It Was Sixty Years Ago Today: John Lennon and the Beatles in Two New Documentaries

It's a fab, fab, fab, fab world.

Beatles ‘64

As the new documentary Beatles ‘64 is eager to lead with, the arrival of the Beatles in America in February of 1964, was the second seismic event to rock the nation during a turbulent calendar-year stretch. The first, roughly six months earlier, was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The second, thankfully, was fab. In the film by director David Tedeschi and produced by Martin Scorsese, this grim dichotomy is presented as indescribable tragedy followed by a most-unexpected corrective. No one single entity could heal the psychic wound of the young president’s loss, but if anything could, it would be four tousle-headed geniuses from Liverpool who happened to make the most exhilarating music many people have ever heard. Beatlemania was upon us.

So it goes throughout an 86-minute recital of famous fans’ initial reactions to the Beatles’ first American tour, abetted by priceless footage by the Maysles Brothers, who followed along with a crew during this auspicious occasion. Having internalized the lore of the Beatles’ legendary 1964 press appearances in the States — suave as the Rat Pack, funny as the Marx Brothers — it is astonishing to watch them respond to some of this news coverage in real time. They get defensive and feel misquoted. They bleed like anyone else. Sounding bewildered, John Lennon reports back to the BBC on a morning radio program, his first impressions of Americans: “They’re wild. They’re all wild!” It’s unclear if he is exhilarated or terrified.

Some of the footage from Beatles ‘64 is repurposed, but a great deal of it is new to me, a moderate obsessive. A vintage back-and-forth between the Fab Four and the endlessly influential disc jockey Murray the K feels a bit like watching recently uncovered images of Lancelot pulling the sword from the stone. We speak often about our current world as the most surveilled in history — cameras to the right, cameras to the left, your phone is a camera, your lamp is a camera, etc. Watching Beatles ‘64 you realize how much they were a test case for consequences of global fame on a once unforeseeable scale. They are, it seems, always being watched. Beatlemania’s appetites were sufficiently rapacious to exhaust even these most ingenious of raconteurs. At times they turn their gaze away, nervous and bothered. They call their management and seethe as to whether all of this was absolutely necessary. And then, under scrutiny that might be described as borderline in violation of Hague statutes, they find a way to shine, and shine again. What’s most interesting about Beatles ‘64 is how their messianic-post-Kennedy-assassination voyage became the kind of immersive sink-or-swim media training that the amphetamine-driven all-night bowery club gigs of the early-’60s in Hamburg once provided for their music.

Daytime Revolution

Eight years later, the band had broken-up and drifted apart, but the fishbowl-like effects of stardom never abated. Having become a figure of incalculable cultural currency, a new documentary explores how John Lennon, for one, sought to redistribute his influence in a touchingly open-hearted fashion. America in 1972, like today, was at a fraught and polarizing crossroads. The last, pointless burning embers of Vietnam threatened to engulf the whole nation in disarray. Civil unrest was rampant, verging on anarchic. As if taxonomizing the national mood, Nixon, descending deeper into his full paranoid stage, had compiled an "enemies list.” Half of the country was on it. The state of the union was unsettled.

And yet the snapshot provided by Erik Nelson's wonderful new documentary Daytime Revolution is of a country still broad enough in its curiosity and openness that Yoko Ono and John Lennon could credibly stage a week long extravaganza of outsider art and utopian concepts on a wildly popular talk show, without it immediately being force fed into the all consuming, zero sum distraction machine that is the contemporary culture wars.

For five straight days in 1972 that’s exactly what happened as The Mike Douglas Show briefly became The Ballad of John and Yoko. To watch it now is to witness something incredibly uncynical in terms of presentation and reception. Yoko and John's inspiration that if more people — to be clear they mean the people in the flyover states — were exposed to home truths about racism, sexism and basic humanity that they might immediately be turned around feels both exhilarating and touchingly quaint. But the broadcast’s massive ratings suggest that even as a nation in crisis, American's five decades ago were perhaps a more flexible, less ideologically rigid people.

There is also the long dormant viability of reaching a massive audience with such an appeal. The idea that Mike Douglas could attract up to forty million viewers for his daily show is utterly astonishing in contemporary terms. The most popular current American talk shows — The View, Stephen Colbert — draw roughly 1/20th of that number. Reasonable people can dispute the value proposition of a culture so balkanized that consumers can easily find an outlet which will service or underscore their preferences and worldview no matter how niche. That has its uses, and the monolithic stature of the three major television networks fifty years ago clearly crowded out a larger and more pluralistic cast of voices. And yet, as an alternative to cable news channels and social media feeds which somehow manage to be both brain-cavingly banal and utterly panic-inducing, it's difficult to not feel nostalgic for a forum where a majority of people might agree to the simple proposition of listening to unfamiliar beliefs.

As they act as guides through the causeways of rock ‘n’ roll, political activism and the avant-garde, Ono and Lennon prove wonderfully warm and insightful company. This is not the surly, cranky Lennon of so much of his “Lost Weekend” ‘70s — here he looks healthy, happy and engaged, his wit honed to its usual razor sharpness. Ono too is charming — deeply glamorous but not at all off-putting, high-minded or generally weird in the way that became far too big a share of her larger reputation. They are what they appear — two geniuses in love with one another and the notion of a peaceful world — filled with gratitude for the immensely likable Douglas for ceding them this invaluable real estate of ideas.

The air crackles with nervous energy. The procession of guests selected for the week arrive — George Carlin, Chuck Berry, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale and Ralph Nader — and listening to them talk and perform, to various degrees of persuasiveness, one’s mind can’t really help but be expanded. When Lennon performs his and Ono's recent composition “Imagine” — based on her words and artwork — you hear in this context not the magisterial procession of a future standard, but the tentative, wistful overture at its core. "I hope someday you will join us,” he sings, but who is us? Who knows. But maybe for seven days in 1972, the world was a little more at one.