Bryce Zabel's INSTANT HISTORY

McCartney's First Tour in 1976

November 30 marks the end of Paul McCartney's 2005 tour, something he's done enough of in recent years that it seems familiar. But it wasn't always like that. Back in 1976, McCartney took his band, Wings, on tour and it was his first tour since the Beatles had played their last "live" song together in the late summer of 1966 at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.

Time, May 31, 1976
Cover by Peter Max

Time noted that, with this tour, McCartney was "bucking Elton John as Pop's top gun." His 21 city tour sold out everywhere and in Los Angeles and New York the tickets were snapped up within four hours in a time before Ticketmaster and ticket brokers.

His bounteous melodic gifts seemed to be reflected in the brightness of his step, the openness of his smile. His impishness, and his considerable charm, always had an ironic undercurrent of worldliness and assurance. Even now, in performance or in conversation, he has the surprised sophistication of a gremline who has just been caught under the drawbridge compromising the fairy princess. It is not for any of this that Paul is popular, however. It is for the music he is making, the flowing Pop that typifies, even defines, the snug place much contemporary rock has found... McCartney is tempering the revolution he helped to create.

The article spends considerble space on the McCartney/Beatles story, praising him and slamming him at the same time. Noting that he is "bucking hard for Pop's Top Gun", it includes this unattributed quote under a concert photo: "If you're a young, vital person who goes to discos, maybe the music's just fine." Ouch. There's the requisite description of Paul and his wife, Linda, as a family that keeps close together by traveling together and, of course, the necessary dissection of the end of the Beatles.

McCartney's roughtest critic over the years was also his best friend. "He sounds like Englebert Humperdink," said John Lennon of McCartney's first solo efforts. Later, in Lennon's remarkable album Imagine, he put it directly to Paul in "How Do You Sleep?", a fierce song full of anger and injury...The song was less spiteful than revealing, fueled by the kind of fury that can only come out of friendship, injured perhaps irreparably, that refuses to disintegrate completely or to mend. Wounds went deep, and they stayed open for a while. McCartney says now: "It's a decision you make, that's all. Otherwise I would have ended up thinking John was the most evil person on this earth...saying all that."

The article closed with the persistant rumors of a potential Beatle's re-union, including the $50-million for one concert offer that was currently on the table. But it quoted a 17-year-old fan who answered that question maybe even better than John or Paul: "...I don't want them to get back together. It would be a super-letdown. They could never produce the music they once did. It's a different era, and they've changed in different ways."

Actually, Paul said it even better. In his spare style, he got it down to three words.  Let It Be.

John Lennon: 65 in October

We're coming up on two significant dates in the life (and death) of John Lennon. On October 9, Lennon would have been 65 years old had he not been gunned down 25 years ago on December 8, 1980. Both Time and Newsweek gave over their covers to Lennon's passing. I've chosen Newsweek to focus on because it has that haunting portrait by Richard Avedon. Also, I had previewed the first Newsweek cover to feature the Beatles back in 1964 in an earlier post, and it's interesting to compare how the coverage changed in those intervening years.

John Lennon 1940-1980
December 22, 1980

Newsweek devoted twelve entire pages to the death of John Lennon in a special "pull-out" coverage. It contained a handful of separate articles entitled: "Death of a Beatle" which was the news coverage, "Lennon's Alter-Ego" about assassin Mark David Chapman, "Strawberry Fields Forever" about the influence of the Beatles, and "An Ex-Beatle 'Starting Over'" about Lennon's new emergence on the public scene after nearly five years of absence.

"Come together, he had once asked them in a song, and now they came, tens of thousands of them, to share their grief and shock at the news. John Lennon, once the cheeky wit and sardonic soul of the Beatles, whose music had touched a generation and enchanted the world, had been slain on his doorstep by a confused, suicidal young man who had apparently idolized him. Along New York's Central Park West and West 72nd Street, in front of the building where Lennon had lived and died, they stood for hours in tearful vigil, looking to each other and his music for comfort."

But, of course, there was no comfort because no matter how many times we sang "Imagine" that week, nothing would bring him back. I remember hearing the news myself -- at the time I was a CNN correspondent in Los Angeles (we had just gone on the air) and I was at home and saw it on the TV. I immediately called my brother and told him and he seemed to react like, "So why are you calling me?" About a half hour later he called back and said he didn't know what he was thinking -- he was devastated like the rest of us. Looking back, I think his delayed reaction came from the sheer out-of-left-field unthinkablility of the news. Nobody saw this coming.

The magazine called Lennon the "unofficial" leader of the Beatles, cited his "numinous influence" on pop culture and noted: "the killing stunned the nation -- and much of the world -- as nothing had since the political assassinations of the 1960s."

"Lennon, semiconscious and bleeding profusely, was placed in the back seat of Officer James Moran's patrol car. 'Do you know who you are?' Moran asked him. Lennon couldn't speak. 'He moaned and nodded his head as if to say yes,' Moran said... Though doctors pronounced Lennon dead on arrival at Roosevelt (Hospital), a team of seven surgeons labored desperately to revive him. But his wounds were too severe. There were three holes in his chest, two in his back and two in his left shoulder. 'It wasn't possible to resuscitate him by any  means,' said Dr. Stephen Lynn, the hospital's director of emergency services. 'He'd lost 3 to 4 quarts of blood from the gun wounds, about 80 percent of his blood volume." After working on Lennon for about half an hour, the surgeons gave up, and went to break the news to Yoko."

Newsweek gave Lennon and the Beatles a great deal more credit for their music than they had 16 years earlier. "These are great songs. If they are pop, then clearly pop is capable of greatness in expressing the pathos of mass society." Lest we give them too much credit, however, for "getting it", that same article concludes talking about the song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", never mentioning (or knowing) that the "gun" was not a firearm, but a hypodermic needle.

Lennon never gave up his passion for social justice. On the day he was shot, John and Yoko had decided on a trip to San Francisco for the following week to walk with Asian workers who were demonstrating for wage equality. Let's close with Yoko Ono's own words:

"Some people are saying this is the end of an era. But what we said before still stands -- the 80s will be a beautiful decade. John loved and prayed for the human race. Please tell people to pray the same for him. Please remember that he had deep faith and love for life and that, though he has now joined the greater force, he is still with us."

Happy 65th birthday, John. We still miss you.

Sinatra Snapshot: 40 Years Ago

At the time, he was The Man, The Leader, The King and, most famously, The Chairman of the Board. Forty years ago this week (September 6, 1965), Newsweek gave their cover to Frank Sinatra who, at the time was 49, about to turn 50. There's an interesting story to this photo you're seeing. Originally, the magazine had commissioned Sammy Davis Jr., Sinatra intimate and camera bug, to shoot the cover photo. His film was rushed to a Manhattan color laboratory where an automated processing machine jammed and ruined Davis's pictures. So they went with a "backstop" photo taken by the credited team of John Bryson and Rapho Guillumette.

Newsweek, September 6, 1965

Sinatra was at an interesting crossroads when this article was written. He was still huge but, increasingly, not for what he was most famous for -- his music.  Even Newsweek quoted one Beatle fan as saying, "He was OK then. He was for that generation. The Beatles are for ours." By 1965, Frank was famous for being famous, for his women, for his politics, for his rumored crime connections, for his Rat Pack friends. For as well known as he was, he remained a mystery.

"Even for his show-biz friends, though, Sinatra remains deep within himself. They feel constrained to keep the talk light. 'I don't discuss his girl with Frank or who he's going to marry,' says Dean Martin. 'All I discuss are movies, TV, golf and drinking.' Joey Bishop says 'we substitute wit for logic with Sinatra.'

For as loyal as the Rat Pack remained to him, he had been discarded by President Kennedy as an insider before his assassination. Still, Sinatra remained loyal to his causes.

"Most of Sinatra's political activities are in aid of Democratic causes. One room of his Palm Springs house is filled with Kennedy memorabilia, and people who know him say his deep admiration for the late President was not affected by the Administration's decision, for reasons of expediency or delicacy, to put an end to publicity linking Sinatra and his friends with the White House."

In truth, Sinatra paid a price for some of these things. His support of civil-rights and friendship with Sammy Davis Jr. hurt him commercially in the South and his contributions to Israeli charities got his records banned in the Arab world.

The article treads lightly on Sinatra's criminal associations.  They do quote Sinatra as saying, "In answering, it looks like a defense. If there were any criminal associations, I wouldn't be where I am today."

Back to the man's music. Here's how writer Joseph Morgenstern put it:

"The soft uncertainties have left his voice, though sex has not. It has a metallic quality: spring steel. At its best, it is commanding, at its worst it is tinny, as if he were wearing a straight mute. He uses short, adroitly clipped phrases now, swinging with the same authority a cop swings his billy. The high notes seem to give him pain, but even that becomes a virtue and sounds like passion. New listeners love it it, and the first generation, upon hearing him now, mourns the loss of his innocence and the loss of its own innocence, which it never had any more than Sinatra had."

Finally, on the subject of Sinatra's women, the magazine gives this rundown. He'd been married twice, to the former Nancy Barbato, and to Ava Gardner. He'd been seen with Lana Turner, Marilyn Maxwell, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kim Novak, Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Lady Adelle Beatty, Juliet Prowse, Dorothy Provine, Jill St. John and his current companion (who he would famously marry) the 19-year-old Mia Farrow.

Say whatever you want about The Chairman of the Board. The man got around.

The Time Crouch: Ellen DeGeneres and Kanye West

If you're thinking this week's Time cover featuring hip-hop sensation Kanye West looks a little familiar, you're right. It features "the crouch" pose that was made famous when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian back in 1997.

"Yep, I'm Gay" / April 14, 1997
"Hip Hop's Class Act" / August 29, 2005

Kanye West was photographed by Kwaku Alston. Ellen DeGeneres was photographed by Firooz Zahedi. If you click on that side-by-side comparison above, you can see a larger version.

By the way, the DeGeneres article was called "Roll Over, Ward Cleaver" -- a reference that probably left a lot of young people scratching their heads when it came out in the 90s and is less understandable today, relating to the classic TV sitcom Leave It To Beaver from the 1950s.  You'll remember, if you're old enough, that Ellen was wrapping up her self-titled sitcom Ellen and preparing to go on an embarrassing public affection-bender with fellow actress Anne Heche.  But, at the moment in 1997, here's what Time had to say.

"Her show's new direction will be groundbreaking not only for having a gay lead character, but for having a gay lead character who is not yet entirely comfortable with her sexuality -- a departure from the normal run of things in the '90s, when gay characters on TV tend to be proud, assertive and more or less uplifting."

As for Kanye West, well, you can still pick up that issue on the newsstands and read for yourself.

Beatlemania!

For as influential as the Beatles were to pop culture, to music, to people's lives, it's truly amazing how little coverage they got in the nation's newsmagazines.  Newsweek gave this cover to the Beatles when they first came to America during that magic February of the Ed Sullivan shows and Beatlemania.  Time didn't get around to a cover until three years later when they featured them in their Sgt. Pepper regalia as distorted puppets.

Bugs About Beatles
February 24, 1964

Here's one weird anamoly to start with -- the article inside about the four musicians we know as John, Paul, George and Ringo is called "George, Paul, Ringo and John."  Go figure.  And, boy, did Newsweek just not get it.  They started that article like this:

"Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair.  Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody.  Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."

It's hard to believe, isn't it?  The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn't just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty.  I remember watching that Ed Sullivan Show where they performed for the first time.  My father, not much of a music fan to begin with, dismissed them by saying he couldn't understand how anybody could stand to listen to "that goddamned caterwalling."  Being part of the status quo, he just didn't get it any more than Newsweek did.  They ended their article with:

"The big question in the music business at the moment is: will the Beatles last?  The odds are that, in the words of another era, they're too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture.  It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict."

I've got tickets to see McCartney this November at Staples Center.  Somebody should have told him.