Beatles '64 reveals a pivotal moment for the Fab Four and America

Fans of The Beatles have been spoiled with documentaries recently with Get Back, Let It Be, and now Beatles ‘64 all being released over the space of three years.

But where the former two delved into the beginning of the end for the Fab Four, the latest — streaming on Disney+ now — covers the end of the beginning. Combining archive footage with new interviews, the documentary from producer Martin Scorsese and director David Tadeschi explores the band’s seismic first trip to America in 1964.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were already making huge waves in Europe and I Want To Hold Your Hand had just topped the US charts, but from the moment Pan Am flight 101 touched down at the newly-renamed JFK airport in New York on 7 February, 1964 the Beatles’ American invasion truly began.

The two-week trip would include appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show (watched by 70m people), the band’s first live performances in North America, and even some down time in Miami and it was all captured on camera by filmmakers Albert and David Mayles. By the time they returned to England, the band — and the world around them — would be changed forever.

The four-headed monster

Filmed just four years later, Peter Jackson’s three-part series Get Back revealed a tired and jaded group, prone to bickering amid flashes of creative brilliance struggling to maintain the semblance of a functioning rock group.

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Irrevocably changed by their relentless global fame, grappling with life after touring, and the loss of their manager Brian Epstein, Get Back offered a fascinating insight into a band in decline.

In contrast, Beatles ‘64 is a revealing snapshot of the carefree mop tops on the ascendance, and the atmosphere is entirely different. The newly restored footage reveals an energised foursome, playful, and full of mischief, very much the group you see in their first movie Hard Day’s Night.

"It's a joyful moment for them," co-producer Margaret Bodde explains to Yahoo, "and it's a moment of seemingly great friendship and camaraderie and fun, and they're having fun and they're discovering America together."

"They're realising every dream in terms of success that they've ever had, so it's joyful," adds director David Tedeschi. "They couldn't be happier. We, of course, know… we see the crowds, we see how hairy it gets. We know what’s coming, but [for the band] for this moment in 1964, it’s all wonderful".

Beatlemania

The film shows the band doing their best to soak up the American culture while holed up in hotels, dressing rooms, night clubs, photo sessions and press conferences. A portable radio is permanently glued to McCartney’s ears as he tries to take in as much American music as possible, while Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes shows them the sights with a secret trip to a BBQ joint in Harlem.

And while they had been used to passionate fans from their time playing in Hamburg, or the Cavern Club in Liverpool, and music halls across the UK, their US fans seemed to offer a new level of devotion.

Thankfully the Mayles brothers took the time to explore the fans’ reaction to the band on their first US visit. Having worked with producer Martin Scorsese on documentaries on George Harrison and the Rolling Stones, director David Tadeschi admits he was already familiar with the band’s story, but found the footage of the fans the most insightful.

“There are all these young women and young men, but mostly young women, who have a lot to say, and are in the middle of this incredibly emotional moment," he says. "It was fascinating and entertaining, and also, we have this sense that — especially at the time, but even today — that ‘oh these girls are just screaming, they're hysterical’ and the truth is they heard something that nobody else heard and everybody eventually caught up with them."

The documentary catches up with some of the fans (including Smokey Robinson, David Lynch, and Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie) who were there for the band day one, and it reveals that their music — and what they symbolised as a group — still deeply affects them to this day.

"My sister had the radio on, and I heard She Loves You," author Joe Queenan tearfully recalls in the documentary. "It’s like the light came on. It’s like total darkness, and then the light comes on."

"We weren't really interested in just hearing from people who loved the Beatles, who enjoyed their music because we’d be interviewing everyone," shares Bodde. "We really wanted something that was unique, different and, for lack of a better word, transformative in the experience of hearing and seeing the Beatles for the first time.

A new sound

One way in which Beatles ‘64 replicates this experience is in how it presents the audio of the Beatles’ first American gigs. The original footage, previously seen and heard in the Mayles brother 1964 documentary What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. and in 1991’s extended re-edit The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit, had the band’s signature Merseybeat sound drowned out by the screaming fans.

But new technology developed by Peter Jackson for Get Back allows fans (and likely McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr too) to hear what the band sounded like at the time for the very first time. It’s the same technology used in 2023 to isolate John Lennon’s vocals for The Beatles Now and Then.

"Peter Jackson’s company Wingnut developed this MAL system of taking a mono track and demixing it," explains Bodde, "breaking it into its disparate elements, creating those different elements as different tracks, so that then [record producer] Giles Martin could go in and remix.

"Now for the first time ever, you have the opportunity to hear the instruments, hear the vocals clearly as their own separate track, hear the audience, so that you can still have that feeling of energy, that locomotive train that was the audience screaming and shouting. So to be able to hear what that band sounded like... they were so tight, they were so great. And now you can finally hear them”.

A moment to be savoured

Although the trip to America marked the start of an exciting new chapter for The Beatles, it also marked a turning point in their relationship with fame. Global success made these four young men from Liverpool the most famous people in the world.

"Coming to America this was ‘give us your huddled masses’, this was — to us — the land of freedom," explains McCartney in the film. "It’s funny," he adds, "because once we got here, we learned it wasn’t quite the story.”

It’s clear that the Beatles in 1964 are coming to the realisation that they are prisoners of their own fame. They wanted to crack America, but it had come at a price. While the kids were going crazy for them, their parents weren’t so sure, and this distrust would culminate in later years with the burning of Beatles records in 1966 after John Lennon’s misunderstood quote about the band being ‘bigger than Jesus’ caused a backlash.

One chilling recollection of the band’s first trip to America comes from British photographer Harry Benson who travelled on the plane to America with the band. "On the way out to America," Benson shares in the film, "they were telling jokes on the first half of the trip, but then it got serious, because they weren’t sure what kind of reception [they would get]. They were a bit apprehensive, they were a bit worried. Part of it was because John, he’d read the papers. He was a bit afraid. He used to speak about — of all things — Lee Harvey Oswald. He would speak about the Kennedy assassination. He was a bit worried about the violence here."

Just 16 years after The Beatles cracked America, John Lennon was murdered on the steps of the Dakota Building in New York City, just a stone’s throw across Central Park from the Plaza hotel where the band had been holed up in 1964.

Their 1964 trip marked a pivotal moment for The Beatles and America itself, coming just months after the assassination of President Kennedy, but as Lennon explains in the film, the band didn’t change anything personally, they just helped to point people in the right direction.

"There was a seismic shift happening," concludes Tedeschi. "Like John Lennon says at the end of the film: they didn't make any change, they saw the change coming, they saw what was going to happen. You see that in the film. It's laden with tension of everything that is about to change. By 1968 you'd have the woman's movement, civil rights, psychedelia, and the anti-war movement are in full flame, but they were all in an early stage in 1964."

Beatles ‘64 is streaming on Disney+.