. “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys, “Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison, and albums by Bob Dylan, Dusty Springfield, the Yardbirds, and the Rolling Stones broadened the range of music for young people and the possibilities for change. These songs left the increasingly banal and novel songs of the early ’60s in the dust and the Beatles were leading the way, even writing chart toppers for other bands (the Stones’ first big hit, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” was a Lennon/McCartney original).
It didn’t take long for the Beatles to infiltrate the pop lexicon. There were numerous references to them in situation comedies and films and parodies on variety shows. Comics would wear wigs and mimic the Liverpudlian accent. They would sing badly and goof around. Peter Sellers recorded “She Loves You” (inspired by Dr. Strangelove) reciting the lyrics in a German accent. That is how the establishment saw them—fun loving, harmless, and cute. But kids at the time knew differently. They understood that the Beatles were leading the vanguard of a new era of music and pop culture.
I was not a stranger to music and performers. My father played the mandolin with passion and style. He had a discerning taste for talent. In fact, the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan he taught himself to play “All My Loving” perfectly. He would often say that had he been dropped off in Hollywood as a young man he would have fit right in. That my father so overtly liked the Beatles that first night reinforced my instincts.
My parents were the first generation of my family in North America. They had left Europe a few years after the ravages of World War II and found themselves with their young daughter in Canada. They were en route with other refugees to New York City, but the quota system detoured them to Halifax, Montreal, and then Toronto. Steve and I were born in the New World. When I was ten, we moved to a middle-class suburb called North York. It was an area mostly populated with concentration camp survivors. Looking back, I would place my friends’ parents in two categories: the Bitterly Affected and the Hopeful Rebuilders. My parents were in the latter category. They had their