Johnny Deadline: BEATLES '64

 by JB

I was so excited for this that I stayed up on Thanksgiving night to see it the minute it dropped on Disney+. A few hours of my life that I will never... get back.

To remind us yet again that the Beatles first arrived on these shores sixty years ago (but mostly to remind us that the holiday shopping season is upon us) our old friends at Apple has conspired to make it a "Beatles Christmas." By this time, you'd think Apple would have simply copyrighted that phrase.

ANNOYING AUTOBIOGRAPHIC PAUSE: Because I was only two years old when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, I consider myself a second-generation fan. I truly discovered the Beatles in the early 1970s... after they had broken up. The first Beatles record I ever bought was the greatest hits double album, The Beatles 1962-1966, commonly referred to as “the Red Album.” I was eleven. I bought it at Korvettes. It cost $4.99.

Yet the strangest thing happened whenever I sat down to listen to it. Every time I spun that album—and I spun it HUNDREDS of times—it made me think of Christmas. But why? I puzzled over this strange reverse déjà vu for years before I finally figured it out: Back in the 1960s, 70 percent of vinyl albums were sold around the holidays; the Beatles usually released their new music around Christmastime. Spinning that terrific record in the 1970s took me back to the holidays of the early 1960s, when I was a toddler, and the Beatles were charting hit after hit. My mother and sister would wrap Christmas gifts together in our kitchen and my sister, who is thirteen years my senior, would play the radio. What was playing on that radio? Why, the latest Beatles singles, of course! Like Proust’s madeleine, the Red Album transported me back to that kitchen, to the sounds and feelings of Christmas. The Beatles’ music playing in that kitchen comprise some of my earliest memories.

WIPING AWAY A SINGLE NOSTALGIC TEAR: What were we talking about? Oh, right—Apple has released the new documentary Beatles ’64 exclusively on Disney+. Both Peter Jackson’s Get Back film and the new restoration of Let It Be also premiered on Disney+, a fact leading some YouTubers to suggest that Disney now “owns” the Beatles. This is not true! The Beatles are owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono. The fact that every creative and marketing decision must be approved by those four individuals helps explain the particular brand of Beatles "product" that we’ve been getting for the past 40 years. By the time a project earns approval from all four, anything new or exciting is largely ironed out.

That is a central problem for Beatles ‘64. Like the wildly expensive "Limited Edition" Beatles Album Rollerball PENS offered to fans in 2012 ("COLLECT ALL NINE!"), this new documentary is shiny but unnecessary, existing only to make money.

I have drawers full of pens because my wife steals them from hotels. Similarly, Beatles fans have the documentaries The Beatles' First US Visit by the Maysles brothers; Patrick Montgomery’s The Complete Beatles; Andrew Solt’s John-centric Imagine; the Beatles’ own elephantine, eleven-hour-plus Anthology; Martin Scorsese’s George-centric Living in the Material World; and Ron Howard’s nonsense-centric Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years. One would assume that the subject has been covered.

Clearly, Apple wanted a promotional item to for their shiny new set of unnecessary vinyl albums released a week ago—an 8-LP boxset titled The Beatles: 1964 US Albums in Mono. It contains the original American mono mixes of six albums, plus the virtually music-less documentary cash-in double album, The Beatles Story. All for only $300.

FULL DISCLOSURE: The albums from the boxset are also available individually, and I bought two: The Beatles' Second Album, because it's fucking amazing, a case of Capitol Records accidentally compiling and sequencing a “pieces and parts,” “what’s left over” album that kicks major ass; and Meet the Beatles, because Target offered it on blue vinyl. Blue—like the surviving Beatles’ faces when they both hold their breath until fans buy their new, expensive boxset.

BUT JB, WHAT ABOUT THIS @#*&^%$#! DOCUMENTARY? I didn’t like it at all. It tries to be seven things at once and fails at all of them. Too much of it is simply repurposed, re-edited Maysles brothers' footage from their superior documentary. In nearly two hours, we get only two full-length musical performances—and only ONE of those is by the Beatles!

I do not believe that every documentary needs to be told chronologically, but the sequencing of Beatles ‘64 is bonkers. We begin with the Beatles playing the Washington Colosseum (Day Four of their first U.S. visit) then flash back to the Kennedy assassination five months earlier. (Elaine Kim’s cover of “All My Loving” plays over this footage, one of the few touches in the new film that I liked.) We then cut back to the Beatles, now on Day One of their visit, landing at the recently renamed JFK airport in New York City.

The film advances the well-worn cliché that, after Kennedy’s death, the United States needed to be "cheered up" with something positive and light-hearted, and that this is what Beatlemania provided. This has been a truism in pop culture since it was first advanced, I believe, in Philip Norman’s 1981 Beatles biography, Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation. Yet, as YouTuber Michael Nowland points out, there is a flaw in this logic. It was adults who needed cheering up after the Kennedy assassination; in 1964, adults famously hated the Beatles. There goes that theory.

Beatles ‘64 mentions Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein once, in passing. You know, the man who single-handedly engineered the greatest show business success of the 20th century? Once.

The film's "talking head" interviews are an odd lot. Ronnie Spector tells of sneaking the Beatles out of the Plaza hotel to visit a BBQ joint in Harlem. Author Joe Queenan’s abusive father would not let him and his sisters watch the famous Ed Sullivan broadcast. Director David Lynch was in the audience for that first Ed Sullivan Beatles broadcast. Smokey Robinson appreciates the Beatles recording his song, "You Really Got a Hold on Me.”

What is the point here? Why make a documentary film about famous musicians making history... then truncate almost every performance? Beatles ‘64 is an essay film without a thesis. It's one hour and forty-eight minutes of moments that are only vaguely connected enough to trick us into thinking that, by film’s end, we have learned something.

We have not.

There are a few things to like. All the footage has been restored, so it both looks and sounds scrumptious. I liked hearing Ringo Starr talk about that one time he fell off his drum riser. I like having an excuse to stay up very late at night, and I needed to stay up very late to see this the moment it dropped. I like complaining about things, and this new Beatles documentary gives me plenty to complain about.

Beatles ‘64 is a love me don’t.