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Men Masculinity and The Beatles Martin King Digital
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Author(s): Martin King
ISBN(s): 9781409422433, 1409422437
Edition: New edition
File Details: PDF, 1.96 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
Men, Masculinity and the Beatles
Martin King
Men, Masculinity and the Beatles
This page has been left blank intentionally
Men, Masculinity and the Beatles
Martin King
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
© Martin King 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Martin King has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England
www.ashgate.com
5 It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night and I’ve Been Working Like a Dog 87
References 161
Bibliography I: Film, TV, Radio 177
Bibliography II: Songs 181
Bibliography III: LPs 191
Index 193
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Figures
1.1 ‘Paul makes the Front Page’ was the original caption to
this picture from The Daily Mirror, November 1963.
John and Paul appear enthusiastic about Beatlemania
and their national fame. 4
2.1 When Lennon met Cook. Lennon, sporting his ‘granny glasses’
for the first time, filming an episode of Not Only but Also on
Carnaby Street, November 1966. 38
6.1 Two days after returning from the Bahamas, the Beatles and
significant others land in Austria for further filming of the
Technicolor international travelogue that is Help! 112
7.1 Roll up for the Mystery Tour. Paul pictured about to board
the coach at the start of filming, 11 September 1967. 124
The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music
alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic
outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international
ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution
of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context,
reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the
status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has
arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new
genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes
authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of
free, individual expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in
the field. Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and
meanings in cultural context, and draw upon methodologies and theories developed
in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology.
The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco,
whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary
or traditional.
Thanks to Heidi Bishop and Laura Macy at Ashgate Publishing, Professor Derek
Scott at Leeds University, Dr Bill Campbell and Sandra Coughlan at Manchester
Metropolitan University, Professor Jeff Hearn and Dr Viv Burr at the University
of Huddersfield, Mel Knight at Mirrorpix and Daisy King for technical support.
I am also indebted to Andrew Newbury for tea, pub sandwiches and the many
hours spent viewing and discussing the material contained in this book on the now
legendary Beatles Anthology days.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Prologue
In the summer of 2001 I was on a holiday in Greece when I got a phone call to
say that my mother had died. I decided to come back alone and, after the flight
home the following morning, in setting out for the journey across the Pennines to
my father’s house, sick of the silence of the past 24 hours, I pondered on what I
should listen to on the journey. I chose the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night album, it’s
jangling, upbeat optimism redolent of a time when we were all very much alive
and living in modern jet-age Britain, at the centre of the universe (or so it seemed to
me). The Beatles, it seems, have provided a soundtrack to my whole life, through
the best of times and worst of times (as Dickens once said, although, obviously, not
about the Beatles). Along with many other people (as I have discovered over the
course of researching this book), the Beatles represented something for me about
change, about what and how I wanted to be (even at the age of six – the height
of Beatlemania). There was something about the possibilities that they offered,
in some sort of abstract way, around what growing up in the 1960s might lead to.
Yes, I loved the music. I still only have to the hear the opening bars of I Want to
Hold Your Hand and I am, once again, lying on the floor of the living room in 1964
listening to our new Stereosound record player (with detachable speakers for full
stereo effect!), high on life and full of optimism. And, as the music developed and
things got weird and parents became disapproving of the ‘druggy’ Beatles, I was
intrigued and just went with it. But it was the ‘something else’ that also drew me in –
their wit, the way they looked and dressed, their irreverent attitude and potential
for subversion, their very Beatle-ness was what really appealed. Obviously these
things were not fully articulated within my six-year-old world view but, like me,
they were new and now; they were on the up and we were all going places.
I was born in 1958, the beginning of Marwick’s (1998) ‘long sixties’, and was
16 when they ended in 1974, making me, most definitely, a child of the ’60s and
so, in retrospect, there seems to be some logic, from a personal perspective, of the
choice of the 1960s, within that period, as an area in which to study social change
and the relationship between the past, the present and the future. This is, then, a
book rooted in a personal interest in identity, masculinity and the historical setting
in which these things come to be considered.
My parents sneaked across the border from working class to middle class, like
many others, in the era of Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ Britain (Sandbrook,
2005), and 1960 saw us relocate from York to a village in Lincolnshire, my
father having taken a sales job with the English Electric Company, travelling
around in his company Ford Anglia, selling the new white goods representative
of the consumerist Macmillan era. Here we saw out Marwick’s (1998) ‘High
xiv MEN, MASCULINITY AND THE BEATLES
Sixties’, my own experience being that, despite the contested nature of the
swinging sixties, discussed later in the book, it definitely did all seem to happen
in Lincolnshire. What has been particularly interesting in reading extensively
around this material is the sense it makes, in many ways, of my own personal
experiences, a recognition of things that happened in the 1960s or the 1980s that
have been set in a theoretical context by various authors. For example, it always
seemed to me that the sixties ended in 1968, when we moved back to Yorkshire,
to the type of housing estate later immortalised in Whatever Happened to the
Likely Lads and other suburban sitcoms of the 1970s. Shortly afterwards, my
paternal grandmother, a woman who despite her 1940s-ness had shared in my
early 1960s’ Beatle obsession, religiously cutting out Beatles stories from the
Daily Express and saving them for my next visit, died. In retrospect I now see
this, for me, as a key event marking the end of Marwick’s (1998) ‘High Sixties’,
a view shared by journalist/novelist Hunter S. Thompson who stated that the
period ‘when almost anything seemed possible … peaked on March 31, 1968’
(Thompson, 1972: 134). My tenth birthday, as it happens! This period of the
past has, I guess, been ever present for me, ever since, through the cultural texts,
style, design and optimism of the period, much of which (and the contested
PROLOGUE xv
of the 1960s], and looking at what changed in terms of men’s appearance but also
the settings/situations and relationships in which they were portrayed. This initial
idea, then, formed the basis of what was to become the proposal for this book,
containing notions of the importance of texts and representation and the 1960s as
an important era of social change for men.
In bringing this book together I have drawn on a variety of texts, both academic
and non-academic, from across a variety of areas. There is a multi-disciplinarity
about it that, I think, reflects my own research interests and approaches. The
writing of it has also drawn me back to some of the things I first discovered as an
undergraduate. The works of Stuart Hall and others at the Birmingham School,
and the work of the Mass Observation Movement, chronicling people’s war-time
experiences as an ongoing project to document social history and social change as
well as drawing in artists, poets, film-makers and other men and women of ideas,
have been influential in the production of this book. Marshall McLuhan’s (1964)
left-field ramblings, Devin McKinney’s (2003) dark perspectives and the Gonzo
journalism of Hunter S. Thompson (1972) have all played a significant part in my
attempts to make creative that which must be contained by subheadings.
Chapter 1
Why the Beatles? A Rationale
Introduction
Why the Beatles? For many they are an aspect of British cultural history whose
superiority and peerlessness needs no debate: Macdonald (1994: 1), for example,
states: ‘[a]greement on them is all but universal: they were far and away the best
ever pop group and their music enriched the life of millions’, while Evans (1984:
7) sees them as ‘the most important single element in British popular culture in
the post war years’. The main aim of this introductory chapter is not to debate the
‘best ever’ discourse, although this is part of their cultural significance, but rather
to explore some of the discourses, both academic and popular, that surround the
Beatles as a cultural phenomenon and, therefore, to provide a rationale for the use
of the Beatles as a case study through which to reflect on changing representations
of men and masculinities in the 1960s, the period in which they were active as a
working group.
As the most photographed, talked-about men of the decade they provide, it will
be argued, a suitable case study in the study of men and masculinity. This chapter
will establish their global popularity and cultural significance in this period (and
beyond),1 and unpick some of the claims made by Inglis (2000a) and others that
1
Inglis (2000a: xv) provides an authoritative summing up of their career:
On one level the story of the Beatles is deceptively easy to relate, not least because it
has been retold, reproduced and reinvented on so many occasions. John Lennon met
Paul McCartney in Woolton 6th July 1957, and shortly afterwards invited him to join
his group (then known as The Quarrymen). In 1958 McCartney introduced Lennon to
George Harrison: these three remained the nucleus of the group amid numerous variations
in personnel (of which the most important was Stuart Sutcliffe’s membership from January
1960 to June 1961), changes of name (Johnny and the Moondogs, The Silver Beatles, The
Beatles), and a performing history largely confined to Merseyside (with occasional spells
in Hamburg) for the next five years. At the beginning of 1962 they agreed to place their
management in the hands of Brian Epstein, a local businessman. In August of that year,
several weeks after the group had accepted a provisional recording contact with E.M.I.’s
Parlophone label, drummer Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr. In October 1962, Love
Me Do, their first official single, was released and was a minor chart entry; and in February
1963, Please Please Me became their first British Number One. In January 1964, I Want to
Hold Your Hand was their first US Number One, and for the rest of the decade the Beatles
dominated popular music around the world. They toured extensively until August 1966,
when they elected to abandon live performances in favour of studio work. Epstein died in
August 1967, and in 1968 the Beatles established their own management and recording
company, named Apple. In April 1970, after increasing involvement in individual projects,
the group effectively disbanded.
2 MEN, MASCULINITY AND THE BEATLES
the Beatles were an historical event, cultural phenomenon, musical innovators and
role models for young people.
Fifty years after their first single, Love Me Do, rose to number 17 in the UK charts
in 1962, the Beatles remain as famous as ever, and the words of press officer Derek
Taylor announcing their break-up in 1970 still seem to ring true: ‘The Beatles are
not a pop group, they are an abstraction, a repository for many things’ (Sandbrook,
2006: 724). With record sales topping half a billion (including 17 UK and 20
US number ones), their iconic images continue to fill TV screens whenever the
1960s are mentioned: frozen in time stepping down from their plane at JFK in
1964, cuddly mop-tops surrounded by screaming fans, cool and groovy in their
mid-sixties roll-neck and shades incarnation, resplendent and moustachioed in Sgt
Pepper costumes, hirsute on the Apple rooftop in 1969. Googling the Beatles in
2011 gives you 23,200,200 hits (Jesus gets 206,200,000, more of which later).
Two are dead and two are living, but their fame as the Beatles seems undimmed.
The phenomenal, and surprising, amount of newspaper coverage generated
by Linda McCartney’s death in 1998; George Harrison’s death in 2001; Paul
McCartney’s marriage to Heather Mills, the resultant fatherhood and messy high-
profile divorce; the release of a remixed version of 1970 album Let It Be in 2003;
wranglings over the Apple name and access to downloads and the eventual high-
profile ad campaigns by Apple (Inc.) at the end of 2010 mean that they continue to
make front page news in the early part of the twenty-first century. Their existence
as a recording group only lasted for an eight-year period, yet the texts that remain
to document the global phenomenon that was the Beatles, including books and
articles, both popular and academic, music, films, magazines and the ‘official’
history now available in the Beatles Anthology book (The Beatles, 2000) and
accompanying DVD (The Beatles, 2003), provide evidence of an extraordinary
male cultural phenomenon of the 1960s or, indeed, of the twentieth century.
Their rise to global popularity and their high visibility worldwide around
1963/4 is discussed later in this chapter. Their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Show in the US in 1964, seen by 73 million Americans, and their occupation of
the top five slots in the US Billboard Chart in the same period are two key events
in establishing their global profile (Kot, 2006). Their first US tour can also be
seen as a key event in the establishing of British youth culture as a global cultural
force. The mid 1990s saw the release of the TV Anthology documentary and
accompanying CDs. In November 1995 they were the biggest selling act in the
US, with the first two Anthology CDs selling 24.6 million copies, accompanied by
back catalogue sales of 6 million. Over 50 per cent of buyers were teenagers or
in their twenties. Similarly with the release of the #1 album (a collection of UK/
WHY THE BEATLES? A RATIONALE 3
US number one hits) in 2000. As the new millennium began, they were top of the
Billboard US Chart with 30 million sales worldwide; again, the biggest purchasing
group was in the 16–24 age band, with people over 40 only accounting for 25 per
cent of sales (Skinner-Sawyers, 2006).
The demographics provide an interesting insight into the continued popularity
of the music. They were and are an extremely popular musical phenomenon. But
what else were, and are, the Beatles? As early as 1964 they had already become,
in the modern parlance, a ‘brand’, instantly recognisable, expanding from just
being a pop group by branching out into films, TV appearances on comedy shows
(with Morecambe and Wise on Two of a Kind, for example) and ghost-written
newspaper columns. There is, however, a dearth of academic work on the Beatles,
despite an increasing acceptance of their historical, sociological, cultural and
musical significance by the popular media and ‘serious’ music journals.
It is the intention within this book to address this issue, with particular reference
to the Beatles as men and their role as a focus for changing representations of
masculinities. Ideas around the ways in which the Beatles ‘helped feminize the
culture’ (Stark, 2005: 2) and their role as ‘one of the 20th century’s major symbols
of cultural transformation’ (Stark, 2005: 2) will be examined through an exploration
and analysis of their four live-action films. However, in order to understand how
they came to be viewed as culturally significant, it is first necessary to examine the
phenomenon of Beatlemania and the way in which their eventual emergence as
‘men of ideas’ (Inglis, 2000b: 1) is grounded in their traditional male pop-star-ness.
Beatlemania
Hysterical scenes had surrounded male stars before the Beatles (Valentino in the
1920s, Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, and Elvis and Johnny Ray in the 1950s) and has
done subsequently (the Monkees in the late 1960s, the Osmonds and the Bay City
Rollers in the 1970s, Take That and Boyzone in the 1990s, One Direction more
recently). However, Beatlemania remains the yardstick, an alliance between the
media, fans and a cultural phenomenon unlike any other. ‘In the beginning there
was the scream’ states Stark (2005: 10), and he goes on to claim that the screams
that had greeted Frank and Elvis seemed to increase fourfold for the Beatles, while
Marshall (2000) sees the beginnings of Beatlemania as the shaping of modern
celebrity, a presentation of self for public consumption that went beyond what had
gone before.
In 1963, the Beatles had four number one singles, two number one albums, a
13-week BBC radio series (Pop Goes The Beatles) and had toured the UK four
times. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were the right men in the right place
at the right time given the social changes of the early 1960s (Sandbrook, 2006),
particularly the emerging discourse of the new classes society in which intellectual
activity would not be confined to one particular grouping (Mannheim, 1960).
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