Tomorrow-Land (14 page)

Some greeted the article with acclaim, a new direction for the staid “Old Gray Lady,” but to others it was the opening salvo against New York's gay community—the
Times
article had explained that “gay” and “straight” were now words of choice among homosexuals to describe sexual identities—and it was much discussed in the ensuing weeks. And it certainly fueled the city's oppressive clean-up campaign downtown, carried out with the help of Police Commissioner Murphy and under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.'s watch.

To someone like Frank O'Hara, a prominent member of the New York School of Poetry and an openly gay man, it was a malicious attack against him and his friends. O'Hara wrote John Ashbery, his friend and fellow poet, who was then in Paris, a sarcastic, angry letter informing him of the shifting atmosphere in New York: “You may be interested to know that the
New York Times
had a front page (and a full page continuation inside) story on how New York is the world center of homosexuality, with somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 of
THEM
prowling the areaways of fair Gotham. Kind of exciting, isn't it?” By
spring, O'Hara characterization of the situation to friends wouldn't be so tongue in cheek.

As America attempted to restore its social equilibrium, across the Atlantic, Great Britain seemed on the verge of losing its own: Beatlemania wasn't just sweeping the charts, it was akin to a seismic shift of the nation's tectonic plates; riots and melees erupted in any city or town where the Liverpool quartet appeared. A December 1 article in the
New York Times Magazine
—the first appearance of the band in the pages of the Paper of Record—began like a dispatch from the front lines of war: “They are fighting all over Britain. Rarely a night passes without an outbreak in some town or other. Sometimes it is a mere skirmish involving a few hundred police, but more often there is a pitched battle with broken legs, cracked ribs and bloody noses.”

The band's fans were hardly criminals or even dime-store leather-clad juvenile delinquents—known as “Teddy Boys” in England. In Carlisle, the historic English town near the border of Scotland, a four-hour-long melee erupted between police and four hundred schoolgirls as the distraught youngsters tried to buy tickets to the band's show. When the Beatles arrived in Dublin, there was a mad rush among the young teens resulting in injuries and broken bones. “It was all right until the mania degenerated into barbarism,” complained a Dublin police chief.

There had been teen idols before: Frank Sinatra in the 1930s and the Beatles' favorite, Elvis Presley, in the 1950s. But this was different. Unlike Sinatra and Presley, the Beatles were a group that wrote, recorded, and played its own songs; they were a self-contained unit and didn't have to rely on anyone besides themselves to create their music. Then add to the mix their Northern England working-class cheekiness and rebellious attitude toward any form of authority—they refused to adhere to Britain's rigid, traditional class system; they were utterly authentic both onstage and off.

The Beatles were something entirely new on the pop landscape. The
Times
declared the band to be spokesmen for “the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation, which is becoming a force in British life.” It seemed that all at once, the youth of Britain had new idols to worship,
new role models to emulate, and soon enough American teenagers—and much of the rest of the Free World's youth—would follow. “We came out of the fucking sticks to take over the world,” Lennon would later say.

The Beatles were not the only rising stars with big dreams. In December, back in New York, folk hero Dylan was having a different kind of impact on the youth of America. Already deemed a poet, a prophet, and “voice of his generation,” Dylan was a bit lost. Earlier in the month he had accepted a Tom Paine Award by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at their annual Bill of Rights Dinner at the Americana Hotel. It was a prestigious honor by the group, a product of the battle-scarred Old Left, who had fought McCarthyism and other progressive-smearing tactics. Dylan, it would seem, was in good company; that same night novelist James Baldwin, whom the mainstream press treated as if he were the spokesman for black America, was also honored.

But Dylan wasn't having it. He didn't want to be the voice of his generation. Seemingly drunk—or high—Dylan accepted the award and then proceeded to insult the crowd. Like Lennon in front of the British Royal Family and their blue-blooded, moneyed kin, Dylan couldn't accept being
accepted
by the Establishment, even if it was an Establishment that he was, at least politically, simpatico with. “I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren't here and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head,” he bellowed. “You people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax.”

At first the crowd laughed uneasily. Dylan's rambling speech got odder and more belligerent, and the crowd didn't know what to make of this young baby-faced folksinger. Then, to make sure his older audience understood just where he was—or wasn't—coming from, Dylan committed an act of political heresy. “I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald,” he said. “I saw some of myself in him.” Here was the man-child who wrote “Blowin' in the Wind” comparing himself to a man who, just three weeks earlier, had murdered a president. After a smattering of boos, Dylan said he accepted the award on behalf of James Forman, one of the founders of the SNCC, and left.

Although the Tom Paine episode was the beginning of Dylan's public rupture with the political activists who bought his records, he was still, in his own way, committed to their cause. At the end of the month, Dylan attended a national council meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS—the national organization of student radicals that would in a short time become a national political force—in Brooklyn Heights. After listening to what the organization's top tacticians like Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin had to say, the folksinger pledged his support. “I don't know what you all are talking about, but it sounds like you want something to happen, and if that's what you want, that's what I want,” he told them.

Two weeks after the meeting, Dylan released his third album in less than two years,
The Times They Are a-Changin',
a record that would further cement his reputation as a songwriter of unparalleled talent and only amplify the roar of the critics who labeled him the voice of his generation. As one critic would comment, the title track was sung by “a prophetic voice trumpeting a changing order.” Whatever people thought of Dylan, no one who had witnessed the surreal, tragic, bloodstained events of 1963 could argue with the veracity of the album's title.

Part Two

Something New

14.

“When the modes of the music change, the walls of the city shake.”

—Allen Ginsberg

 

Robert Moses found himself dealing with the same old problems in the new year of 1964. He had been complaining loudly—and to anyone who would listen—for the last two years about the US Federal Pavilion, the largest of the World's Fair's buildings. He was unimpressed with architect Charles Luckman's clean and sleek modernist design—it was nothing more than “a square doughnut on stilts” in his estimation—and, try as he might, he was unable to influence the pavilion's exhibits.

Moses had little faith in the Commerce Department, including Under Secretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. the son of his bitter enemy. He detested Herb Klotz, the coordinator for the pavilion, and had little time even for his old ally, New York–based developer Norman K. Winston. Moses worried that the host country's pavilion would be “second-rate.” (By the end of the Fair's first season, one Flushing Meadow executive said “third-rate” was more like it.)

Winston contacted Moses early in the new year with a request: The US Federal Pavilion owed $223,000 in electrical contracting expenses but was cash-strapped, so he wanted to know if Moses would “deobligate” the pavilion of the payments it owed the World's Fair Corporation. Moses wouldn't hear of it. “It is certainly no fault of the Fair that you are short of funds,” he shot back in a memo. Moses said he would take the matter under consideration, but being unable to resist a cheap dig at his friend, insisted on imposing “one condition . . . namely that you cease to use the word
deobligate
. It's not in the dictionary.” He also made sure his written response was carbon copied to top World's Fair and Commerce Department executives. Maybe he felt guilty or maybe he was just in a more generous mood, but a few weeks later, Moses allowed Winston to defer in his other Fair payments so the pavilion wouldn't default on its bills.

There were other lingering concerns, such as a memorial to President Kennedy. Although the public had been writing the World's Fair chief with their suggestions since the assassination, Moses was not about to make the delicate process of choosing an appropriate memorial to the slain president a democratic one; he would handle it privately and in own his way. He told his friend Gilmore D. Clarke, a respected landscape artist who had designed Moses' beloved Unisphere, in mid-January that he wanted a sculpture or bust of Kennedy, but something that would not offend public tastes. “A really fine objective piece of portrait sculpture in the conservative tradition,” he instructed. “No distorted Epstein, Moore or Lipchitz stuff to become the subject of public controversy.” The last thing that the World's Fair needed was another uproar regarding art, particularly one that risked incurring the wrath of an American public still mourning its fallen leader.

At the end of the month, Moses got the news that he had been fearing: President Johnson wouldn't be able to attend the opening day ceremonies. It was a severe blow to the prestige of the Fair. Moses knew that any New Yorker old enough to remember the 1939–40 World's Fair could recall that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had addressed the crowds at Flushing Meadow; what's more, the speech was broadcast on a new technological device called a television, two hundred of which were strategically positioned around the city, allowing citizens to actually hear and—more importantly,
see
—their president. Moses also knew that when the New York newspapers found out, they would have a field day.

In the meantime, he received friendly cooperation from one of the most powerful men in show business: Ed Sullivan. The television impresario, whose eponymous-named Sunday-night variety show was one of the most-watched programs in the nation, contacted Moses in early February regarding the special World's Fair–themed show he was preparing; if there was any aspect of the Fair that Moses wanted specifically promoted, Sullivan said, he only had to ask. The Master Builder trusted Sullivan's showbiz instincts implicitly and responded that anything the TV host thought would “contribute to the exposition's success” was fine with him. Sullivan's was exactly the kind of carte blanche
cooperation
that Moses expected from all of New York's media elite but, much to his endless chagrin, rarely, if ever, received.

Moses need not have worried about the presidential snub flooding the press, however: The New York media was about to become preoccupied for the next several weeks with the arrival of the Beatles, who would capture the hearts and minds of the nation's teenagers, who would then buy their 45 singles and LP albums by the millions. The same day that Sullivan wrote Moses—Friday, February 7—the TV showman was expecting his special guests, the Beatles, to arrive via transatlantic Pan Am jet at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Jamaica, Queens, shortly after 1:00 p.m. They were coming to New York to perform on
The Ed Sullivan Show
on Sunday night, as they would for the next two weeks.

The Beatles were still something of a gamble. The previous October Sullivan witnessed Beatlemania firsthand when he happened to be at London's Heathrow Airport at the same time that the band returned from a tour in Scandinavia. He immediately got in contact with the band's manager, Brian Epstein, and booked the group on his show. However, his crosstown rival, Jack Paar, had secretly obtained a concert clip of the band and played it for his bemused audience in early January. Paar's audience hadn't been impressed. Neither had the
New York
Times
' television critic, Jack Gould, who wrote the next day that the Beatles were like “[Elvis] Presley multiplied by four, their calisthenics were wilder, and . . . might prove infinitely more amusing.” Gould predicted the band would flop, doubting that Beatlemania would be “successfully exported. On this side of the Atlantic, it is dated stuff.”

He had a point. In the early 1960s, rock 'n' roll had flamed out. The proof, as Gould noted, could be found on the charts: The week that Paar aired his Beatles clip, the top song in the United States was “Dominique” by the Singing Nun—an actual Belgian nun—who became an international recording sensation (and also landed a spot on
The Ed Sullivan Show
). The year 1963, according to music and cultural critic Greil Marcus, was a low point for the music he grew up listening to. “Rock 'n' roll—the radio—felt dull and stupid, a dead end,” he later wrote.

The golden age of rock 'n' roll of the 1950s and the media sensation that had ensued was over. After his discharge from the US Army, Presley had gone mainstream, recording forgettable songs (“Kissing Cousins”) and starring in even more forgettable motion pictures (including 1963's
It Happened at the World's Fair,
filmed at the 1962 Seattle Fair). Chuck Berry's star had faded after he was jailed for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines; Little Richard returned to the church; Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin; and Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Ritchie Valens were dead. So it seemed was rock 'n' roll.

The Beatles knew it, too. “We were new,” John Lennon confessed to
Rolling Stone,
rock's paper of record, years later. “When we got here you were all walking around in fucking Bermuda shorts with Boston crewcuts and stuff on your teeth. The chicks looked like fuckin' 1940s horses. There was no conception of dress or any of that jazz. I mean we just thought, ‘What an ugly race.' It looked just disgustin'.” But Lennon and his bandmates knew that the roots of the Beatles sound—rock 'n' roll, R&B, Motown, soul, pop, even flashes of country and western, all crafted with Tin Pan Alley–like polish—were anything but new. They were here to preach the gospel of American music to the country that had invented it.

The Beatles had a unique vision of American music, one that was untainted by the country's great historic stain of race. In February 1964 music was segregated like everything else in the country. The color line in music had black music on one side (Berry, the Drifters, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers) and white music on the other (Presley, the Everly Brothers, the late Holly). Others, most importantly Elvis, a country boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, had blurred the line before, but the Beatles were different; they unabashedly and openly loved the music of black America.

“We used to really laugh at America, except for its music,” Lennon confessed in the same
Rolling Stone
interview. “It was the black music we dug. Over here even the blacks were laughing at people like Chuck Berry and the blues signers. . . . The whites only listened to Jan and Dean
and all that. . . . Nobody was listening to rock 'n' roll or to black music in America. We felt like [our] message was, ‘Listen to this music.'. . . We thought we were coming to the land of its origin. But nobody wanted to know about it.”

They soon would. By the time the Beatles' jet landed at JFK, the band's single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the No. 1 song in the country and would be for the next six weeks. In fact, the band would have a monopoly on
Billboar
d
's top spot for the next fourteen weeks—an unprecedented feat at the time—with two more No. 1 songs: “She Loves You” and “Can't Buy Me Love.” Sullivan's gamble would pay off beyond anyone's wildest imaginations.

America would get its first taste of Beatlemania in early 1964, the lads becoming, in many ways, their own four-man World's Fair. If Moses wanted to know what would attract young teenagers, whom he expected to be repeat customers at his exhibit, he only had to observe the scene at JFK Airport. Waiting for the English youths—two of the mop-tops were twenty-one years old; the other pair, twenty-three years old—were three thousand teenagers who had been whipped into hysteria by a barrage of record label hype: Capitol Records had plastered posters and bumper stickers all over proclaiming messianically “The Beatles Are Coming!” Local deejays encouraged kids to “cut school” and make a beeline for the airport to “see the Beatles.” But Murray the K, who spoke in a brash, pseudo-hipster slang, turned his Queens-based AM station, WINS, into a self-styled Beatles headquarters, proclaiming February 7 “B-Day” and referring to himself as “the
fifth
Beatle.” Airport officials were shocked at the spectacle. “We've never seen anything like this here before,” one told the
New York Times
. “Never. Not even for kings and queens.”

After landing, the Beatles were shuffled into a makeshift press conference with a roomful of cynical New York newspapermen, many of whom were wondering just what all the hysteria was about. They soon found themselves getting played by the quick-witted Brits, each of whom could hold their own with the most grizzled reporters. The questions came at the band rapid-fire. The answers were just as fast.

 

Q: “Are you for real?”

A: “Come have a feel.” (Lennon)

Q: “Do you ever have haircuts?”

A: “I had one yesterday.” (Harrison)

Q: “How about the Detroit campaign to stamp out the Beatles?”

A: “We've a campaign of our own to stamp out Detroit.” (McCartney)

Q: “What do you think of Beethoven?”

A: “I love him. Especially his poems.” (Starr)

 

In one brief, spontaneous, noisy, off-the-cuff press conference, the four lads from Liverpool did what Moses had rarely (if ever) done in four decades: They charmed the abrasive and jaundiced New York press corp. Two days later, when the Beatles played their five-song set on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
seventy-three million Americans tuned in to watch—a record audience for an entertainment program. That was three million more than Moses was promising to attract to his World's Fair over two years. Someone in Flushing Meadow should have seen the writing on the wall.

New York music promoter Sid Bernstein certainly did. He had booked the band into Carnegie Hall based solely on glowing reports from the British press. Fortunately for Bernstein, the Carnegie dates were in the same month as the band's
Ed Sullivan Show
appearances. “That practically ensured my dates,” Bernstein recalled, “because anything on
Sullivan
twice in a row was tantamount to being a superstar.”

Bob Dylan noticed, too. In February 1964 he was driving cross-country with four friends in a sky-blue Ford station wagon, trying to escape himself. Dylan was still reeling from a November 1963 exposé in
Newsweek
revealing his true origins—he wasn't the half-Indian high plains drifter he pretended to be, but a Jewish kid from a working-class family in Hibbings, Minnesota. Needing a change of scene, Dylan and company left New York on February 3, meandering their way to California, where he was scheduled to play a concert in Berkeley at the end of the month. Along the way, they stopped in Virginia (where the singer's road manager, Victor Maymudes, donated clothes to striking
miners), North Carolina (Dylan knocked on poet Carl Sandburg's door, only to be turned away), and New Orleans, where they partied during Mardi Gras. It was the festive atmosphere of the Big Easy that inspired Dylan to write a new song with stream-of-consciousness kaleidoscopic lyrics called “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

They were driving somewhere in California when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came over the radio. “Did you hear that?” Dylan asked his friends. “Fuck! Man, that was great! Oh, man—fuck!” When the song ended, Maymudes flipped the knobs as he drove, looking in vain for another station playing the Beatles. “Don't worry about it, man,” Dylan told him, as he stared out the window in silence for miles. “We kept driving along,” recalled Maymudes, “but we lost Bob somewhere back on Route 1.”

At seventy-five, Moses was hardly hip enough to hear what Dylan was hearing. His musical tastes included the insipid stylings of bandleader Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, not only a close friend, but one that Moses made sure played weekly concerts at the World's Fair. Just as Beatlemania was about to hit New York City like an invading army, Moses was writing liner notes for Russian-born conductor and arranger Andre Kostelanetz's April 1964 album
Wonderland of New York
—a record which he thought served as “an excellent medium to invoke the spirit of our town.” Kostelanetz's popular radio broadcasts of light classical music and lush orchestral recordings of the American songbook helped pioneer a new musical genre: easy listening.