The Beatles: Image and the Media

Notes

237 notes preface 1. Ledbetter, Les. “John Lennon of Beatles is Killed; Suspect Held in Shooting at Dakota.” New York Times 9 December 1980: B7; in another story on B7, “Crowds of Lennon Fans Gather Quickly at the Dakota and Hospital,” the total was put at one thousand mourners at the two locations. 2. For our purposes, “Beatlemania” refers to the extreme hysterical reaction of the Beatles’ young female fans prompted by any appearance of the band. It is primarily a feature of the touring years, especially from late 1963 to 1966, though the reaction, on a smaller scale, continued to accompany any public appearance by band members throughout their careers, both as Beatles and solo artists. 1. “the twentieth century’s greatest romance”: imagining the beatles 1. We are concerned here with the image’s resonance for an essentially white audience. As Nelson George notes in his history of music and black culture, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988), by 1965 rock and roll had become white music made for a white audience. There were blacks that listened to the Beatles and other rock and roll acts, but just as rock and roll music had become essential to the youth culture of whites, soul music had become integral to black youth culture (George 106–8). 2. Dyer, in defining the source materials for the image (60–63), notes the importance of film in development of the film star image. I have substituted “work product” for this category, because the Beatles’ career, and therefore image, encompassed work in sound recording, on film and video, and various other pursuits, all of which contributed to the evolving image. Christine Gledhill, in her introduction to Stardom: Industry of Desire (1991), a collection growing out of Dyer’s pioneering work, defines the star, a mechanism of identification for the audience, as “an intertextual construct produced across a range of media and cultural practices” (Gledhill xiv–xv). 3. Of the four, only Starr was actually working class. Lennon, Harrison, and McCartney came from modest but middle-class backgrounds, though they clearly identified with the working class and posed a northerner’s critique of the London establishment’s dominance of British society. 4. The approach was popularized in works such as Elements of Semiology (1967), S/Z (1970), and Mythologies (1972), which offered analyses of subjects ranging from literature to fashion. 5. In 1923, the “Frankfurt School” was formed at the newly founded Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal , Friedrich Pollack, Mark Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, were among the Marxist intellectuals gathered at the Institute. They, with affiliated intellectuals including Walter Benjamin, developed “critical theory” as a powerful critique of Western capitalist societies. The Frankfurt School formed in response to the general failure of revolutionary movements in Europe and the United States. Escaping Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, the members of the School migrated to Great Britain and the United States, where they witnessed the full extent of the rise of mass culture in film, radio , music, television, and advertisement. Their critique of capitalism and mass culture continued into the 1960s; One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, propelled its author, Herbert Marcuse, into the vanguard of New Left radicalism. 6. In June 2005, forty-one years after the murders, a Philadelphia, Mississippi, jury convicted an eighth Klansman, Edgar Ray Killen, of three counts of manslaughter for his leadership role in the crimes. 7. Beatles Anthology, vol. 8 (VHS), sleeve notes. 2. “ladies and gentlemen, the beatles!”: introducing the image 1. EP: Extended play vinyl records containing more songs than a single but fewer than an album, typically four or more tracks, which are played, like singles, at 45 revolutions per minute (rpm). 2. Acker Bilk, the trad jazz clarinetist, had success with “Stranger On the 238 notes to pages 5–22 Shore,” which reached number one on the Billboard singles charts in May, 1962 (Whitburn, Billboard’s Top 10 77). Laurie London’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” reached number one in 1958 (Spizer, Beatles’ Story, Part I 5–8). 3. The offending incident involved a joke about the meaning of “W.C.” An English woman, planning a trip, had written her prospective host and queried as to whether or not her lodgings would have a W.C. (“water closet,” or toilet). Far from fluent in English, the...