Tomorrow-Land (34 page)

Soon after the NAACP got wind of a song that was featured in the Chrysler Pavilion's new show and quickly lodged a complaint. The song, “Dem Bolts,” was a play on the old minstrel show tune “Dem Bones.” Although at first the carmaker changed some of the offending words—dropping the
Amos 'n' Andy
–like “dem” in favor of “them”—the Detroit automaker eventually scrapped the song rather than risk a national boycott of their cars, which the civil rights group threatened. Similarly, an employment agency placed a newspaper advertisement—“WANTED: Blue-Eyed Blondes”—for jobs at the World's Fair. The NAACP immediately raised a red flag. Just as quickly, Moses wrote a letter to the group and other civil rights organizations explaining the Fair had nothing to do with the offending ad, nor did it endorse racial hiring policies. The agency quickly withdrew the ad and apologized.

In the first weeks of the '65 Fair, more trouble brewed between the American-Israel Pavilion and the Jordan Pavilion. The American Jewish
Congress had successfully sued for the right to hand out flyers in front of the Jordan Pavilion denouncing the offending mural; in retaliation, the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations handed out flyers in front of the American-Israel Pavilion telling Americans not to purchase “Israeli War Bonds.” (That provoked the pro-Israeli group to set up a free lunch of kosher bologna and beer, taunting the pro-Palestinian group to partake in the free food.)

As the opposing groups continued to distribute their flyers day after day, tempers flared. On May 1 a group of Israelis taunted a group handing out the anti-Israel flyers. Soon the Pinkerton police were separating two men. The entire episode was hardly the World's Fair's finest moment: Over the course of the Fair's two seasons, the opposing groups made sure the seemingly intractable problems of the Middle East extended to Flushing Meadow.

By the spring of 1965, among the Fair's other problems was the stewing violence that was enveloping New York City. On May 22 an elderly woman was standing at a Queens subway station awaiting her train, when a twelve-year-old girl approached her. Without saying a word, the girl plunged a knife into the woman until she bleed to death. That very same night, at Flushing Meadow, a group of young people snuck into the Fair by riding in the back of a delivery truck for a small fee. Karnick Yeterian, a twenty-year-old dental technician from the Bronx, and his friends decided to jump off the truck early, figuring they wouldn't have to pay the driver. When the driver's friends demanded Yeterian pay his nickel for being snuck inside, he just ignored them and set out to see the Fair. That's when Henry Roman, age fourteen, jumped the dental technician and threw him to the ground; then Raphael Villa, fifteen, plunged a hunting knife into his chest. Another murder, this time over a nickel.

The crimes were unrelated, but to the citizens of New York—particularly Queens, where both murders took place—they illustrated one fact: In Birmingham, innocent children were killed for the color of their skin; in New York City, children killed over nickels, or for no reason all.

By June the burgeoning anti–Vietnam War movement had also crept into the Fairgrounds, when the Student Peace Union passed out flyers in front of the US Federal Pavilion, even though they had been denied the right to do so by Moses, who was still dealing with the political migraine from the American-Israel/Jordan Pavilion mess. The quartet of students were largely ignored by Fairgoers before being removed. One young Fair worker, Michael Cohen, age nineteen, reported to work at the Wisconsin Pavilion with a placard that read
All Hands off Vietnam
, or at least tried to: He was stopped at the gate by the Pinkerton police, had his Fair pass revoked, and had to pay $2.50 for a ticket to go to work.

For whatever reason, Moses granted permission for an August rally by an organization called Women Strike for Peace, which wanted to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan as well as call for the end of hostilities in Vietnam. On August 6 four hundred women dressed in black, under the careful watch of the Pinkerton guard, marched silently—they were allowed to picket as long as they did not disturb Fairgoers' fun—around the Unisphere. At other times of the day, they marched to the Japanese Pavilion and handed out flyers asking Fairgoers to remember the tens of thousands who had died in the flash of a mushroom cloud.

In Washington, DC, on that same August day, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been passed by overwhelming majorities in the House of Representatives and the US Senate. It was the second historic legislative victory for the Johnson administration and the postwar civil rights movement, which had fought for more than ten years to achieve equality under the law. While no one should have thought that the struggle for black freedom was over, the stated goals of groups headed by King, Lewis, and James L. Farmer Jr. had now been achieved. There would be plenty more to do, but one era of the movement was over—at least to those millions of Americans who mistakenly thought that eradicating inequality could be accomplished with the stroke of a pen. In reality, the struggle to redeem America's racist soul was just beginning.

For those African Americans who could already vote—in places like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles—freedom and equality meant something else entirely; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn't going to radically alter their lives. The de facto
desegregation that they had been living with was not going to change. For them, the legislative changes delivered over the last year were far too little and far too late. Their anger was about to boil over, just like it had the previous summer in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, only this time it would be the Watts section of Los Angeles that would light a fire that the nation could not ignore.

32.

“Beatles Say—Dylan Shows the Way”

—
Melody Maker,
January 9, 1965

 

As the World's Fair entered its final weeks,
the Beatles arrived in New York on August 13 to kick-start their 1965 North American tour. The
New York Times
issued a friendly warning to the band: Since their last US concert, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium eleven months earlier, the musical landscape had shifted dramatically. For the first time since their stateside debut the previous February, the Beatles had competition.

Under a blaring six-column headline—
The Beatles Will Make the Scene Here Again, but the Scene Has Changed
—the
Times
' pop music critic, Robert Shelton, argued that although the group had inspired a seismic “upheaval in pop music, mores, fashion, hair styles and manners,” the Liverpool quartet no longer had a monopoly over the charts. In 1965, pop radio had become a free-for-all.

From January to August, a dizzying array of groups had snared No. 1 hits on the
Billboard
charts, including the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and the Beach Boys. There was also a steady onslaught of mop-topped British Invasion groups attempting to cash in on the Beatles' popularity, like Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and Freddie and the Dreamers. There were even homegrown Beatles imitators like Gary (son of Jerry) Lewis and the Playboys, who began a string of hits starting with “This Diamond Ring.” Also scoring their first No. 1 hit on this side of the Atlantic were the Beatles' friendly rivals, the Rolling Stones, with “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” an instant classic that stayed atop the charts for a full month. With Keith Richards's full-throttle, fuzzed-out guitar and Mick Jagger's snarling vocals, “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” was edgy, dark, and dangerous. It made the Beatles sound like bumble-gum pop.

Although the Beatles were an indisputable global phenomenon—having already sold some one hundred million singles and twenty-five
million albums worldwide—from January to August 1965, they had occupied the top spot on the US charts for only five weeks with three different singles. An amazing feat, no doubt, but it paled in comparison to the band's chart domination in 1964: six No. 1 singles (at one point they held the top spot for fourteen consecutive weeks); five Top 10 hits; two Top 20 songs; plus another that reached the Top 40. So dominant were the Beatles in 1964 that, during a week that April, just as the World's Fair was about to open, they had twelve singles on
Billboard
's Hot 100 chart, including the top five spots. By August 1965, the
Times
could legitimately claim the Beatles had suffered “a slight popularity decline.”

Not that the Beatles had any reason to worry. Still in their early twenties, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were arguably the most popular songwriting duo in pop music. Bands began to follow the Beatles' lead, and even occasionally surpass them. The Animals, who like the Beatles hailed from England's gritty, industrial north, played a particular brand of hard-edged R&B-inflected pop, and scored a major hit in September 1964 with their rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” an old folk standard. Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly had both recorded the song, as did Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. The Animals' version, however, would become the definitive one.

Instead of strumming the song's simple chord progression like a folkie would, guitarist Hilton Valentine turned the old standard into an instantly catchy riff, while Alan Price added haunting blasts of electric organ as vocalist Eric Burdon sang in a blues-drenched, soul-weary voice. By September 1964 the song was lodged atop the charts—the first British Invasion band after the Beatles to hit No. 1—and stayed there for three weeks. This prompted
The New Yorker
to compare the two bands in whimsical political terms: The Animals were new and exciting, like Bobby Kennedy; meanwhile the Beatles were passé, a la Hubert H. Humphrey.

The track was unlike any previous pop recording: The Animals weren't pining for a girl or craving some innocent romance; they were singing about spiritual ruination. By the summer of 1965, songs with
mature lyrics were state-of-the-art for rock 'n' roll, and it was a trend, as the
Times
pointed out, “not reflected on Beatles records.”

The Beatles knew it, too. As Lennon would confess years later, in those early Beatlemania days, he and McCartney didn't worry much about lyrics. “The words were almost irrelevant,” Lennon said, while McCartney admitted, “We weren't that fussy about [the words], because it's only a rock 'n' roll song. I mean, it's not literature.” However, others didn't feel that way. When asked at a 1965 press conference about the significance of lyrics, Dylan declared, “The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.” Actual poets like Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure couldn't have agreed more: They hailed Dylan as one of their own, a literary adherent to their Beat Generation.

But lyrically speaking, the most interesting song in 1965 was “Eve of Destruction”—an anthem of anxiety penned by a nineteen-year-old West Coast songwriter named P. F. Sloan. Recorded by gravel-voiced ex-folkie Barry McGuire, it became a No. 1 hit in September 1965, going on to sell more than one million copies. And unlike any Beatles song, “Eve of Destruction” referenced Red China, Vietnam, and the plight of the young American draftee: “You're old enough to kill, but not for voting.” For the first time, young Americans—millions of whom Robert Moses was still hoping to attract to his World's Fair—could listen to the music flowing from their radios and hear about the anxieties of their generation: the Vietnam War, civil rights, the Cold War, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust—and all of that in just over three and a half minutes. Pop music was no longer
just
entertainment.

The music industry soon labeled this trend “folk-rock”—the ­marriage of the meaningful lyrics of folk music to the sounds of a rock band. The prevailing conventional wisdom of the time regarded rock 'n' roll as ephemeral pop made for teenyboppers, vacuous fluff played by musical neophytes on electric instruments, whereas folk music was authentic American music, passed down from generation to generation and performed on acoustic instruments by serious musicians like Baez, Pete Seeger, and, of course, Dylan. Folk didn't follow trends. The topical “protest songs” folksingers wrote—or interpreted—were concerned
with politics and social justice. They didn't shout “yeah, yeah, yeah” or wear mop-tops. Nor did they trouble themselves with vulgar commercial concerns such as hit records (at least not publicly). The union of these two disparate musical genres was the next step in the evolution of rock 'n' roll, and the Beatles—the originators of the rock renaissance—were in danger of being left behind.

However, if the Beatles were feeling any pressure after landing at JFK International Airport in mid-August, they didn't show it. Unlike on previous tours, the Fab Four didn't wave to the crowd waiting hours for their arrival. Instead, they shuffled into a limo and headed via police escort to the Warwick Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where they eluded 1,500 fans stationed outside the hotel by sneaking in a side door. The band still met reporters in a de rigueur press conference, and were as quick-witted as ever, but the buoyancy of that magical first meeting with the American media was gone. It was clear the Beatles were weary of the endless interviews—“farcical affairs,” Lennon called them—touring, and Beatlemania in general.

It only took one glance at the cover of the band's fourth UK album,
Beatles for Sale,
released in late December 1964, to see the transformation. In the photo the foursome, set against an out-of-focus autumnal background, look dour and dog-tired. They're wearing heavy overcoats with the collars pulled up and thick scarves, as if a storm were heading their way.
*
The cracks in the band's public facade were beginning to show.

Inspired by the limitless parameters of Dylan's poetic musings, Lennon began exploring more sophisticated themes in his lyrics. With songs like “I'm a Loser,” which despite its ironically upbeat tempo, featured oddly confessional lyrics—“Although I laugh and I act like a clown/beneath this mask I am wearing a frown.” “That's me in my Dylan period,” Lennon later said of the song.

This new mood carried over to the band's latest album,
Help!
whose title track and first single was a desperate plea—literally—for help. But
once again the song's message was obscured by the track's upbeat tempo; it topped the
Billboard
charts in late August, sounding as optimistic as anything the Beatles had ever recorded. “I was fat and depressed and I
was
crying out for ‘Help,' ” Lennon said in one of his last interviews.

Regardless of the band's studio accomplishments, onstage their musical and lyrical innovations were lost amidst the howling, hysterical teenage fans. And on their ten-city, two-week North American tour—for which each Beatle was reportedly insured for $5.5 million by Lloyd's of London—the screams would only get louder as the Beatles made history again. The band alternated between enormous outdoor sports arenas such as Atlanta County Stadium (like Shea, it was one of the new multipurpose civic stadiums being built around the country) and Chicago's venerable Comiskey Park, and indoor venues such as San Francisco's Cow Palace and Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon, the latter show immortalized in verse by Ginsberg, who attended the gig, much to the band's delight. (“We hear that Allen Ginsberg is in the audience,” announced Lennon in between songs from the stage. “We send him our regards.”)

No pop band or performer—including Elvis—ever played to audiences this size. And the tour's opening show, at Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens, would be, in the words of the
New York Times,
the biggest gathering of Beatles fans “ever seen and heard in one place.”

The show at Shea was the idea of New York promoter Sid Bernstein. A showbiz veteran, Bernstein had booked the Beatles' two concerts at Carnegie Hall in February 1964, but found the venue was too small to meet ticket demand. “We had turned away thousands of fans,” Bernstein said. The hunt began for a larger New York venue. At first Madison Square Garden was considered, but ultimately was deemed too small. This was a first: No pop group had even been too big for such a large-scale arena. Then it struck Bernstein: Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets (who were conveniently out of town in mid-August).

Shea was a brand-new facility, having opened on April 17, 1964—just four days before the World's Fair. It was easily accessible by subway, the Long Island Rail Road, and a battery of highways, newly refurbished
by Robert Moses. In fact, it would be as if the Beatles were actually playing the World's Fair itself. Thousands of teenagers—Moses' target audience—could, ostensibly, attend the Fair during the day and see the Beatles at Shea that night. In addition, Shea was nearly four times the size of the fifteen-thousand-seat Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, where they had played the previous August.

“I suggested Shea Stadium . . . to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein,” recalled Bernstein. “He asked, ‘Do you think we could sell it out?' and I told him ‘I'll give you $10 for every unsold seat.' ” He wouldn't have to pay a single dollar: The Beatles sold out all 55,600 seats—an unprecedented audience in the annals of popular music.

On the evening of August 15, the band flew from Manhattan to Queens via a Boeing Vertol 107-II helicopter. Although R&B saxophonist King Curtis, one of the many opening acts on the bill, was in the middle of his set as the Beatles' helicopter passed over the stadium, a deejay broke into the PA system to alert the crowds of their arrival. “You hear that up there? Listen . . .
it's the Beatles!
” The stadium exploded with the light of thousands of flashbulbs as fans aimed their cameras skyward, snapping photos as the Beatles flew past. The band peered through the helicopter's windows at the ocean of fans below. “It was terrifying at first when we saw the crowds,” recalled George Harrison, “but I don't think I ever felt so exhilarated in all my life.”

The helicopter landed on the heliport on top of the Port Authority Building at the World's Fair. As they exited their helicopter, they waved to the two hundred or so local Queens kids, who only had to walk down the street and wait by the metal fence just on the other side of the Grand Central Parkway. Immediately, the Beatles were corralled into the Port Authority Building, ushered into a Wells Fargo armored truck, and driven the short distance across the Fairgrounds to Shea. Thousands of Fairgoers probably didn't take notice of the armored truck carrying four of the most famous people in the world as they wandered Flushing Meadow that night.

After arriving at Shea, the truck drove straight into the bowels of the stadium, and the band found Ed Sullivan waiting for them in the visiting
team's dugout. Sullivan's production company had thirteen cameras stationed throughout the stadium to document the concert (it would air as a television special in 1967). As the Beatles stood in the dugout looking at the frenzied fans, they couldn't help but laugh; the scene was absurd, Fellini-esque. “It seemed like millions of people,” McCartney recalled. “But we were ready for it.” They were probably the only ones. Jagger and Richards were watching from the front row behind the Mets' dugout. The Rolling Stones frontman seemed shaken by the spectacle of mass hysteria. “It's frightening,” Jagger told a friend.