Announcing "Beautiful Possibility"
What if The Beatles are less about our past and more about our future?
It didn’t lift for three years, by which time it had spread and had covered the whole world. There was perpetual screaming and yeh-yehing for three years, one long continuous succession of hysterical teenagers of every class and color, shouting uncontrollably, not one of whom could hear what was going on for the noise of each other. Each of them emotionally, mentally, or sexually excited, foaming at the mouth, bursting into tears, hurling themselves like lemmings in the direction of The Beatles or just simply fainting.
Through the whole of the three years, it was happening somewhere in the world. Each country witnessed the same scenes of mass emotion, scenes which had never been thought possible before and which are unlikely to be ever seen again.1
It would be hard to exaggerate the impact of the “earthquake” that hit the world in 1964. The cultural revolution of the Sixties, sparked by the explosion of Beatlemania, changed our world instantly, radically and permanently.
After the long, dark night of two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and the assassination of a young American president, Beatlemania engulfed the world in an ecstatic explosion of music and joy and sexual awakening unlike anything the world had — or has — ever experienced, lighting the fuse for what would become the Love Revolution of the Sixties.
Of course, teenagers screaming for their idols wasn’t in and of itself new. Kids had screamed for Elvis, and before that, for Frank Sinatra, and during the Swing Era, for the Benny Goodman Orchestra, and no, I am not making that last one up.
Beatlemania was something altogether different.
We fell fast and we fell hard — fierce and possessive and sometimes violent and out-of-control and on a scale never experienced before or since. Cultural infatuations come and go — that’s the way of things — but for sixty years, through it all, our love affair with The Beatles remains a singular phenomenon that’s never come anywhere close to being repeated.
But even as we’re all in agreement about its seismic cultural impact, we still don’t have a satisfying and accurate explanation for why Beatlemania was what it was (hint: it wasn’t because of the Kennedy assassination). Most writers do what mathematicians do when they don't yet know how to solve a proof, inserting “and then a miracle happens” for what they aren’t able to explain — “First, there were The Beatles and then a miracle happened and then Beatlemania and then another miracle happened and then The Sixties.”
The thing is, though, in important ways, that is more or less exactly how it all happened. “What was it about The Beatles?” is to some extent an unanswerable question, and that’s probably how it should be.
Beatlemania was, by any reasonably open-minded definition, a miracle, if a miracle means a great blessing that we have no scientific explanation for — and how do you explain a miracle? How do you deconstruct magic? And do we even want to try? Isn't it perhaps more magical if The Beatles remain mysterious and ineffable in the same way a magic trick is only magical when we don’t know how the trick works?
There’s always risk in a quest to discover the source of magic — otherwise, it wouldn't be much of a quest.
But in this case, it might not be quite the risk it seems to be, because there’s magic and then there’s magick. There’s trickery and sleight of hand and “man behind the curtain” magic, and then there’s that other kind of magick, the kind that we know in our hearts is at the centre of this story and this music, the kind that’s found in the subtleties of the human heart and the human spirit, in fairy tales and folklore, enchantment and mystery, which I’ve come to believe is where this story belongs and which is perhaps the only way to truly understand and connect with its deeper power.
For the vast majority of people I’ve talked with about this work over the past few years, discovering the deeper magick at play behind all of this has made the story — and the music — richer, more beautiful and more magickal. And since I’m on a bit of a personal quest to restore that deeper magick to this story, I hope with all my heart that you'll feel the same.
But that said, if you really, really don’t want to know how the magick of Beatlemania might have happened, now’s the time to leave the theatre.
For the rest of us, I invite you to come along on our — let’s just get this one out of the way now — magical mystery tour and see what we might discover.
Excerpted from the long-form series, “Beautiful Possibility”
Part 1 ~ The story of the story of The Beatles
Premieres February 24
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Hunter Davies, The Beatles, W.W. Norton,1967, p. 179.