The other night I listened to a program on National Public Radio about the new digital release of The Beatles’s entire body of work that came to define the1960s and Rock ‘n’ Roll music. I found it tedious. Nostalgia is only interesting to people who didn’t live though the period or those keeners who never grew out of it – the sort who build shrines in their basement and communicate with Elvis or John Lennon through New Age mediums.
Sensible people who actually lived through the era lose interest when it becomes clear they are no longer the people who saw and did all those things. Looking back without rose-colored glasses just muddles all those memories you have spent so many years editing into what they should have been.
It’s worse when moviemakers do their own editing as we have seen recently with the Woodstock retrospective. The nostalgists at Warner Bros. created a festival of Rock ‘N’ Roll, peace, harmony and free love. Participants who are honest recall rock ‘n’ roll, rain, traffic jams, open sewers and crabs. Beatles revisionists maintain the ‘60s cultural rebellion did not begin until late in the decade when the group started dressing like psychedelic South American dictators, hanging around with phony swamis, and singing about girls with kaleidoscope eyes.
That may have been the way things unfolded in places like Baltimore and San Francisco, but in Weiser, Idaho folks had more foresight. They knew at their first sighting of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 that trouble was coming. There was more to it than long hair and impudence; they had been through that with Elvis. The British rock group stirred a dormant mistrust of foreigners and people who mess with the natural order of things.
Less than a month after Ed Sullivan the rebellion began at Weiser High School. One day in the boy’s bathrom Tony Raymond combed his hair into long bangs nearly reaching his eyes in front and covering the tops of his ears on the sides. “It’s Paul, she loves you ya, ya, ya…” he sang out. Everyone else joined in. Tony decided he liked his hair that way and so did Ed Mowery, Jay Beeson and John Reed. They went to their next class – government – as The Beatles.
The girls didn’t exactly swoon, but they made it very clear that they liked the boy’s new image. For John this was a heady experience. He announced he was Ringo and beat his desk with pencils singing ya, ya, ya. The chronically conservative teacher, Mrs. Duclos dispatched them instantly to the principal’s office.
Had the boys combed their hair up off their foreheads and ears the matter would have ended there. But the
tried to argue their case. “Our hair is the same length,” insisted Ed Mowery, “just combed different.” Even at that, disaster could have been averted had Tony Raymond not pressed the case to the edge. When Principal Walt Kerfoot finished explaining stolidly how their hairstyle had disrupted civics class and no real men wear bangs, Tony calmly observed that their hair was no more a distraction than the stubble on Mrs. Duclos’s unshaven legs.
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