The Beatles and Fandom

Sex, Death and Progressive Nostalgia

Richard Mills

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501346637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Sex, death and nostalgia are among the impulses driving Beatles fandom: the metaphorical death of the Beatles after their break-up in 1970 has fueled the progressive nostalgia of fan conventions for 48 years; the death of John Lennon and George Harrison has added pathos and drama to the Beatles' story; Beatles Monthly predicated on the Beatles' good looks and the letters page was a forum for euphemistically expressed sexuality. The Beatles and Fandom is the first book to discuss these fan subcultures. It combines academic theory on fandom with compelling original research material to tell an alternative history of the Beatles phenomenon: a fans' history of the Beatles that runs concurrently with the popular story we all know.

1

‘She Loves You’: Beatles Monthly

Beatles Monthly is significant for fan studies for two main reasons. Firstly, it was a forum for proto-feminist girl fans to express their sexuality – admittedly in a very euphemistic and wholesome manner – and secondly, the publication is an example of transformative or progressive nostalgia. Liam Geraghty, paraphrasing Simon Reynold’s thesis in Retromania (2011), explains that nostalgia is ‘often seen as an inhibiting and emotional phenomenon that reacts against change and modernity, nostalgia not only represents a longing for the past, it is also manifested as dissatisfaction for the present’ (Geraghty 2014: 163). In this chapter we will see that Beatles Monthly is a forward-looking publication: the girl fans challenge Brian Epstein’s cosy boy-next-door image with letters and commentary that are feminist and transgressive. A scrutiny of Beatles Monthly demonstrates that new theoretical positions are constantly developing, new perspectives on fans and Beatlemania, more importantly a feminist discussion concerning sexuality and the incipient sexism of the music industry. Beatles Monthly is not just relevant as a 1960s cultural artefact, but it is appropriated into new debates by fans. Beatles Monthly is an emancipatory feminist space, it is unmoored from its context in later years by technology and there is a sexual subtext: all of these aspects of fandom demonstrating that it is not an ‘inhibiting phenomenon’ rooted in nostalgia.

Rather than being a mere reactionary colour supplement, the nostalgia represented by this fanzine is ‘a more active agent, reflexive and exerting a shaping influence on the past and present; bringing the two periods on an individual’s memory together, making a new more fulfilling experience of history and the possibilities it holds for the future’ (Geraghty 2014: 164). Beatles Monthly is now bought, exchanged and read online, and like all the objects and performances in this book, Beatles Monthly has been transformed by the digital remediation. This is what Geraghty calls transformative nostalgia or what I call progressive nostalgia. Beatles Monthly is held dear by baby boomer fans, but technology has changed the meaning of Beatles Monthly to ‘serve as model for future play’ (Geraghty 2014: 164). In other words, ‘The things we continue to hold dear from childhood, remediated and recycled by new technologies of modern culture, are evocative and thus serve to bring together ideas of thought and feeling’ (Geraghty 2014: 164). Through cyberspace these objects are transformed into progressive texts that are no longer anchored to their original print dissemination and reception. Beatles Monthly is a digitized ghostly presence which is electronic imprint reminding older fans of the past; it is a ghoul haunting the present with its exchange value; it is a cyber objet d’art that creates new meaning in fans’ lives because of its remediation by online communities. The meaning of Beatles objects shifts in conjunction with changes in media: the online sale and discussion of Beatles Monthly takes it into a new electronic realm which is distinct from its print form, as Geraghty argues: ‘Playing with these objects (touching, filming, displaying and collecting) changes how fans relate to memories of the 1960s, or as he puts it, “the reconstruction of personal and public memories of childhood in the digital sphere”’ (2014: 165). Technology stimulates a progressive nostalgia where dusty archives are reimagined creatively online and are understood in new fan contexts.

In early 1963 a publisher, Sean O’Mahony, asked Brian Epstein if he could publish a magazine devoted to the Beatles. Epstein and the group agreed and the title launched in August 1963 with a print run of eighty thousand. The fanzine Beatles Monthly was produced by the Beatles fan club (mostly female) and it ran from 1963 to 1969. Beatles Monthly was founded in 1963. It was first published in August 1963 and continued for seventy-seven editions until it stopped publication after the December 1969 edition. It was revived in 1977 and ceased publication in 2003. Beatles Monthly was the first official fanzine on the Beatles.

By the end of the year circulation had grown to 330,000 copies per month. O’Mahony edited the magazine under the name of Johnny Dean. The magazine’s photographer, Leslie Bryce, had unrivalled access to the group throughout the 1960s, travelling the world and taking thousands of photographs. In addition, Beatles roadies Neil Aspinall and the late Mal Evans wrote many of the articles, and artist Bob Gibson created numerous cartoons and caricatures of the fab four on a regular basis.

A more accurate title of the fanzine would have been She Loves You as the Beatles’ image and music were reappropriated by girl fans. The appropriation of the Beatles phenomenon in Beatles Monthly is predicated on girl fans objectifying the Beatles as adored, love fantasies. For most of its seven-year history, the magazine was divided into distinct sections: Johnny Dean’s editorial, a double-spread colour centrefold of a different Beatle every week, ‘Letters from Beatles People’, ‘Beatles News’ and ‘This Month’s Beatle Song’. The language in the letters page is full of repetitious phrases: love, gorgeous, scream and generally jokey colloquial language that is bubbling under with sexual innuendo.

The first Beatles Monthly in August 1963 starts as it means to go on. The first issue has all four Beatles on the cover in their Pierre Cardin collar suits. From the start it is obvious that the fanzine will be devoted to glossy pictures of the fab four. In fact fourteen of the twenty-eight pages in the first issue are glossy photographs of ‘the boys’ (including a forensic close centre spread). This ratio continued throughout the fanzine’s history: 50 per cent pictures and 50 per cent text. In issue No. 2, September 1963, this format continues. The Beatles are described by Margaret Newham, South Shields, Durham, ‘a devoted Beatles fan’, as ‘gorgeous’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 1, 1963) in a letter section dominated by female fans: Kay McGregor, Margo Higginson, Lesley Banks, Gula Lindross, Valerie Payne, Margaret Newham, Laura Bellany, Maxine Williamson, Virginia Harrop and Samantha Chatnam. This was only occasionally impinged on by a male letter. It is only when the book is rebooted in 1976, with a new introduction by Dean and a contemporary letter pages from 1976, that this demographic changes dramatically: in the ‘new’ fanzine, the letter writers are mostly male, enquiring about the minutiae of Beatles history, chronology of releases and nerdy facts about the band.

The Beatles organization cannily sells the fanzine to girl fans: the band is often pictured with girl fans (this is especially prevalent in issue No. 5). The fanzine prints letters that obsess over the Beatles appearance. Alison from Stubbington, Hants, writes in issue No. 3, ‘if you take Paul’s hair and eyebrows, Ringo’s eye and neck and George’s chin and ears; put them together and you will have most handsome face to grace that has, or ever will, grace the pages of pop star mag’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 3, 1963). Theresa Wareham, Dagenham, Essex, asks ‘if we can have one (a picture) of all of them in swimming trunks’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 3, 1963). By this stage of the publication the fans are calling the shots and demanding pictures of ‘Paul’s handsome suntanned face’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 5, 1963); the Beatles ‘improperly clad’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 8, 1964); Diane Dickinson, Norbury, London, writes that ‘I heard on the good ol’ London Transport the other day: “That Paul Macwhatsit is the most ansome feller out”’. She continues to reveal her nose fetish: ‘the other one with the kissable konk (i.e. RINGO … don’t mind me, I’ve got a thing about noses’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 16, 1964). Letters would usually start with ‘Dear gorgeous, lovable Beatles’ and end with ‘lots of love and kisses’, Gillian and Lynn (Beatles Monthly, No. 20, 1964). Issue No. 4 has a fan describing herself as a ‘complete Beatles parasite’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 4, 1964); the language is so heavily charged with repressed sexuality that in my notes for this issue I wrote about a ‘double-centre spread of Porn’; this was in fact a Freudian slip, I meant to write ‘double page centre spread of Paul’.

The letters page is full of fans’ stories of falling and bumping into inanimate objects in their excitement when a Beatles song comes on the radio. Leslie Bryce’s photographs seriously scrutinize the band with very detailed close-ups of each band member’s face. The text is littered with exclamation marks and upper-case lettering to denote excitement, especially when the fans are ‘ordering’ the band to cut their hair or shave their moustaches. The text is a structuralist web of total fan devotion, absorption and sexual longing for a boy band by transgressive proto-feminist fans. The photographs most beloved by fans in Beatles Monthly were taken by Leslie Bryce, the magazine’s in-house photographer. Leslie was a significant conduit between the fans and the band in the years 1963 to 1969 and his shots frame the Beatles in very down-to-earth domestic spheres: drinking tea, placing the stylus on a record, Paul pretending to comb Dusty Springfield’s hair and Ringo at the wheel of his car. Again we see that Bryce’s work constructs a performance from ‘the boys’ as smiling, carefree pop stars, which obfuscates the louche lives of musicians who drank and smoked marijuana immoderately. These beautiful portraits are a ghostly simulacra demonstrating the hyperrealist nature of Beatles fame, Beatles Monthly gave the fans what they wanted, good-looking pop stars: pin-ups that were demanded by girl fans.

The magazine is affirmed on the consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s; it is all about consumption. In the fanzine, the Beatles are advertisements for the consumer society: the pictures fetishize clothes and musical instruments, and the magazine is a pictorial equivalent of one of their songs: easily affordable, standardized, selling love. The pages of the magazine are advertising ‘Swinging London’, and the fans are consuming and appropriating this fantasy into their own personal lives. The fanzine aims to promulgate optimism and love: the pictures are of smiling and happy Beatles. Beatles Monthly inherits the pop art style of A Hard Day’s Night cover, the Beatles’ pictures in Warholesque squares is a recurrent conceit. The fanzine includes tour itineraries, posters for sale, adverts for merchandizing: it is a magazine for neophiliacs seeking new excitement.

Every inch of the Beatles’ personal lives and appearances is scrutinized here. The Beatles are under pressure from their fans to conform to certain looks: the Beatles are marketed as lovable and infantile, but it is important to stress that Beatles Monthly is not ‘standardized rubbish’ (Adorno, ‘The Cultural Industry’) that manipulates ‘parasitic’ fans: the fans in the Beatlemania years 1963–5 are more feminist than the later countercultural period as they call the shots. The counterculture Beatles from 1966 to 1969 – while on the surface politically progressive – are stereotyping women as dream eroticized others in songs like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. In Beatles Monthly the girl fans are eroticizing the Beatles as dream objects. The fans’ voices here are adoring, sexual, ironic, witty, emotional and overwhelmingly feminine. Beatles Monthly captures youth and beauty and is a publication of high quality.

Beatles Monthly is a trailblazer for pop magazines such as Smash Hits and the History of the Beatles written by Billy Shepherd enshrined the Beatles story and mythology before Hunter Davies and Philip Norman (and perhaps more truthful and more accurate than either journalist). The fanzine was also very global and it sold swinging London to an international market: Beatles Monthly is a product of Atlantic history and Anglo-American individualism: neo-colonialism selling the Beatles, London and feminism to the world. The Beatles are sold as nice, approachable, fun-loving, wacky boys; they are often depicted as cute insects in line drawings. The letters pages are teeming with bad poetry celebrating the Beatles by repeating their song titles ad nauseum. It is a fora where proto-feminist fans treat men as objects of desire, feminized men with long hair; the Beatles look is the antithesis of 1950s music and sports stars who were depicted as macho, whereas in Beatles Monthly, the Beatles are young, skinny, long-haired fashionable fops in Carnaby Street corduroy, Cuban-heeled boots with roll-neck sweaters.

Beatles fans’ letters and double entendre

In Beatles Monthly the sexuality is sublimated by the twee language and double entendre. For instance, Jean Denmark, a Beatles fan from Elmhurst, Illinois, writes, ‘Also John, please remember to bring your mouth organ to your next recording session. I’m still waiting to hear your beautiful mouth puffing out beautiful chords on a new song’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 31, 1966). The fans often put their demands in upper case: ‘And PLEASE, will you and the rest of the Beatles wear your hair as long as George’s was on the last Ed Sullivan show? I’ve NEVER seen him look so fantastically gorgeous. Beatle hair was MEANT to be long’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 32, 1966). Jan Wade from Bethesda, Maryland, ends her hirsute plea with ‘love love love love’. The language in Beatles Monthly is lascivious, focusing on hair, mouths and even noses! The fans could also be incredibly critical of the Beatles appearance. In February 1966, Annabel Lee complained in verse that the cover of Rubber Soul makes the Beatles look like ‘freaks’: ‘I tried to work it out but could not, Why such a photogenic lot, should want to see yourselves portrayed as freak, You look as if you have been dead for weeks.’ She describes John as ‘the late’, Paul as wearing a ‘graveyard guise’, Ringo as ‘grey yellow’ and ‘Dracula like’, George as ‘cadaverous’. The rhyme ends with Annabel employing the un-feminist term ‘bird’ to express her disappointment in the Beatles looks: ‘What bird who over Beatle picture drools/Can want to see her idols look like ghouls?’ (Beatles Monthly, No. 31, 1966). If Annabel was shocked by the Rubber Soul cover, it’s a shame her reaction to Abbey Road’s hippie look wasn’t recorded for posterity.

Discounting the sexist symbolic order of some of the fans’ language, Beatles Monthly illustrates that early 1960s Beatles fandom was nascent and incipient feminism. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs identify the sexual repression in Beatlemania; sexual aggression is ‘sublimated’:

In the decade that followed Beatlemania, the girls who had inhabited the magical, obsessive world of fandom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘She Loves You’: Beatles Monthly
• 2 (Un)conventional: Beatles fan conventions
• 3 ‘Paperback Writer’, journalists as superfans: Hunter Davis, Ian MacDonald and Philip Norman
• 4 ‘Fanaticism’ and the Beatles
• 5 ‘Images of broken light’: The Beatles on YouTube
• 6 Paul Is Undead: Fan fiction, slash fiction and literary fiction
• 7 ‘I play the part so well’: Beatles tribute bands
• 8 ‘Ticket to Ride’: English cultural tourism and Beatles fans
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Discography
• Personal Interviews
• Appendix 1 Beatles Questionnaire
• Appendix 2 Mass audience theory
• Appendix 3 Chris Olley
• Index
• Copyright Page