Band on the run
Fi l ip inos love Easter eggs , eve n this close to Christmas, and Ron Howard’s documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The
Touring Years, contains a real dandy: stick around after the closing credits, just as you would for any Marvel franchise installment, and be rewarded with 25 minutes of restored footage from the Beatles’ 56,000-capacity Shea Stadium concert of 1965. The sound quality is great, the sequencing and cutaways preserve the atmosphere of high Beatlemania, and you even get to see John Lennon playing a Hammond organ solo with his elbow.
Beatlemania never actually went away, it seems. Apple Corp. continues to present the Fab Four’s legacy in different formats, well into the 21st century, well past the point when it should matter. So what do the Beatles still have to tell us half a century after their last tour of the world’s stages? There’s still a little gristle left on the bone in Howard’s documentary, which explores the band’s maniacal touring days. (Thanks to Solar Entertainment Corp. for bringing it to Manila.)
Indeed, why should new audiences care about a band that broke up 46 years ago? The Beatles magic reveals itself once again, as always, slowly but surely. The testimonies here range from people like Whoopi Goldberg, who explains how she became an instant Beatle fan, despite the apparent race gap: “The Beatles were colorless,” she explains. “I felt I could like them, and be included and accepted.” No wonder her mother found a way to score two Beatle tickets to Shea Stadium for herself and her gaga daughter, despite their tight budget in 1965 (mind you: tickets cost $4.50 back then).
We get the usual tales — recited by John and George themselves, through old interviews — of how the band got together, how John and Paul bonded over songwriting, how they sought the pinnacle of success (a number one hit in the US), and perhaps came to regret it all when the concert grind started to wear them down. As the hordes of hysterical teenagers swell, the four musicians are increasingly in danger of being crushed onstage by stampedes of thousands.
Bonding was the key to the Beatles’ strength inside a fishbowl existence that turned global as they conquered country after country onstage. It was manager Brian Epstein who suggested trading their leather jackets for a common identity: “The Beatle suits made us one person,” recalls Paul. “We were a four-headed monster,” and that group identity meant they could handle press cons and criticism as a well-oiled unit. “I don’t know how Elvis (Presley) handled it all by myself,” George marvels. “At least we had each other; he had no one to talk to.”
We expect to hear tales of shabby treatment in Manila (the infamous moment when Beatlemania met Marcosmania), but the Beatles’ brief tour of this country only merits a short mention.
Worse is the flap over the Beatles’ “arty” album cover for “Yesterday and Today” shot by Robert Whitaker: outtakes of the moptops posing with dismembered dolls, butcher smocks and fresh meat drive home the controversy. The Beatles, inevitably, were growing up, speaking their minds, and the press started to turn on them.
Fans, too, were perplexed. Elvis Costello recalls being initially turned off by the folkie sounds of “Rubber Soul.” “But after a week of listening to it,” he says, “I couldn’t imagine living without it.”
This introspective growth is juxtaposed with the still-remarkable sight of young female fans screaming their heads off at concerts, fainting, swooning and straightup losing their damn minds over the Fab Four. Can any band or performer command that kind of spontaneous adoration these days? (Beliebers and 1D fans need not apply.) In the wake of JFK’s assassination, the ongoing Cold War, and Civil Rights battles in America, a weary world took to the Beatles like today’s youth take to cat videos and memes. They couldn’t get enough. (Talking head Malcolm Gladwell puts it down to the cultural ascendance of a large, still-young Baby Boomer generation.)
It’s director Michael Curtis who gets the best bead on our continuing fascination with John, Paul, George and Ringo: “The Beatles were the dream of having your friends for the rest of your life.” That’s pretty much been our relationship with the Beatles forever, whether you grew up with them, inherited them secondhand from a sibling’s record collection, or discovered their gifts for the first time as a millennial. They seemed like our mates. Some grew up with the Beatles, while some watched them grow up and grow apart, fascinated by the glue that still kept them together in our minds. On hand for commentary are McCartney and Starr, the latter looking ever youthful despite being the oldest surviving Beatle.
There’s Ringo, pondering after all these years the absurdity of playing a 56,000-capacity stadium with their amps miked straight into the park’s crude PA system. “We sounded like (affecting tinny PA system): ‘On deck, batting .300, Willy Wonka,’ or whatever.” Yet the proof’s in the pudding: years of straight touring made them a blistering unit, racing through their hits in a typical 30-minute show, retaining the beat and even their harmonies without the aid of onstage monitors. “We couldn’t hear a bloody thing onstage,” recalls McCartney. How could you, with 50,000 young voices screaming at you?
As usual it takes McCartney to offer a more sentimental overview: the story of the Beatles was a story of faith. “We had to have faith in each other” to make the whole thing work. That’s how they survived the goldfish bowl of fame and mania.
The film closes with nicely restored footage of the impromptu Saville Row concert atop Apple headquarters, which caused snarled traffic and whiplash for blocks around. Oh, to have been there in person…
*** But wait! The Beatles: Eight
Days A Week does offer you a sly fly-on-the-wall tease of what it was like to be at an actual Beatles concert. The aforementioned Easter Egg should keep you glued to your seat after the final credits roll, as it features eight or nine complete songs in sequence in beautifully restored footage. (The image is so clear, you can even see Lennon’s razor burn and ponder why they’re all wearing identical sheriff badges on their suit coats.) Watch manic fans get escorted off the baseball field by police; watch Lennon jabber between songs in pidgin-Italian/Japanese; relive again why these four men were such consummate entertainers in an age when Auto-Tune, MTV and Spotify were but distant gleams in some music programmer’s eye. Since it’s an uninterrupted concert (we’ve seen it in bits and pieces, but never all the way through, until now), director Howard wisely felt it would distract from his doc’s thesis if inserted somewhere in the middle; instead he tacked it on after the final note, like the false ending on “Abbey Road” or
Hello Goodbye. Whatever the reason, it’s thoroughly enjoyable to — once again — sit back and enjoy the Beatles doing it live.