Lennon's ad: "You shoulda been there"

Disney Channel's "Beatles '64" might help us all right now

It might seem a bit strange to open a Beatles’ documentary with a bunch of excerpts from speeches from President John F. Kennedy. But the point was, historically speaking, when The Beatles arrived in America, it was just a few months after the horrific tragedy of the Kennedy assassination in November of 1963.

In “Beatles ‘64”, the new Disney Plus documentary by Martin Scorsese, Paul McCartney offers some perspective, fifty years on.

"When we came, it was quite shortly after Kennedy had been assassinated,” he said. “Maybe America needed something like The Beatles to be lifted out of sorrow.”

“It’s like the light comes on,” writer Joe Queenan agreed. “It’s like total darkness and then the light comes on. Here’s this thing that comes out of nowhere…”

With roughly half of America still stunned, if not openly grieving over the results of the November election a few weeks ago, could we again turn to The Beatles to once again lift the spirit of America?

Don’t think so. Two of them are gone. John Lennon thanks to an assassin’s bullet in 1980, George Harrison from cancer in 2001. As the prescient Lennon ad for his 1975 “Rock ‘n Roll” album cautioned, “You shoulda been there.”

And it’s true. Though Scorsese, utilizing rarely seen footage from Albert and David Maysles from 1964, cleaned up sound thanks to new technology developed by Peter Jackson in restoring The Beatles’ “Get Back” a few years ago, “Beatles ‘64” offers a compelling snapshot of the chaos that surrounded The Beatles’ trip to America in 1964. But all the updated interviews, from a teary-eyed Queenan to an emotional Ellen Bernstein (daughter of Leonard) truly do is evoke a magical mystery tour of days gone by.

But that there was a time when so many people not only agreed but were almost insanely passionate about the sound, the music and the spirit of four saucy lads from Liverpool is uplifting in itself. The film catches the four of them just as Beatlemania is taking over America and Maysles’ behind-the-scenes clips catches their shock, delight, surprise — take your pick — as the country across the pond goes ga-ga before their eyes.

The film also shows how brilliantly “A Hard Day’s Night” captured their spirit. Their snappy answers in interviews, they’re like kids getting out of school on an extended field trip to smoke cigarettes, carry a radio that looks like a Pepsi soda machine to their ears at all times and mug for the cameras. It’s as if they can’t quite believe anybody is so interested in them. It gives us a chance to imagine being in their shoes, young 20-somethings from hard-scrabble Liverpool, England, growing up listening to American music from Motown and elsewhere, suddenly landing here like they are the conquering heroes, for what? Recording a few songs?

At one point, Paul is asked what seems like an absurd question about the impact of The Beatles on Western Culture. It’s 1964. He scoffs it off, as he should. Well, nobody is scoffing now.

There was nothing quite like Beatlemania. "Beatles '64" brings it all back

There’s a lovely moment in the film where McCartney, in a recent interview, recalls he and Lennon writing “She Loves You” at Paul’s Liverpool home. They debut the tune for Paul’s dad who says “Boys, it’s nice. Very nice. But couldn’t you sing, ‘She loves you, yes, yes, yes?” He said there’s enough of these Americanisms around.”

The pandemonium that was Beatlemania is evident, too, something that’s never really been explained. When showing “A Hard Day’s Night” in the classroom, the insanity of the crowd’s response, kids screaming so uncontrollably loud that they couldn’t actually hear the sounds from the stage of the group they’d come to see. Often, in viewing vintage Beatles’ clips, you hear the screams more than you hear the band.

Peter Jackson’s wizardry has cleaned those clips up here and perhaps for those lucky folks who were actually there and couldn’t hear, well, now you can. And the music is well worth hearing.

There are a series of a couple of brilliantly restored clips of The Beatles putting on a raw and raucous live performance in Washington, D.C., which you may have seen parts of before, but never heard as clearly as you will here.

There’s John Lennon, feet defiantly set apart at the microphone like nobody else you’ve ever seen, roaring through “She Loves You.” Later on, here’s McCartney wailing a stunning cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” (Little Richard himself also shown earlier complaining about Pat Boone’s lame cover of that song!) and then an excited George Harrison, his right foot a-tapping as if locked into the source, rocking out to Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” amid near-hysterical screams from a sold-out audience.

There is also a remarkable clip of the boys on Ed Sullivan, offering a flawless three-part harmony on “This Boy” that, in a flashing couple of minutes, demonstrates the audible magic the four of them generated on stage. The clip is magnificent, flawless and magical. It also makes it clear that we will never see their like again.

It’s hard to know exactly what prompted Scorsese to pull this film together, other than they had the Maysles’ 17-minutes of Beatles’ stuff and were able to find clips of people who were there, had a few McCartney and Ringo Starr moments and moments with Ronnie Spector and a few others who remembered that time. Spector told about taking The Beatles to a Harlem BBQ place where they ate their ribs in peace and loved it. Ron Howard’s excellent “Eight Days A Week” covered some of this already. So think of this as an apertif, something to whet your appetite for more Beatles. On Disney Plus, you have “Get Back” and “Let It Be” — hours of Beatle music.

With the Christmas season approaching and an inauguration that will be its antithesis just a few days after a New Year, Scorsese’s and Disney Plus’s timing couldn’t be better. You can rock your way through the holidays, remembering — or maybe learning — about a time when music could bring the country together in a way it never will again.

If you were lucky enough to grow up in that era, you know how very true Lennon’s ad was. Indeed, “you shoulda been there.”