Good Lord, 55 Years Since the Beatles Turned Left at Greenland?

At first, I was resistant to the charms of the Beatles.

I was a folkie in the making. By my freshman year in high school, I was a fan of Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Tom Rush, playing my older and far more sophisticated sister Kath’s albums over and over. I worried about things like whether the Kingston Trio would survive Dave Guard leaving and John Stewart coming in. (They did.)

For Christmas that year (1963), I asked for an got Judy Collins #3, which started with “Anathea,” and ended with “Turn, Turn, Turn!” Queue “Anathea” and I can still run through the entire album.

Yes, I watched Bandstand, but I lived for the short-lived (April 1963 – September 1964) Hootenanny, the Saturday night show hosted by Art Linkletter’s (!) son Jack, which featured folk acts. After the fact, I learned that the show refused to have Pete Seeger on because he was a lefty. This  caused a number of the more authentic/less commercial/more established folk singers – Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton – to boycott it. Whatever the politics (and the show was hardly right-wing), I lapped Hootenanny up.

I listened to plenty of Top 40 Radio, but I lived for Jefferson Kaye’s Sunday night folk show on WBZ, Boston’s powerhouse teen station of the era.

So for a while there, I snobbily held off on The Beatles, even as the first songs started to get airtime, and the girls at school started buzzing a bit about them.

And then, on February 7, they were here, landing at the recently renamed JFK Airport in New York. And there they were, two nights later, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, where the Fab Four shook their mops and gave us five great songs: “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” “ She Loves You,” “I Saw Here Standing There,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” (No, of course I didn’t remember fully and exactly. I had to look it up. EdSullivan.com had the deets.)

And, so, I became something of a Beatles fan.

It was hard not to get caught up.

The Beatles were a lot more interesting than, say, the bland and nasally Beach Boys. Their songs were catchy. They were fun.

I was never that rabid, but I liked them. I started buying their albums. (Or Kath did.) In the summer of 1964, along with my friends, I took the bus “down city” (Worcester for downtown) to the movies to see “A Hard Day’s Night.” That madcap romp – which was how the film was characterized – included a press conference during which John was asked how he found America. His answer was classic: turn left at Greenland.

John was, of course, my favorite Beatle. Most girls liked Paul, the cute one. The brooders were attracted to George. And those nurturers who worried about the human condition glommed on to Ringo, who always seemed a bit pathetic, a lesser light. But John was the literary, brainy, witty one, so he was the one I was drawn to. (I also liked Adam, the brainy/broody Cartwright brother, rather than cutie-pie Joe or gentle soul Hoss.)

I watched all of The Beatles’ appearances on Ed Sullivan. We were regular Ed Sullivan watchers in our house, anyway, so we didn’t have to do any convincing to get my parents to turn Channel 7 on. There were only three networks then, so there wasn’t a ton of choice. I don’t imagine that my parents thought much of The Beatles, but I really didn’t care. As long as they let us watch it, who cared what their old fogy opinion was.

Bonanza was on Channel 4 right after Ed Sullivan, so Sunday night was absolutely must see TV. For a while. By later in high school, I wasn’t regularly watching either show. Mostly, I was sitting around listening to Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, The Clancy Brothers, Tom Rush, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limeliters… Back to my folk fan roots. And, on occasion, I listened to The Beatles.

I bought John’s books: In His Own Write and, a year later, A Spaniard in the Works, through which I learned that the British word for wrench was spanner. Because if you didn’t know that, you missed the title’s pun.

I debated with my classmates whether Help! was better than A Hard Day’s Night.

I got a kick out of the four girls in my class who dressed up like the Beatles and lip-synched a couple of their songs for a school talent show. (Mary G actually looked a bit like Paul. Suzanne L actually looked like John. Sue F actually looked like George. And Donna F actually looked like Ringo. Or so we thought. When you go to an all-girls school, you take what you can get…

Anyway, I was definitely a small f Beatles fan.

That said, I wasn’t all that upset when they broke up in the late sixties. I liked Paul on his own just fine. I felt Yoko’s John was weird.

I never saw The Beatles in concert, but at a Vietnam War Moratorium in Washington DC (October 1969) John Lennon had hundreds of thousands of us singing “All We Are Saying, Is Give Peace a Chance.”

After The Beatles appeared that first time on Ed Sullivan, the nuns, of course, spent Monday morning excoriating them. They were immoral, indecent. The arguments were the same ones that the nuns had made in 1956 when Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan.

There were a few differences. In 1956, Sister James Aloysius – or was it Aloysius James? Most of our nuns had double names -  asked us on Monday who had watched Elvis. All 50 or so hands shot up. How many turned it off, we were then asked. A trap. Only Francis George’s parents had turned the dial, thus, Sister declared them the only decent family in the class.

In 1964, the oddest thing we were told was that Ringo was retarded. I’m not sure how we were supposed to respond to that one.

I have a clutch of Beatles’ CDs, and I put them on every once in a while.

But I remain a folkie at heart.

That said, I was quite happy to meet the Beatles via Ed Sullivan. Hard to believe it’s 55 years since the lads turned left at Greenland. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…)