Save the Children

Balboa Stadium felt like a huge white-noise experiment, a gigantic energy dynamo that could draw waves of sound from the deep, unexpressed emotions of the crowd and make you feel it all in your solar plexus. Thousands of us crept carefully in among the seats that filled the football field and the stadium itself. Now and again, a soundman would cross the distant stage, a structure built to stand temporarily in the middle of the field, and he would be followed by a dancing chorus of screams from the teenage girls.

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A couple of years before, I had been driving west on the freeway from Redlands to Los Angeles, listening to a small, local radio station which was making its living by feeding off the local population of youths. Barely listening at first, I heard a recording of singers who sounded unlike any I’d ever heard before. The Isley Brothers, maybe? No. Soul music? Not exactly. Pop? Sort of. They sang with wild abandon, unafraid of the imperfections in their voices, a high wire act that would eventually fall into the net far below. Or miss it entirely.

“That was ‘From Me To You’ by the Beatles,” the radio announcer said absent-mindedly, as if such a miracle appeared on the airwaves every day. It was the very first Beatles recording I’d ever heard. (The second, for those who wonder, was “Thank You, Girl.”) The song knew innately how to bounce and laugh and dance and play and wake up every cell in your body. It showed up at the dinner party wearing wild neon-colored shorts and longish hair and talking far too loud.

The disc jockey was playing from a vinyl album that quickly became a rarity. The Beatles, then utterly unknown, had been first released to potential fans—and to radio stations, to the press, to reviewers—on a VeeJay Records pressing. “To you, to you, to you, to yeuuw!” they sang. I’d never heard anything like it before.

They caught the listener up in their remarkable lack of self-concern, their inappropriateness, the way they didn’t seem at all worried what anyone might think of them. They weren’t afraid to come on too strong, hit their notes slightly off key, lose their voices in the middle of a chorus. (If you doubt this, listen to an early version, unedited, of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and notice Paul’s goof. It was cleaned up when those who created the masters of their songs in America figured out they should work with some degree of care.) I imagined them with red faces and sand-papered vocal chords at the end of each song, filled to overflowing with joy.

I didn’t find a copy of the VeeJay recording for a couple of years. By then, I already had all of the Beatles’s songs in my growing collection of the Capitol Records albums. The Beatles were such a stunning combination of innocence and cheekiness that most fledgling fans—like me—would do whatever they commanded, as when George, at the close of their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, waved at the screaming audience and declared, walking off-stage, “Buy our reckords!”

We did!

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A girl behind me in the San Diego stadium screamed a plaintive “RINGGGO!!!” with no evident provocation and my ears rang helplessly, nearly begging for mercy. Then she screamed again. It was all too much. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?” I heard her yell at the friends seated around her. I didn’t answer, of course, not being a friend, but I took stock. John was doubtless my favorite. But favorite for what? And why? And wasn’t this a bit like asking, “What’s your favorite color?”

What exactly were we celebrating here?

My brother (then 14), sister (10) and I (21) felt we’d landed on some other planet and were trying to blend in with the aliens; we were treading water whose level was a bit above our heads; we tried to keep calm and cool.

August 28, 1965. It was the second American tour. (We hadn’t made it to the first.) Our father had kindly arranged to get our tickets. My job was to get myself and my siblings to our seats, make sure they didn’t disappear into the wonder of the occasion or the overwhelming sound system—and to get all of us home through the thick and dazed traffic that would emerge from the many parking lots after the show.

Finally, a couple of local disc jockeys, who weren’t quite up to the occasion either, stumbled out on to the stage with mikes, welcomed us, told us the first act would start in a few moments and then, big mistake, disappeared. The crowd grew anxious and surly. They wanted the red meat. Now.

Every few moments, someone broke from the stands, jumping to the field and dashing toward the stage, only to be chased down, tackled and carried to the waiting police by one or two bouncers from the army of out-of-work Sumo wrestlers circling the stage. It had been entertaining enough to consume the interest of others in the stadium until the disc jockeys tantalized us all.

“Where are they?” people yelled out from different parts of the stadium. The trick was to get 20,000 Beatlemaniacs into a profoundly compressed space, keep us from rioting and make sure none of us got hurt.

The day before, Brian Epstein, their manager, had carted the group up to Elvis’s Los Angeles home. A state meeting, with the King of Rock’n’Roll pressing the flesh of his obvious heirs, and pretending they could all be good buddies as they competed for audience share and fan dollars.

The Beatles’ time had come, though, and Elvis doubtless knew it. One of the opening groups for the first tour, a show we hadn’t seen, had been the Bill Black Combo, starring Elvis’s stand-up bass player. The die was cast.

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August 28, 1966: Exactly a year later, we saw the L.A. stop in the third American tour at the Dodger Stadium. We sat once again in open-mouthed awe. The stage, off in the distance, was ringed by people in wheelchairs—invalids who had come in hope of being blessed by one of the Beatles and perhaps gaining a healing from the experience.

The Beatles were not only a magnet for star-crazed young fans, they were also attracting crazies of all persuasions, who projected their neuroses on them, stripping them of their own humanity, their actual identities. John Lennon—who was amazed and horrified by many of the responses to the group—had recently remarked in a kind of stunned amazement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. He hated being made into someone he wasn’t, a demi-god. The music and fun were being drained from the experience. And the concert had a macabre edge to it; death threats had been delivered to the band at every stop on their tour this time.

They were a phenomenon they themselves could not contain or control. For many reasons, the show’s usual closer on this tour was “I’m Down,” which referred warily to the drugs they were using as well as to the feelings they were trying to medicate.

The Dodger Stadium concert was attended by about 45,000 people. We all saw, and were part of, a moment of history that would never repeat itself. I remember the show being started by a cheery singer named Bobby Hebb (“Sunny” was the title of his hit). He was followed by The Ronettes (a girl group led by Phil Spector’s wife, Ronnie); the Cyrkle (a group whose hit, “Red Rubber Ball,” was co-written by Paul Simon—they were managed by Brian Epstein, and the quirky spelling of their name was a John Lennon idea); and the Remains (a strong, talented group with a garage band quality who never quite grabbed the brass ring of fame and held on for very long).

Then, the Beatles stepped up to the plate to sing the Chuck Berry song, “Rock and Roll Music.” “It’s got a back-beat, you can’t lose it,/any old time you use it./ Gotta be rock and roll music,/ if you wanna dance with me.” And so it was: straight-ahead rock and roll music. The set was heavily tilted toward the 12-bar blues structure, relatively easy to play: There was no room, no aural space, for intricacy in this concert. The band couldn’t hear itself think over the screaming of its audience.

John, in frenetic moments—as when they took solos on “I’m Down”—played the electric piano with his elbow, running wildly up and down the scales. We were sitting close enough to see (with binoculars) John with a disbelieving but maniacal glee lighting up his face. Thinking back on it, though, John was surely very close to screaming, “Enough!” And leaving it all behind. He was willing to persevere, but, as we later learned, George had just about crossed that line already.

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"I'm not saying we’re better or greater than Jesus, or God as a thing or whatever it is, but it was wrong, and now it's come to all this." John Lennon in 1966

December 8, 1980. I was driving home and a news bulletin on the radio announced John’s death. What could possibly have convinced this person that John should die? For me, and for millions of others, John represented life lived fully, searchingly, creatively. Not death!

It was one of those few moments when my world simply collapsed, suddenly becoming very small and dark and incomprehensible. “The day,” to borrow Don McLean’s phrase, “the music died.” The music, the explorations, the sense of freedom, the opening to a better world.

Eerily, I think of a weird wish I’d often had inside that it could be me up there, playing my guitar, singing my songs, flailing over the electric Rhodes with my elbow, making music that mattered somehow. As if there were something real in that fantasy portrayal of fulfillment. The real Bill up there, acting out the part of the truly fulfilled Bill. As if we weren’t just wrapping our deeply wounded hearts and souls in the solace and energy of the music and the mind-numbing buzz of the crowds and the overwhelming, echoing, mesmerizing sound of the stadium.

If we couldn’t be truly genuine and authentic in our art, utterly aligned with our beliefs about a better world, we could at least act as if we were. And then someone’s internal Caesar cried, “Kill the Gladiator!” Our deepest fears find it deeply abhorrent when people act out their deepest and best sense of what is real and true. It is a huge taboo.

Mark David Chapman, John’s murderer, was a deeply confused youth, of course, yet there was a method to his madness. I don’t hope to understand, but he seemed to be acting out the various fragmented facets of his response to John and, ironically, his own need to protect the people, the children, from the phoniness prevalent in the world—protect us all from the LIE by killing the bringer of TRUTH, protect us by making it impossible for us to actually confront the truth itself. He saw himself, it seemed, as a Holden Caulfield, catching the children in the rye, before they fell to their doom.

“There’s something else I want to say,” he soon explained in an impossible stab at repentance. “I feel that I see John Lennon now not as a celebrity. I did then. I saw him as a cardboard cutout on an album cover. I was very young and stupid, and you get caught up in the media and the records and the music. And now I–I’ve come to grips with the fact that John Lennon was a person. This has nothing to do with being a Beatle or a celebrity or famous. He was breathing, and I knocked him right off his feet, and I don’t feel because of that I have any right to be standing on my feet here, you know, asking for anything. I don’t have a leg to stand on because I took his right out from under him, and he bled to death. And I’m sorry that ever occurred.” Mark David Chapman in 1980

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June 16 – 18, 1967: About a year later. The Monterey Pop Festival. Jimi Hendrix’s major debut. Janis Joplin’s. Don’t forget Otis Redding. John Phillips, Mama Cass Elliott, Jerry Garcia. And don’t forget Brian Epstein, the Beatles’s manager, dead in a drug overdose a little over a month after Monterey Pop took down its festival stages.

They were all dead not very long afterward.

And why, I wonder, have the explosions of new musical expression and lifestyle experiments and personal philosophies brought with them so much death?

It’s true: I have felt the wish to be a star, up there on a tightrope, as if true happiness and lasting fulfillment could only be found at great and dangerous altitudes. And I have watched too many stars fall, including my teenage role model Ricky Nelson, whom I once met on the set of Ozzie and Harriet, the teenage son of the bandleader Ozzie Nelson and one of his lead singers, Harriet, playing the teenage son of the bandleader Ozzie Nelson and one of his lead singers, Harriet…as if working in a hall of mirrors.

After this flurry of deaths, rock seemed to move into the direction of self-conscious excess—whether it was David Bowie bending genders, or Peter Gabriel turning his every performance into a frame full of art, or the rest of us, just singing and playing our instruments for the joy of it as if we were chasing the experience of music and transcendence that kept dying before out eyes.

But the feeling of loss is undeniable.

Arnold Toynbee, one of the past century’s great historians, looked at the field of flowers and unwarranted optimism that bloomed in the Age of Hippies—the ironically self-destructive time of mutual tolerance we’ve been reviewing here—and observed that the whole edifice collapsed under the weight of its inability to encounter evil and stand up to it. Its demise was, he said, inevitable.

Very few rock bands still sing, “We can change the world.” Instead, songs are all too often filled with invective, with the “F-bomb” and with stunning disrespect for the rights of women and the importance of mutual empowerment. But most of us haven’t forgotten how to dream of what it would be like to find the social and spiritual philosophy we can all ride from here to an everlasting heaven and the creative glory that will elevate us to truly fulfilling levels of prosperity, fame and invulnerability. Most of us are still saving up for the ticket home.