Reflections: Conversations, Essays, and Other Writings

Reflections on the Beatles in America

Writing this essay in 2013 involved revisiting touchstones of my young adulthood. Reflections on the Beatles in America Strawberry Fields is a 2.5-acre memorial to John Lennon located just inside the West 72nd Street entrance to Central Park in New York. Its focal point is a circular black-and-white mosaic with the word “Imagine” embedded in a winding asphalt walk.The walk widens at the mosaic and is rimmed by benches.Then it narrows again and leads past a large rock outcropping with a bronze plaque listing more than one hundred countries that contributed shrubs and trees to the site. For the last seven years of his life, Lennon lived in the Dakota at the edge of Central Park.When he died there at the hands of an assassin in 1980, the end of the Beatles as a corporeal entity became irrevocable. Because of its proximity to the Dakota, Strawberry Fields has the feel of a cemetery.That’s unfortunate. The Beatles, who captivated America a half-century ago, were about happiness and joy. They sang with incredible energy and sent a thrill through an entire generation.Their music was their own.They wrote it themselves, performed it in their own unique way, and evolved under the brightest spotlight that ever shone on performing artists.They were four remarkably gifted young men who blended their talents into something extraordinary that changed music and the world.They were a celebration of life. If it seems like a long time ago, that’s because it was. I John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey (better known as Ringo Starr) were born in the port city of Liverpool duringWorldWar II.The city was subjected to heavy bombardment as the Royal Air Force struggled valiantly to defend England against the German Air Force during the most sustained aerial assault in history. REFLECTIONS 3 Lennon was born on October 9,1940.His father was a merchant seaman who abandoned the family when John was five.Thereafter,his mother chose to “live in sin” with another man who had no interest in raising “someone else’s son.” John was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, who were childless. “There were five women that were my family,” Lennon later recalled. “Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women, five sisters. One happened to be my mother. She just couldn’t deal with life. She was the youngest and she had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn’t cope with me, and I ended up living with her elder sister.” Julia Lennon visited her son regularly. In 1956, she bought him his first guitar and taught him to play it. He then joined an amateur skiffle group called the Quarrymen and was performing at a church picnic on July 6, 1957, when he met fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney. Paul’s father was a salesman and former jazz band musician who’d taught his son to play piano and trumpet.When Paul was fourteen, his father had given him a trumpet, which Paul traded in for a guitar. John invited Paul to join the Quarrymen.Years later, Paul told Barry Miles (author of a superb biography entitled Paul McCartney: ManyYears from Now),“John and I were two of the luckiest people in the twentieth century to have found each other.” Similarly, Bob Spitz (author of the equally outstanding The Beatles:A Biography) would observe,“A rhythm developed between John and Paul that got stronger and tighter. No doubt about it; they were tuned to the same groove.” On the surface, Paul was easygoing. John was sarcastic and sometimes belligerent but had a wonderful smile that masked his anger and pain. “Where John was impatient and careless,” Spitz writes,“Paul was a perfectionist.Where John was moody and aloof, Paul was blithe and outgoing , gregarious, and irrepressibly cheerful.While John was straightforward if brutally frank,Paul practiced diplomacy to manipulate a situation.” Both John and Paul wrote music.They became even closer when Lennon’s mother was killed by a speeding motorist while crossing the street on July 15, 1958. Paul’s mother had died of cancer two years before. “Now we were both in this; both losing our mothers,” Paul later recalled.“This was a bond for us, something of ours, a special thing.” 4 THOMAS HAUSER “I lost her twice,”John said...