All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in order are here.
This is the real second half of episode 1:3 (Hope of Deliverance). It will not probably make much sense without episodes 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3.)
“The girls saw the Beatles were for real. And driven by the mania of that understanding, they clutched and clawed because the Beatles were the source of energy. And that source attracts everyone.”1 — Rollling Stone, 1968.
Welcome to this week’s first of two Rabbit Holes - which isn’t a Rabbit Hole so much as it’s the back part of the main episode — which means that unlike other Rabbit Holes, this one is not scruffy, or if it is, it’s not meant to be.
In it, we’re going to finish what we started in episode 1:3 — our quest for the deeper mythological roots of Beatlemania.
So let’s rewind to where we were in all of that, when we broke away to talk about the meta of talking about the possibility that John and Paul were lovers, when I suggested the recipe for what it would take to spark Beatlemania and thus the Love Revolution—
For Beatlemania to happen, somewhere at the heart of The Beatles there needs to be a unique, powerful, deeply culturally transgressive source of erotic lifeforce love strong enough to spark a riverbed-changing earthquake and give birth to a new world, but subversive enough so as not to be consciously recognised as transgressive by the larger culture.
Before we continue, I want to emphasize again that none of what’s in this Rabbit Hole or anywhere else in this series is intended to prove that John and Paul were a romantic couple. What I want to do here is to show you how looking at Beatlemania through the speculative frame of John and Paul as lovers offers us insights that aren’t available to us otherwise.
It starts, of course, with the music.
If it’s true that John and Paul were a romantic couple, we’ll see in a future episode from things each of them has said — and from the songs themselves — that there’s good reason to think they wrote many, and maybe most, of their love songs for and about one another.
And if that’s true, then even the so-called “simple” love songs of Beatlemania become so much more than they already are, so much more than the teenage longings of early rock-and-roll revolutionised into a new sound — which takes us back to the mysterious causes of Beatlemania, and that transgressive, subversive erotic lifeforce love that I’m suggesting had to be at the heart of it for it to spark the reaction it did — and to my suggestion that the source of that transgressive, subversive lifeforce love may have been a hidden romantic relationship between John and Paul.
When music is created and performed by two lovers together, there’s something extra in that music, and in performing it, that wouldn’t be there otherwise. The music itself, as well as the performance of that music, becomes deeply infused with the erotic tension between the two lovers — and perhaps especially so if that love affair is hidden, and even more so if that affair is forbidden by the culture, which adds yet another layer of extra intensity that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
Sexual attraction and creative inspiration originate from the same source — the lifeforce power of the Grail, which as we talked about in the prior episode, is the spark that brings all new life into being, whether it’s the literal sexual spark of desire between two people, or that same spark expressed in the act of creation. It’s why we tend to be more creative when we fall in love.
To put it another way, two people writing and singing love songs to one another are by definition going to create highly-charged erotic, lifeforce-infused music in a way that a single person, or two people who are not in love with one another, can’t.
And if the two people in question also happen to be musical and lyrical geniuses, the ability to communicate that highly charged erotic, lifeforce-infused love through their music becomes supercharged.
I realise the following is a bizarre analogy that’s much too trivial and silly for what we’re talking about here, but— for a moment, think of the lifeforce love The Beatles were generating as pizza. If the driver delivers your pizza in a brand-new Ferrari going at top speed on an open road, it’s going to arrive at your door much fresher and hotter and meltier than if it’s delivered by a guy working his way through rush hour traffic in a ten-year old Buick. And you are thus far more likely to make those satisfied moans of pizza appreciation when you bite into it, if that pizza is hot and fresh and melty.
In this... cheesy... analogy, the Ferrari delivering the pizza of lifeforce love is, of course, the genius of The Beatles, and the Buick is pretty much everyone else.
So then, a duo of musical geniuses, deeply in love and maybe even deeply enmeshed and obsessed with one another, involved in an intense, obsessive, transgressive, subversive, hidden love affair that they communicate, whether consciously or not, through their music — and as we’re about to see — in their performance and their public image.
If that’s what was happening during Beatlemania, then that for sure gets us what we need to start a Love Revolution.
This transgressive erotic love between Paul and John that those teenagers sensed and responded to in the music wouldn’t be picked up by journalists or musicologists or historians, because it’s less something we hear in the music of The Beatles and more something we feel — if we’re attuned to it the way teenage girls very much tend to be and the way journalists and musicologists and historians very much tend not to be.
A colleague of mine once pointed out that if The Beatles were to happen today, everyone would immediately assume that John and Paul were a romantic couple. And she’s right, because we’d be looking at them through contemporary eyes not blinded by the bigotries of the past — and also because the story as it’s been told for the past sixty years wouldn't be interfering with our ability to see what might actually be there. We’d be looking at John and Paul’s relationship with fresh eyes undistorted by preconceived biases.
That’s today, though, with our modern sensibilities. The teenagers of Beatlemania didn’t have our awareness of same sex love. It wouldn’t have occurred to most of them that a boy would sing a love song for anyone other than a girl. And as such, the teenagers of the time wouldn’t have consciously recognised the source of this erotic energy as coming from John and Paul, only that it was coming from The Beatles as a whole. And even here, given their “lovable mop top” image, that erotic energy would have been hiding in plain sight, cloaked beneath the tailored suits and the stage bows. It would have been — and still is — subversive, and unusually so.
Teenagers wouldn’t have needed to consciously recognise the specific source of that extra spark of eroticism in order to feel it — because while most of the signs of a secret love affair can be hidden, that extra spark in the music, and in the way two lovers interact, can’t be hidden and it also can’t be faked.
When two people are in love, especially if it’s two young men barely out of their teens, it’s not possible to completely hide that love — and as we'll see in the next episode, it’s not at all clear that John in particular was putting all that much effort into trying to hide it.
Those Beatlemania teenagers wouldn’t consciously expect to see signs of a love affair between two boys, but they’d still pick up on the traces of that love affair — in the body language between the two lovers as they sing, in the little glances that they might exchange over a shared microphone, in the way the two of them often seem more focused on each other than on the audience, and maybe most of all, in the indefinable extra intensity with which the song is sung as the lovers spark off one another.
The Beatles, or at least John, seems to have understood this. Here he is in a joint interview with Paul in 1966—
“When Paul and I write a song, we try and take hold of something we believe in – a truth. We can never communicate 100 percent of what we feel, but if we can convey just a fraction, we have achieved something. We try to give people a feeling – they don’t have to understand the music if they can just feel the emotion. This is half the reason the fans don’t understand, but they experience what we are trying to tell them.”2
I want to stop for a second and acknowledge that there is a popular theory — both in the mainstream and the Beatles studies counterculture — that while it’s true that the erotic connection between John and Paul sparked Beatlemania, that’s actually evidence that they weren’t lovers — that instead of acting on it, they channeled their love and desire for one another into the music. And that it’s the repression of their mutual erotic desire that “exploded” into their music and thus into Beatlemania.
That theory sounds plausible on the surface and that’s what I initially thought , too. But we’ll talk in the next episode about why the unrequited or repressed sexual tension theory doesn’t actually hold up. As a preview, as plausible as the theory sounds, the research just doesn’t support it.
If you’re thinking this whole erotic energy/lifeforce thing sounds a bit too fuzzy and metaphysical to be credible, a demonstration is in order. Because while this erotic energy between Paul and John was cloaked, it wasn’t subtle. Whether or not they acted on that erotic attraction, it’s there and it’s easy to see with your very own eyeballs in the video footage, once you know how to look for it. And its effects are grounded in very tangible and real-world advertising techniques.
“Great courage is needed to embrace in front of the lens with the entire world in opposition: this involves relinquishing to the World a fragment of one’s indomitable Soul.”3
What’s seems to be happening between Paul and John when they’re on camera is almost impossible to describe in words. It’s most evident in their concerts, but it’s also visible in interviews and in their films, and it’s what we responded to, I think, in Get Back. The best way to see this thing I’m talking about is to watch videos of them performing or otherwise interacting with one another at the slowest available speed and with the sound off.
What you’ll see if you do this little experiment at home is a constant stream of little interactions — little sparks of connection — between John and Paul. Sometimes more of them, sometimes fewer, depending on the context and maybe on how they were feeling about one another on that particular day, but a steady stream nonetheless.
Most of these little interactions flash by much too quickly to be consciously picked up in real time, and especially in concerts with the distraction of the music and the screams — but those sparks between them are undeniably there. Nearly invisible in real time, they become virtually impossible to miss when the video is slowed and the sound is muted.
The countercultural Beatles world likes to turn these little moments into gifs, and here are a few examples—
There are also a couple of links in this footnote — 4 — to full length interviews that are particularly good for John and Paul spark spotting (and trying saying that three times fast).
Again, I’m not offering any of this as proof that John and Paul were lovers. But whether they acted on their love for one another or not, these moments between them are not fantasy, they’re real and observable. They are without any question what happened, and they are, also without question, erotic. This simply isn’t how friends or brothers look at or interact with one another. On stage or off, Paul and John’s interactions with George and Ringo are very different from how they interact with each other. Those little electric moments happen only between Paul and John.
Now, obviously, the Beatlemania teenagers weren’t experiencing The Beatles on YouTube where they could slow down the action and mute the sound — but they didn’t need to do that to be affected by those little sparks of erotic connection.
Just because something is too quick for our conscious mind to notice it doesn’t mean our subconscious isn’t picking it up and reacting to it. That’s the whole basis for subliminal advertising, in which a frame or two of an image, often sexual, is inserted into a commercial to create a subconscious association or emotional reaction that’s too quick for the conscious mind to perceive.
Unlike subliminal advertising, I’m not suggesting that John and Paul did this deliberately as some sort of mind control scheme. That would be ridiculous, and I hope this comparison doesn’t trigger some wacky new Beatles conspiracy theory because we have too many of those already.
But I am suggesting that it’s the sort of thing that happens naturally when two people who are deeply in erotic love with one another make music together, or give an interview together, or appear in a movie together — when they’re trying to focus on the audience but find their attention continually drawn back towards one another instead.
Of course, unless you had really good seats, these little sparks wouldn't be easily seen at a concert in the days before live video screens made it possible to see close-ups of the band even from the nosebleed section.
But that erotic energy was, of course, aural as much as visual — and the erotic connection between John and Paul would inevitably have been embedded in the music they wrote and performed together. The music itself contains the imprint of the mythological story, because music, and art in general, is how mythology is transmitted into the culture. The music contains the imprint of the lifeforce of the Grail. And even when the music wasn’t audible over the screams, the experience of being with thousands of other teenagers who were experiencing the same emotional and erotic connection to that music and to The Beatles would have been more than enough to offset not being able to see those little sparks of connection during the concert.
The teenagers would have come to the concert primed with that lifeforce energy from the music — and the effect of being in a crowd of people all having the same intense emotional experience would have been all that was required for that reaction to surface, even if no one could hear or see anything happening on the stage.
And even though John and George’s guitars would have been drowned out by the screams, that Beatles backbeat — Paul’s bass and Ringo’s drums — would be felt if not heard, pulsing through the crowd of teenagers. A musical heartbeat — the pulse of life — and also the rhythmic pulse of sexual passion and a callback to the raw sexual power of early rock-and-roll.
There’s more to say about why it was teenage girls who first responded to the lifeforce erotic energy The Beatles were putting into the world.
Teenagers with their newly surging hormones tend to be more sensitive to emotional subtext than adults are. And teenage girls tend to be especially sensitive to romantic subtext. They’re also less inhibited about responding to that subtext than adults or teenage boys — because in Western culture, teenage girls are really the only demographic permitted to show any extreme emotion other than anger. We allow — and even expect — teenage girls to get swept away by their romantic impulses.
We’ll talk more about that in the next episode, but for now, it’s no surprise that it was teenagers — again, mostly, though not all, girls — with their tumultuous hormones and their relative unguardedness and their heightened sensitivity to romance, who were the ones who allowed themselves to be swept away by the lifeforce erotic love — felt but not consciously understood — that The Beatles were calling up into being.
It’s also no surprise that teenage girls were the first to discover The Beatles — all the way back in 1960 at the birth of Beatlemania, which we talked about in a prior Rabbit Hole.5
And if those Beatlemania teenagers were screaming because they could feel that transgressive lifeforce love between John and Paul concealed beneath the safe “lovable mop top” facade — even if they didn’t know specifically what they were feeling or why — then the part of John’s breakup narrative about how the “mop top” era was all just a PR performance is both wrong and right, but in a very different way from how John’s comments have historically been interpreted — which might be part of why he sent such mixed signals about it.
Because what John is referencing isn't just deception, it’s subversion.
If Paul and John were in love and acted on that love — and I recognise we have a long way to go to show that it’s a credible possibility — then there was by necessity an element of performance — of deception — in what they presented to the public. There had to be, to conceal what — at that time in the US and Britain — would have been an illegal, deeply threatening to the culture, deeply transgressive love affair, the discovery of which would have ended their artistic careers and The Beatles as a band, and would almost certainly have brought the Love Revolution tumbling down before it even got started.
And this, of course, is where manager Brian Epstein’s “respectability makeover” comes into the story.
“The Beatles became one of the first stars of any medium to metamorphose fully and obviously from perky and aboveboard to mysterious and covert, from good-time boys to heralds of a new consciousness, from wholesome lads your mom could enjoy to dangerous subversives speaking liberation to like-minded deviants. They became, in short, the world’s first household psychedelics, avatars of something wilder and more revolutionary than anything pop culture had ever delivered before.”6
Brian’s “respectability makeover” of the Fabs remains unpopular with many Beatles fans — including me. Personally, I’d rather the Fabs in skin-tight, openly transgressive black leather any day.
But while the black leather Hamburg look is edgy and sexy to our modern eyes, outside of Hamburg and the rough clubs of Liverpool that they played in the pre-fame era, it would have scared the hell out of the mainstream audiences.
The black leather jacket is a powerful part of the iconography of early rock-and-roll and the ‘50s. When we think of the rock-and-roll ‘50s, most people immediately think of boys in black leather jackets, like in the Broadway musical and movie “Grease.”7
But this is an example of how mythology is more powerful than history in shaping our experience of the past, because the truth is that early rock-and-roll artists didn’t wear black leather — not even Elvis, until his ‘68 Comeback Special.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, the only people who wore leather jackets were ex-military who still had their jackets from the war (and those weren’t black) — with all the “might makes right” power thereof, motorcycle gangs who borrowed that “might makes right” power from the ex-military guys (and some of whom were ex-military themselves), and also parts of the queer subculture that subverted that ‘might makes right” power by adopting its iconography as part of subverting cultural concepts of masculinity.
The Beatles likely picked up their attraction to leather from a combination of all three subgroups. They would have encountered the biker gangs in Hollywood movies rather than in real life.7 But they would have encountered ex-military officers with their leather jackets in Liverpool and — in a very different way that we’ll talk about when we get there in the story — in Hamburg. And Hamburg is also, of course, where they would first have encountered the underground queer leather subculture of the Reeperbahn.
But maybe the strongest influence would have been from rocker Gene Vincent, who almost certainly also picked it up from those same subcultures.
Before The Beatles, Gene Vincent was the only early rock-and-roller who wore black leather. He also wore a leg brace and moved with a notable limp as the result of a childhood accident. The black leather and the leg brace, combined with his aggressive stage presence, made Vincent into another figure who was too much for his time.
It’s little wonder Gene Vincent caught the attention of a young John Lennon.8
But Gene Vincent, like Little Richard, struggled his entire career to get mainstream traction because, also like Little Richard, he was too transgressive and thus too threatening, if not to the teenagers, than to their parents — which makes Vincent a cautionary tale for what probably would have happened to the Fabs if they hadn’t switched out transgressiveness for subversion — trading their the black leather for designer suits.
And that’s why the respectability makeover is arguably Brian’s most important contribution as their manager.
Like Gene Vincent, The Beatles in black leather would have been far too openly threatening to play in Peoria. And a revolution isn’t a revolution unless it reaches beyond the revolutionaries to the mainstream culture.
When Brian blunted their Hamburg-inspired black leather sexuality — which by all accounts was extremely potent — he concealed the erotic lifeforce power of their music beneath a safe “lovable mop top” facade. And in doing so, he made The Beatles into a “trojan horse” that gave them the power to do what Elvis and Little Richard and Gene Vincent couldn't.
Brian’s respectability makeover was the subversive “trojan horse” that was a necessary part of our “recipe” for Beatlemania. It got The Beatles into the living rooms of mainstream culture — where every revolution has to reach eventually or it’s not a revolution, it’s just a bunch of people in berets sitting in a coffee shop — or on substack — talking about revolution.
To give you an idea of how all this played out during Beatlemania, I created a mashup of descriptions of The Beatles written by journalists in the UK and US when The Beatles first came to the attention of the major media outlets. Please note that this is NOT a single, cohesive quote, it’s a mashup, so don’t go quoting it. I just want to give you a sense of the zeitgeist, when the world first encountered Beatlemania—
“Put away the spray guns. We’re safe. The Beatles are harmless... a fine mass placebo... They look like shaggy Peter Pans...with funny but acceptable haircuts, who sang funky but were clean, adorable, and cheeky— but not too cheeky, just perfect for British idols... the very spirit of good, clean fun. They have none of that mean hardness about them. The image they portray is not rough, tough, leather jacket hoods. On the other hand, it is neat, crisp and above all—clean. They shower and shampoo quite often... Teenagers find the Beatles exciting and the parents don’t, or at least — shouldn’t — mind this. They’re not, after all, inciting people to go out and beat up old ladies... Mummies like the Beatles, too— that’s the extraordinary thing. They think they are rather sweet. They approve...The Beatles are whacky. They wear their hair like a mop — but it’s WASHED, it’s super clean. So is their fresh young act. They don’t have to rely on off-colour jokes about homos for fun.”9
Again, this is a mashup, not a single quote. So please do not go quoting it as a single quote because it isn’t one.
The point is that except for that last part, which is just ignorant, these quotes are silly, because of course they are. Calling the artists who wrote and recorded the music that sparked a cultural revolution and deposed “suffer now, rewards later” “a harmless mass placebo that the mummies approve of” redefines the very concept of “missed the whole fucking point.”
And that is actually a very, very good thing, though, silly as it is — because missing the point is, in fact, exactly the point.
The “lovable mop top” image was the deceptive-but-necessary facade that got the Fabs’ transgressive sexuality past the censors and the parents. But once The Beatles were pronounced “harmless,” teenagers were free to do their teenage thing. And the intensity of that erotic lifeforce love being generated between John and Paul through their music — and anytime they were seen together — was free to work its subversive, culture-changing magic unimpeded.
I mentioned earlier that one of the curious things about Beatlemania is that Brian’s respectability makeover made the reaction to them bigger rather than neutering them the way Colonel Parker did Elvis. The reason for that (beyond The Beatles not getting drafted10) is probably pretty simple. Unlike Colonel Parker, Brian wasn’t allowed to mess with the music.11
Those tailored suits and stage bows — discordant as they became later in the ‘60s — gave The Beatles the cultural leverage to bring transgressive, erotic, pushing-against-the-culture lifeforce love into the suburban living rooms of mainstream culture, without anyone realising what it was.12
But the trappings of respectability didn’t have any dampening effect whatsoever on the erotic lifeforce love energy The Beatles were putting into the world through their music — which exists completely independent of those external trappings, just as does the erotic connection between John and Paul that plays out in those sparks of interaction that we see when we slow down the video.
Woven into those early “mop top” love songs is the lifeforce love that a generation of teenagers hungered for, but that the older generation, numbed by and in denial of the death trauma, had given up on. In this way, the “mop top” Beatles were both transgressive and subversive. Transgressive in pushing against the “suffer now, rewards later” constraints of the culture, subversive in hiding in plain sight as the “lovable mop tops” you’d let your daughter date, even as they were busy shattering those constraints.
Again, I’m not offering this as proof that John and Paul were a romantic couple. But if Paul and John were in love and if they acted on that love, what must it have been like for them, singing the music created from that love out to the whole world, sharing glances and smiles across a microphone... I can’t hide... I can’t hide.... I can’t hide... and the world screaming back its love and approval, even if almost no one consciously knew what exactly they were responding to, or what it was that The Beatles may have been struggling to hide.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” written and sung in 1964 from a boy to a girl changes pop music. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” written and sung for and with another boy — changes the world, even if no one knows that’s what’s happening or why.
In the context of a love affair between John and Paul, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “In Spite of All the Danger” and “Please Please Me” and “If I Fell” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” and “You've Got To Hide Your Love Away,” and every other “silly love song” they wrote or recorded becomes an act of both transgressive and subversive defiance, of love over fear, and of a poignant longing for the freedom to love openly.
If Paul and John were in love and acted on that love, that longing to love openly is likely at least part of that extra something we hear in their music — because the freedom to love openly is arguably the main freedom missing in the restrictive, joyless world of “suffer now, rewards later.” Not just sexual and romantic freedom, but the freedom to live a life rooted in love and joy rather than suffering and obligation. The very freedoms what would, in just a few short years, be demanded by the Love Revolution and by virtually everyone born out of it — including all of us.
Again, I'm not suggesting any of this was done deliberately, either on the part of The Beatles or the teenagers. The teenagers were reacting on primal instinct, and The Beatles were just being The Beatles.
But I am suggesting that it’s at least possible that Brian did at least part of this consciously.
Brian was a closeted gay man in a culture in which same sex love was illegal and dangerous. Multiple friends and associates of his have written about the meticulous separation he kept between his professional life and his often reckless private life, and also about his obsession with protecting The Beatles from any hint of scandal.13 It might be hard to believe now, given we know for sure that Brian was gay, but during and even well after his lifetime, many of his close associates, including women he dated, swore he was completely straight.
I bring this up to point out that Brian knew how to cover up a same sex love affair, and he would have understood the importance of doing so in the cultural climate of the time.14 And he would almost certainly have known, perhaps on an intuitive level, at least the broad strokes of where the appeal of The Beatles’ sexuality lay — he responded to it himself, when he fell under their spell watching them in their undiluted leather-clad glory at the Cavern. I suspect his reaction wasn’t that different from the Cavern girls’ reaction — not for nothing did Brian occasionally confess he had the mentality of a teenage girl.15
If — and this is obviously an “if” on several levels — if Brian sensed or overtly knew what was between John and Paul, as it seems likely he would have, he may well have blunted their overt sexual appeal in part to conceal their affair, for their own protection as well as out of commercial need. And if Brian was going to make them “bigger than Elvis,” as he planned to, he’d need to lift them up out of the underground counterculture of Liverpool and Hamburg and into those mainstream suburban living rooms. And he’d be well aware that wouldn’t be possible if the two frontmen in the band were so obviously romantically involved that it was recognisable to the general public.
But with John and Paul’s transgressive love affair carefully hidden beneath the surface, the “lovable mop top” image made The Beatles safe for teenagers of all ages, ethnicities and social classes to scream over without fear of the mainstream Establishment shutting the whole thing down.16
All of this is to say that — if John and Paul were lovers — then sparking Beatlemania and the Love Revolution was a complex dance with the highest possible stakes. If the erotic love between them is too obvious, the revolution built on the lifeforce power of that love crashes down under the weight of cultural disapproval, which only adds to the death trauma instead of healing it. If the erotic love between them is too hidden, it’s not powerful enough to inspire anyone to revolution. But get it just right, and a new world is born.
We can get even more specific about how all this might have happened.
BRITISH MOP TOP VIRUS UPON US TODAY — AND MAY THE COPS PROTECT US?”17 — New York Daily News newspaper headline, February 7,1964, (the day The Beatles arrived in America )
One of the ways in which Beatlemania was visibly different from what had happened in the past when teenagers had screamed for their idols was that there was an undercurrent of intensity and violence to Beatlemania that there hadn’t been with Elvis.
That intensity and violence is evident in the film footage, where girls who are probably otherwise normal, relatively polite teenagers fight and claw their way through police barricades and engage in otherwise out-of-character behaviour — sometimes even criminal behaviour — to get close enough to touch The Beatles.18
I’ve not found a better description of the reality of Beatlemania than the one in Ken Womack’s book based on the diaries of Beatles’ roadie Mal Evans. So even though it’s a little lengthy, I’m going to read it to you. Because it’s important to understand how very much Beatlemania was not just a bigger version of what happened with Elvis or with anyone else teenagers have ever screamed for, then or now—
“The Beatles opened the concert with "Twist and Shout," and "it seemed as if the whole building rocked as the teenagers began to spill forward," Mal wrote. "I could see the crash barriers starting to give way under the weight of the onslaught, and, determined though they were, it looked as though the police lines must collapse."
“In advance of the second show, Mal had been especially concerned about the fifteen-foot-high wire-mesh fence behind the stage. Incredibly, the fans "just hoisted each other up and clambered over, oblivious to cuts, bruises, and broken limbs as they fell from the top. Paul was almost torn off the stage by a girl who grabbed him, while another nearly hauled Ringo from his drums." As the show devolved into out-and-out mayhem, [Mal and others] were now on stage, trying to protect the boys, keep the show going, and throwing off the stage intruders as they kept coming." And that's when...the San Francisco Police chief shouted to Mal, "If we don't get this lot under control, we'll have to stop the show."
“By this point, the stage and its immediate environs had taken on the look of a battle zone. "Unconscious teenagers were being dragged out of the audience," Mal wrote, "and we hauled them on to the stage for safety. Some were in a terrible state, bruised, battered, cut and unconscious. Their clothing was torn and their hair disheveled. We put them backstage, where the casualties mounted into the hundreds as the show went on. A chain of policemen organized to get them to the first aid center." At one critical juncture, a fan hurled a metal folding chair onstage. Eventually, the situation became simply too dangerous for the band to continue. "It's no good," [the police chief] told Brian, "You'll have to cut the show. Only one more song.”
“As the casualties mounted, Mal prepared to usher the Beatles to safety. "Sobbing girls lay slumped against the walls or huddled in the corners," he wrote, "and I caught a glimpse of Joan Baez trying to revive some of them with smelling salts. Every artist in the show was backstage helping out and trying to get the fainting youngsters back on their feet." When the concert mercifully ended, the Beatles dropped their instruments, ran from the stage, and climbed into an enclosed freight truck to make their escape.
“Afterward, "pandemonium broke out in the auditorium,” Mal wrote, "and I thought the whole place was going to collapse around us. But somehow, the police managed to keep the tide at bay, all the exit doors were thrown open, and people were hustled out. The scene behind them was of devastation, with seats overturned, people still trying to get onto the stage and more people fainting. "
“By the next morning, the Beatles and their entourage were winging their way back to London. But the perils of the band's second North American tour would not be so quickly forgotten. For his part, Brian Epstein would chalk up the chaos and violence to lax security. But it was more than that, Mal realized. He had long felt that there was a dark side to Beatlemania, that not all the attendant hysteria could be understood as the simple by-product of fandom.”19
This quote probably makes it clear why even people who aren’t mythologists often compare Beatlemania to the maenads of Greek mythology — the girls who were so overcome by the erotic music of the poet Orpheus that they lost control of their rational minds and attempted to tear him limb-from-limb in their frenzied need to touch him. It’s an accurate comparison because, of course, that’s exactly what’s happening with Beatlemania — another example of why understanding mythology is key to understanding this story.
But while comparisons are often made to the ecstatic violence of the maenads, those comparisons don’t tell us why the maenads or the Beatlemania teenagers acted in such an unexpectedly violent way, and especially sometimes directly towards the very people they loved so much. Most sociologists attribute it to overactive teenage hormones, which as we’ve talked about is true in an important way. But it still doesn’t answer the question of why they reacted to The Beatles with violence. Why would the maenads try to dismember Orpheus, if they were so enthralled by him?
If we factor in the lovers possibility, the answer isn’t all that complicated. Because the darkness isn't about any kind of malevolence. It's about intensity.
Teenage girls, because of those overactive hormones, are more sensitive to emotion, and when we have a heightened sensitivity to anything, we’re also by definition more easily overwhelmed when we experience it.
It’s another imperfect and too-small an analogy, but think of it like being allergic to a bee sting. If someone has an allergy to a bee sting, the same sting that feels like mild pain to someone who’s not allergic will cause a massive reaction for someone who is. The reaction is bigger because the person is more sensitive to it.
The same is true of sexual energy. The same surging hormones that make teenage girls acutely sensitive to romance and erotic energy also make it easy for them to become overwhelmed by that romance and erotic energy, if it’s too strong or there’s too much of it all at once.
The violence and the extreme behaviour that characterised Beatlemania is exactly the sort of thing that might happen when an immature psyche — meaning their mental and emotional state of being — is exposed to a massive infusion of erotic sexuality that’s both more mature and more transgressive that they’re able to handle.
This reaction would be even more intense if the source of that erotic transgressive lifeforce love is hidden. And even more so, if the source of it is deeply transgressive.
If John and Paul were indeed lovers, then there was an extreme contrast between the transgressive lifeforce erotic love that The Beatles were giving off as a result of that love affair, and the “harmless mop top” image that concealed it. The cognitive and emotional dissonance of the two existing simultaneously in a single experience — transgressive eroticism and harmless adorable “mop tops” — would be more than enough to cause extreme emotional dissonance for teenage girls whose psyches were not mature enough to handle it. And especially if they weren’t consciously expecting or prepared for it.
In a sense, you could say that the erotic love between John and Paul — supercharged by their mutual genius — overloaded the teenagers’ mental and emotional wiring, which would explain the violent and otherwise out-of-character behavior that we saw. It’s essentially a mental and emotional fuse blowing from too much power surging through it.
A dramatic and extreme example of this is the story of Candy, cultural critic George Melly’s three-year-old stepdaughter. Here’s how he tells it in his 1970 book Revolt Into Style —
“In 1964 my stepdaughter Candy, at three [years old], fell in love with the Beatles in a way that was painful to witness. Every time she heard ‘the Beakles’ on record or saw them on television, she would become rigid as though hypnotized. We could hear her having imaginary conversations with them all over the house too. Paul was her particular obsession and sometimes she threatened to ‘wee all over him.”
I’m not a licensed psychologist, but it’s not hard to recognize that “wee” is about all a three-year-old would understand about orgasm and sexual ecstasy.
Melly then goes on to talk about taking Candy — a three-year-old girl — to a Beatles concert in 1964—
“Candy didn’t [scream]... She leant forward in her seat and watched them expressionlessly while they were on. Then, as soon as the curtain fell, she burst into tears. She made us buy her a huge photograph of them which was for sale in the street. She made us pin it on the wall at the end of her bed and would sit up smiling like a child in Turn of the Screw, staring at it for hours at a time.”20
For me, the story of Candy is both beautiful and terrible.
It’s terrible because I think maybe we recognise now that it’s wildly inappropriate to take a three-year-old to a Beatles concert, even if we’re not quite sure why.
It’s beautiful because it’s an example of how powerful the love The Beatles were offering the world was, in its capacity to take even a three-year-old girl to a higher place. It seems likely that what three-year-old Candy’s psyche was desperately trying to have — but didn't possess the mental and physical maturity for yet — was an ecstatic, erotic spiritual awakening.
Maybe you’re starting to see why even their earliest music was far more mature and dangerous than it’s usually made out to be.
Melly, being an adult male and presumably less sensitive to emotion and romance, didn’t recognise the full strength of the lifeforce erotic energy being generated by The Beatles, much less what its source might be. Fooled by the trojan horse of their harmless ‘mop top’ image, he probably thought The Beatles were a kiddie band. He didn’t realise he was exposing his three-year-old step-daughter to a powerful and transgressive sexuality that her psyche — already in overload from just hearing The Beatles and seeing them on TV — was in no way mature enough to handle in real life, surrounded by thousands of shrieking, turned-on maenads.
Candy is an extreme example of course, given her age. But this effect wasn’t confined to three-year-olds. There are hundreds — maybe thousands — of examples of odd and extreme behaviour in the film footage of Beatlemania.
There’s one example in particular that stands out for me, just because of my personal connection to it.
On a research trip to Hamburg in March of 2023, I discovered an obscure DVD for sale at the Erotic Art Museum in the St. Pauli District just off the Reeperbahn. The DVD had a picture of the Fabs on the cover, but the description was in German, and my reading knowledge of German is limited, so I bought it without knowing what it contained, because there was no way I wasn't going to buy a mysterious Beatles DVD at the Erotic Art Museum in Hamburg.
The DVD turned out not to be anything erotically sensational, but it was well worth the purchase. It was a police training film made during The Beatles’ ‘66 tour stop in Hamburg that resulted in the German Polizei using tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd of teenagers that had gathered to try to get into the sold-out concert.
My German isn’t good enough to translate the voiceover,21 so I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a “do” or a “don’t” film. Either way, the film is unique in that it’s the only Beatles concert footage I’ve come across that focuses primarily and for an extended period of time on the audience, rather than on The Beatles themselves.
At the 12:42 marker in the film, a teenage girl abruptly gets up and — with a contorted expression on her face that looks like rage — hurls a projectile of some sort at the objects of her adoration, before sitting quietly back down again.
It’s a powerful moment, and it’s the sort of reaction one would expect from an immature psyche so overloaded with transgressive erotic energy that she doesn’t know what to do with it, and that she can’t seem to even vocalize — so instead it expresses itself in violence.
And finally, by far the most extreme example I’ve found so far of this darker side of Beatlemania behaviour comes from Apple Scruff22 Carol Bedford.
In her book, Bedford — an ordinary suburban teenager — writes about sneaking into a hotel where The Beatles were staying on tour. Here’s the rest of her story —
“First, I found a maid cleaning an empty room. The door was open so I entered the room and shut the door behind me. I informed her that I had a knife in my purse and would kill her if she did not tell me which floor the Beatles were going to stay on. The woman was absolutely terrified and I'm sure she would have told me if she knew. She said that she thought they would probably stay on one of the upper floors and that they would have a floor to themselves for security reasons. Thus satisfied, I let the poor woman go.”23
What makes this anecdote especially chilling is that in the book, other than her passing reference to the “poor woman,” Bedford expresses no remorse at all for her behaviour. She seems to treat the whole episode as a zany caper that proves just how devoted she was to the Fabs — which, to be fair, it does.24
Beatlemania is not the same as teenagers screaming for Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Or for that matter, for Madonna, Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift. Without a doubt, the erotic lifeforce love generated by The Beatles was real and powerful — and its effects on a generation of teenagers were uniquely intense and powerfully transformative.
“This isn’t show business. This is something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines. You don’t go on from this. You do this and then you finish.”25 — John Lennon in 1964
The legend of the Grail conveniently skips over what exactly happens when the Grail Knight pays attention to the Grail — and I say ‘conveniently’ because there's no way around that experience being one of sexual ecstasy. Having experienced a bit of it myself, what Beatlemania teenagers were experiencing feels very much like a religious conversion experience before the eroticism was stripped out of religious conversion experiences.
The swept-awayness of Beatlemania was in its time — and even today — dismissed as “hysteria” — which began life as the Latin word for a nervous disorder that affected only women and girls, and is today defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “overwhelming, uncontrollable emotion or agitation.” And of course, Beatlemania itself includes a similar word — “mania,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “madness characterised by uncontrolled, excited or aggressive behaviour,”26 and the Online Etymology Dictionary defines more poetically, using phrases like “inspired frenzy” and “mad passion.”27
The two ideas are intertwined, of course — passion and a loss of control. And certainly women — and especially teenage girls — are the only group in our culture permitted to express a Beatlemania-level of passion and loss of control. No one else is supposed to act like that, which is why Beatlemania was so inexplicable to the adults of the time — and even still today.
This prohibition on expressing out-of-control passion is, of course, rooted in the same fear as the prohibition on connecting directly to the lifeforce without going through the church — if we can experience the ecstasy of passion without an intermediary, we’re not so interested in “suffer now, rewards later.” And the powers-that-be need us to be interested in “suffer now, rewards later,” so we’ll behave ourselves like good cogs in the machine and keep working ourselves into nubs to make them rich.
And if millions of teenagers all over the world were simultaneously experiencing what was essentially a powerful sexual and spiritual awakening of erotic lifeforce love in connection with The Beatles, and if that mass awakening was in response to a deeply transgressive love affair between John and Paul that subversively pushed against the two thousand-year-old “suffer now, rewards later” of the culture, then the Love Revolution becomes virtually inevitable.
Any emotional experience injected into the culture in massive quantities doesn’t just enter the cultural zeitgeist, it becomes the cultural zeitgeist — the cultural “vibe.”
When masses of people in a culture are fearful, the culture becomes a fearful culture. But when masses of people in a culture become turned on by lifeforce love, the culture becomes what we call the Sixties — a mass explosion of joy and sex and creativity in the arts that a 1968 documentary on the Love Revolution called “the most startling artistic upheaval since the Renaissance.”28
“Suffer now, rewards later” didn’t stand a chance, against the first-ever global awakening of the healing erotic lifeforce love power of the Grail. And that’s a pretty good description of the Love Revolution — and not incidentally, a pretty good prescription for the healing our world urgently needs right now.
The term “girl power” gets applied to a lot of trivial, irrelevant BS, but Beatlemania was the real deal. Almost no one took those screaming, fainting, crying teenage girls seriously at the time, and almost no one takes them seriously even today.
But those teenage girls were in many ways wiser than anyone else in this whole story, including the Fabs themselves, because they sensed the world-changing lifeforce love at the heart of the music before anyone else did — as far back as 1960 — and opened themselves fully up to it without hesitation or inhibition. And it’s their attention — their noticing of the lifeforce love of the Grail — that drew everyone else’s attention, and transformed a teenage hunger for love and life in the shadow of death into a world-changing revolution.
Elvis couldn't sate that hunger, although he tried. And neither could Little Richard, although he tried, too. The Beatles — and only The Beatles — could.
The Beatles, with John and Paul’s genius and their erotic love for one another as the creative heart of the music, enfolded in the joyful brotherly love of George and Ringo, amplified by a generation of teenagers starving for lifeforce love, would have been exactly the mythological story the world needed in order to heal the death trauma of the Second World War. It was the new mythological story that early rock-and-roll couldn't give them — a story that had at its centre the courage to love passionately in the face of hatred and violence and fear, and to love in defiance of prejudice and intolerance and the grey repression of the “old ways.”
If John and Paul were lovers, they took the explosive sexuality of Elvis and the transgressive sexuality of Little Richard, combined it with their mutual love and romantic obsession, superharged it with their mutual genius, cloaked it in Brian Epstein's veil of respectability, and sent it special delivery to the post-war teenagers hungering for something to lift them out of their death trauma. And for the first time in two thousand years, the riverbed of Western civilization rearranged itself.
We could take all of this much further, and we will when we get to the rest of the story in the second part of the series. There is more to talk about relative to Beatlemania and how it might have affected John and Paul in particular as both the centre and the source of it. There’s also more to say about specifically how the trojan horse of respectability worked in detail. And most of all, there’s how the initial spark of erotic ecstasy of Beatlemania matured into the Love Revolution. And the way all of that happens is equally complex and, to me at least, equally beautiful.
But for now, we’ll leave it here.
As a reminder, this hasn’t actually been a Rabbit Hole — it’s the true last half of episode 1:3. The actual Rabbit Hole for the week deals with my research methodology, which is maybe of more interest to you now than it would have been when we started. And it’s in a sense an introduction to next week’s episode, in which we will deal with the objection that the lovers possibility isn’t credible, and that it’s just a fevered fantasy of a bunch of lovestruck females thinking with their.... Grails... instead of their heads.
Until next week.
Peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith
Rolling Stone, October 26, 1968.
Lennon & McCartney Interview for Flip Magazine, May 1966.
Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, Loving:A Photographic History of Men in Love, 5 Continents Editions, 2020.
Here are two interviews in which it’s especially easy to see these little sparks of connection between them—
And then there were those who were too afraid to be swept away—
“As well as the screaming girls, The Beatles attracted protestors. Canterbury University students held up signs that read, “Go home Beatles — leave our maidenhood alone.”
Philip Mathews, “Who were the eggmen?”, The Press: Christchurch and Canterbury News, June 15, 2024.
Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, 2002.
I’m indebted to Mick Farren’s book, The Black Leather Jacket (Plexus, 2007) for pointing out that early rock-and-rollers, including Elvis, didn’t wear black leather. And also for his analysis of Gene Vincent.
.At the beginning of the stripped down version of “(Just Like) Starting Over,” John dedicates the song to his rock-and-roll heroes—“This one’s for Gene and Elvis and Eddie. And Buddy.” Gene gets top billing, even over Elvis. We’ll have more to say about “(Just Like” Starting Over” in a future episode.
quotes taken from:
All About the Beatles, Edward De Blasio, McFadden-Bartell, 1964, various, (This might be the first book ever written about the Fabs, in 1964. It’s hastily-written, and so inaccurate that it would be funny if it didn’t show that the story was a mess from the very beginning, but there’s no reason to disbelieve the newspaper quotes, since he would have had those to hand at the time)
Love Me Do: The Beatles’ Progress, Michael Braun, Graymalkin Media (also written in 1964, also hastily written, but not, it seems, overall inaccurate.)
The Man Who Made the Beatles, Ray Coleman, McGraw Hill, 1989.
Compulsory National Service in Britain, which required all 18 year old boys without a medical waiver to do two years in the British military, ended in 1960, literally just before John would have had to do his two years (although it seems likely he’d have received a medical waiver for his eyesight, and it doesn’t seem at all likely he’d have stuck around for the full two years rather than going AWOL). But had Paul and George been conscripted, they both would almost certainly have served their time, and it’s beyond unlikely that The Beatles would have happened. Beatles synchronicity is a real thing. (Ringo might have received a medical waiver as well.)
[re: Jan 24, 1962 signing of the second contract with Brian/NEMS]:
“Paul, gazing in that disturbingly wide-eyed way, asked, ‘Will it make much difference to us? I mean, it won't make any difference to the way we play.”
“‘Course it won’t. I’m very pleased anyway,” I said without the slightest idea of the disappointments ahead before I could contemplate taking a penny in manager’s fees. I started with the Beatles as I have with all my artistes — running them at a loss until they earn enough to afford to lose a percentage.
We all sat and looked at one another for a moment or two, none of us really knowing what to say next. Then John broke the silence: “Right, then, Brian. Manage us, now. Where’s the contract? I’ll sign it.”
Brian Epstein (ghostwritten by Derek Taylor), A Cellarful of Noise, Souvenir Press, 1964.
it’s self-evidently true in looking at what actually transpired. Brian did briefly interfere when he made his poor song selections for the failed Decca audition — and that was, it seems, the end of that. There’s no further indication that Brian had any say at all in anything related to their music. In fact, quite the contrary.
Here’s Brian again in his 1964 book—
“Sometimes [John] has been abominably rude to me. I remember once attending a recording session at EMI studios in St. John’s Wood. The Beatles were on the studio floor and I was with their recording manager George Martin in the control room. The intercom was on and I remarked that there was some sort of flaw in Paul’s voice in the number, “Till There Was You.” John heard it and bellowed back, “We’ll make the record. You just go on counting your percentages.” And he meant it.” Brian Epstein, A Cellarful of Noise, Souvenir Press, 1964.
By the way, here’s the version of the story from a more objective and probably more accurate point of view, NEMS employee Tony Bramwell, who was in the studio when the incident happened—
“Poor Brian was constantly overacting and reacting, as when he made a fool of himself one night by turning up at Abbey Road with a boyfriend, trying to show off a bit to demonstrate to the boy how he exerted influence over the Beatles and knew his way around the studio. He flipped the intercom switch and told John that the vocals he’d just done weren’t “quite right.” Whether he was trying to make a joke, or being flippant, I’ll never know. Everybody, including me, winced and cringed and waited for the inevitable, which came swiftly. John just looked up at him without smiling and said, “You take care of the money, Brian, and we’ll take care of the music.”
Tony Bramwell, Magical Mystery Tours,St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
Someday maybe I’ll write about another artist who successfully trojan-horsed subversive values into mainstream living rooms under the guise of harmless respectability, albeit in a very different and far less mythologically world-changing way. As one of the original celebrity activists alongside George Harrison and Harry Chapin, John Denver managed to keep peace, social justice and environmental protection in the public consciousness throughout the ‘70s by leveraging his mainstream appeal to slip countercultural messages into his music.
“The care with which Epstein was forced to conceal details of his sex life made him paranoid about press stories involving the Beatles’ lovers and wives. He felt that not only their one-night stands, but also their fully-fledged romantic affairs had to be hidden from the media. He impressed this on all the singers and bands he signed up, although the same rule applied a hundred times over in the case of the Beatles.”
Tony Barrow, John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me, Andre Deutsch Pub, 2005.
Larry Stanton, one of Brian’s romantic partners, also talks a lot about Brian’s obsessive attempts to keep his management of The Beatles separate from his chaotic personal life, in his tell-all, Hide Your Love Away: An Intimate Story of Brian Epstein (TrineDay Star, 2020).
When we re-tell the story in the second part of the series, we’ll talk about how the anecdotes about the “Satyricon” backstage orgies might have been generated by Brian as cover for the truer story — because despite a thorough search, I’ve found no evidence to support those alleged “shagfests” having actually happened, and a lot of evidence to suggest they didn’t.
There’s good research to suggest that a fair amount of the story as it’s currently told is distorted as much by Brian’s PR spin that’s taken on a life of its own as by John’s breakup narrative.
I’m definitely not the only person who’s noticed this. Here’s a quote from a 2021 Datalounge thread discussing the lovers possibility— “So much has been written about them that it's almost like that PR sanctioned storyline has been burned into peoples' brains.”
We’ll try to untangle it as best we can when we re-tell the story through the frame of the lovers possibility in the second part of this series.
You know that situation when you’re in the midst of researching something and there’s a quote you come across so often that every time you read it, you think, “Oh, I don’t need to clip that one right now, that’s easy to find.” Well, Brian’s “mentality of a teenage girl” is such a quote. I’ve seen this quote from Brian so many times, and now that I need it, it’s gone poof. If you happen to have it, please send it along.
Meanwhile, there’s this—
“[Brian] told me that just once he allowed himself to go and stand at the back with all the girls in a concert in America. I think it was one of the stadiums where there were probably 25,000, 30,000 people, and he went into the crowd of girls and he just screamed like one of the girls, which he said is what he'd always wanted to do from the first minute he'd ever seen them. He had spent his whole life being restrained and wearing suits and suddenly he just screamed and became the mad fan he wanted to be.” Simon Napier-Bell quoted in In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story, Debbie Geller, St. Martin’s Press: 2000.
And more than that, in a delicious twist of irony, far from shutting it down, the Establishment itself got swept up in it, and decorated The Beatles (though sadly not Brian) with MBEs in thanks for rearranging the old world beneath their well-heeled Cuban boots. It might be the first time the losers in a revolution gave medals of appreciation to the victors.
All About the Beatles, Edward De Blasio, McFadden-Bartell,1964.
That need to get close to the source of the lifeforce is also likely the reason for the stories about the cripples and terminally ill people who believed that a touch from The Beatles would heal their illness.
When it comes to mythology, the line between literal and metaphorical is razor thin and often nonexistent.
The belief that an idol can heal with a touch isn’t unique to Beatlemania, although the scale of it might have been. It’s rooted in the belief that the touch of royalty has the power to heal because royalty is anointed by God — and mythologically speaking, for “God,” read the lifeforce, the spark of creation that animates all life. And if the Beatles were the conduit for that lifeforce, then it makes sense that those who were suffering from terminal and debilitating diseases would believe the touch of a Fab would heal them, in a literal enactment of the collective psychological healing of the death trauma that was taking place with Beatlemania.
Ken Womack, Living the Beatles Legend, Day Street Books, 2024.
NOTE: This quote was minimally edited just to remove a few distracting details — the name of the police chief and the names of the people who were protecting the stage. It’s too long to put the original version in a footnote just for a few names.. But as always, if you’re going to quote it for anything, please go to the original source.
George Melly, Revolt Into Style, Allen Lane Pub., 1970.
full quote: “In 1964 my stepdaughter Candy, at three, fell in love with the Beatles in a way that was painful to witness. Every time she heard ‘the Beakles’ on record or saw them on television, she would become rigid as though hypnotized. We could hear her having imaginary conversations with them all over the house too. Paul was her particular obsession and sometimes she threatened to ‘wee all over him.
[RE: taking Candy to a Beatles concert in Dec 64] “Candy didn’t [scream] though. She leant forward in her seat and watched them expressionlessly while they were on. Then, as soon as the curtain fell, she burst into tears. She made us buy her a huge photograph of them which was for sale in the street. She made us pin it on the wall at the end of her bed and would sit up smiling like a child in Turn of the Screw, staring at it for hours at a time.”
If anyone would like to take a try at a translation, I’d be very appreciative. The YouTube auto captions aren’t accurate enough for research purposes.
The Apple Scruffs were a group of girls and queer boys who stood vigil outside the Beatles’ houses and the studio at Abbey Road. While they occasionally had a casual relationship with the concept of personal property if it belonged to the Fabs and they wanted it for themselves, I’ve found no other incidents of this kind of behaviour. This example is not representative of the Scruffs, who are one of the most beautiful parts of this story. We’ll talk about them some time in the future — becasue they, too, are deeply mythological as the witnesses to the miracle.
Carol Bedford, Waiting for the Beatles: An Apple Scruff's Story, Blandford Press, 1984.
It’s worth mentioning here that it’s possible that part of this extreme behaviour might also relate to what the Beatlemania teenagers were pushing against in their effort to get close to The Beatles.
Transgressive, remember, means going against the culture. And in this case, the culture in question was the old “suffer now, rewards later” and “might makes right” story. A lot of the violence of Beatlemania was directed towards authority figures, because it was authority figures who were keeping them from The Beatles in the form of police, security guards, hotel desk clerks, etc.
If the Beatlemania teenagers were experiencing a surge of transgressive lifeforce energy, that could easily translate into a willingness to push back against the powers-that-be that are keeping them from literally touching the source of that lifeforce energy.
This very literally, makes storming of police barricades during concerts an act of violent resistance against the old order, aka an act of revolution. It’s an early iteration of the clashes between police and students in the war protests at the end of the Love Revolution. The impulse and intention is the same, although the student demonstrators were generally older and not the same kids as the Beatlemania teenagers.
quoted in Love Me Do! The Beatles' Progress, quoted in Love Me Do! The Beatles' Progress, Michael Braun, 1995, Michael Braun, Graymalkin Media, 1964.
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=mania retrieved 2-14-25
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=mania retrieved 2-14-25
All My Loving, television documentary, 1968. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x85he4l
