Фor teenage Janice Mitchell, hearing the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand on American radio in December 1963 affected her in ways she still can’t express. “How do you explain why? [you were] electrified when you were struck by lightning? “she says, laughing.
I Want to Hold Your Hand not only sounded more interesting than the other songs in the rotation of the station in her hometown, the single is an escape from a difficult childhood. Mitchell from Cleveland, Ohio, grew up with careless parents who eventually abandoned her and two younger siblings. And 1963 was another difficult year. Mitchell was swayed by the death of her beloved great uncle, one of the few adults who had shown her kindness.
The arrival of the Beatles gave a glimmer of hope. “I realized I wanted to go where the Beatles came from because I decided that happiness would be there,” Mitchell said. “That was my goal: to go there and breathe the Beatles’ air, walk the sacred lands of the Beatles, and have a happy life.”
Mitchell fulfilled her wish, as she described in her captivating book My Ticket to Ride: How I Ran Away to England to Meet the Beatles and Got Rock and Roll Banned in Cleveland. She and another ingenious friend successfully left the United States and spent three blissful weeks in England in the autumn of 1964, enjoying London’s nightlife and sights and even visiting Liverpool – although, unfortunately, they did not cross paths with any of them. The Beatles.
My Ticket to Ride is far from the only Beatles book published last year. Most notably, Paul McCartney’s bestseller “The Texts: 1956 to the Present” arrived weeks after the Beatles: Return, an accompanying piece to Peter Jackson’s long-running documentary. But Mitchell’s memoirs are one of the few Beatles books written by a woman in the ’60s since they released their debut single. The Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched women’s lives, but literature, journalism, and critical science – with a few notable exceptions – tend to focus disproportionately on how men experience and value the band and its music.
“For a Generation X woman coming in the 1990s, the chances of publishing a story or an interview with the Beatles in a major issue are 100-1,” said music journalist Christy York Wooten. Yet in recent years, more and more scholars, journalists, musicians and podcasters have challenged the Beatles’ conventional narratives and expanded who could talk about the band. For Wooten, this change is long overdue. “The media coverage of the band’s evolution portrays women as bystanders, which makes our stories about the impact of music lower or just tied to fans.”
Fiery Beatles fans are not always viewed in a positive light, despite how vital they were to the band’s success. As critic Sasha Geffen wrote in Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Couple: “Without the Beatles, there are no Beatles. Each group forges its own identity with the other. ” And yet the narrow stereotype of a Beatles fan that crystallized in the 1960s – imagine a teenage girl screaming at the band because they are so cute – continues.
“Women scientists who are also Beatles fans still run the risk of being perceived more as fans than as an authoritative voice,” said Dr. Christine Feldman-Barrett, a senior professor of sociology at Griffith University and author of last year’s A The Beatles’ Women’s Story. “The legacy of the Beatles ” hysterical ‘fan’ is such that I believe it has made many women reluctant to write about the Beatles until recently.”
Feldman-Barrett’s book is a comprehensive correction of outdated ways of thinking. It delves into less covered topics ripe for analysis (such as how the Beatles influenced women musicians) and takes a fresh look at Beatlemania, the women of the Beatles universe, and fan relationships with the band.
The book grows out of Feldman-Barrett’s lifelong appreciation for the group, which opened her eyes to other topics, such as “British history, interest in Eastern spirituality in the 1960s,” she said. “It really was a portal for different interests.” As Geffen writes, “A girl can put her desire into a group, but she can also find herself there.”
Decades later, the Beatles’ ability to arouse curiosity has been preserved for generations. Growing up in the United Kingdom, musician and writer Stephanie Phillips was struck by the Beatles’ cultural ubiquity. “As a young man who wanted to develop my own sense of self, it almost felt amazing,” she said. Entering the band’s music in the 1920s through louder covers of American bands such as Pixies and Throwing Muses “gave the Beatles that alternative luster and almost made them sound like a vague underground cult band,” she said.
Such sonic freedom of action shapes the music that Phillips makes in the punk band Big Joanie – it refers to both the “experimental song structures” of the White Album and the stretched song of the Beatles’ “earlier, pop-oriented” albums – and helped her to reinforce a different perception of the group. “My version of the Beatles wrote short and vivid love songs, experimented with every possible genre, and was clear about the cultures they were influenced by,” she said. “I think it’s a broader and more inclusive version of the Beatles than the band I grew up listening to on television as a child.”
Dr. Holly Tesler vividly remembers hearing news of the assassination of John Lennon in 1980, although she did not know who the musician was at the time. “Because I was a stupid kid, instead of listening to music, I decided it was going to be a research project,” she said. The 10-year-old borrowed Nicholas Schaffner’s Liverpool Boys Library and spent the next few weeks reading (and re-reading) the book, “bored all my friends and family,” falsifying them with facts from the Beatles. “After what must have been an infinite amount of time, my parents just said, ‘Here, kid, listen to music.’ And there was no going back.”
Tesler’s subsequent insatiable interest in all aspects of the Beatles led her to academia and the founding of the Liverpool Beatles’ Master’s program: Music Industry and Heritage. Launched in September 2021, it offers an in-depth study of the group’s cultural, media and economic impact. Tesler says the class is diverse, including new graduates to mature students in their 60s. “I was a little worried that there would be a big split,” she said. “Everyone is connected now. And they’re all a happy little group of Beatles students together. “
Younger generations of Beatles fans, who joined the band long after they disbanded, are even less attached to the hard historical stories surrounding the band, Tesler said. “[They’re] much more involved in gender and sexuality debates than earlier generations would have been. ”
This is a conversation that has expanded from the world of podcasts. “I see more young fans wanting to move away from the ‘who we blame for separation’ approach and more to an approach that analyzes everyone’s individual experiences, emotions and views,” said Talia Reynolds, co-host of Other Minds. a different kind of Beatles podcast with Daphne Mitchell and Phoebe Lord. The show works as a team of representing voices thoroughly studied episodes (excerpt: “Jealous Man: Lennon-McCartney and Competitive Admiration”). “We thought it was time for the Beatles to discuss with empathy and humanity,” says Lord. “It means making an effort to see things from every angle.”
Podcast co-hosts say the Beatles have shaped their lives in many ways: influencing them to perform, write and develop respect for music; deepening friendships; and even find solace in discussions on topics such as John Lennon’s sexuality. “The Beatles’ music, their story, their selves are uniquely soothing,” says Mitchell.
It is not necessarily a fact that several generations of Beatles fans will understand each other. Alison Boron grew up as a fan of the Monkees and the Beatles. As a teenager, she eventually found soul mates in the latter’s nascent online community of about Y2K. “I can’t imagine who I would be without the Beatles,” she said. “Sometimes it sounds crazy when I hear myself say that, but there’s really no way they haven’t affected my life. An early job with a local Beatles tribute band sparked her interest in the music industry, where she works today.
In 2018, she launched the podcast BC the Beatles. Boron remembers how she and co-host Erica White received a lot of encouragement from older fans. But they have also experienced age, sexism and fan management. “We came across people who didn’t think we had a place at the table because we weren’t there in the first place,” she said. “It was difficult for us to be taken seriously.”
Empathy for the unjustly slandered Yoko Ono inspired the launch of the All About the Girl, a Liverpool-based podcast. “I’ve heard all sorts of things about her all my life, that she’s a talentless destructive force or a joke,” says co-host Chloe Walls. It wasn’t until I started doing my own research that I realized the complete bad service done to her by the mass story. The Walls fell in love with Ono’s music as they explored the Beatles after watching the 2019 film Yesterday; she was “annoyed” by how the film “fundamentally misunderstood what makes the Beatles great.”
Several podcasters interviewed mentioned Beatles fan fiction and fan art as an influence on their fandom – and especially that of younger generations. For Walls, the Beatles’ online fandom was also formative, as it “allowed me to be creative in a space with other people with similar views” and also introduced her to her partner (and podcast co-host) Daisy Cooper. The couple met in 2020 on Tumblr, “in a discussion about the relationship between John and Paul,” says Wallace.
As an adult, My Ticket to Ride author Mitchell worked as a journalist and private detective. As she wrote her book, she used these skills to try to understand aspects of her painful childhood. She found more empathy for her younger self – as well as a view on how listening to I Want to Hold Your Hand changed the trajectory of her life. “If I had never heard of the Beatles at that time, my life would have been completely different.