Movie Music: A Personal Memoir for Retro Spectrum Radio
Part 1: The Beatles
I made my debut on the all-world stage right just smack dab before the opening of the 1960s — made it with a couple of months to spare before the calendar turned to a new decade — so movie music for me begins with The Beatles, and A Hard Days’s Night.
Manchester, New Hampshire was still a working mill town then, The textile mills were expiring or already dead by February 1964, when I watched as part of my nuclear family in that nuclear age (there no choice as there was one TV set in entire house set-up in the “TV” room) “The Ed Sullivan Show” and the birth of The Beatles in America.
I remember (Je me souviens, since I lived on the West Side of Manchester, New Hampshire, where the old Frogs would have said, in English, “I remember, me” — Je me souviens is the motto on Quebec license plates driven by many a West Siders relative)…. I remember my two sisters having been dropped off at the State Theater on Elm Street, which became Cine I & Cine II.*
When my brothers asked my mother, why can’t we see the movie, for the first time she didn’t answer, “because you’re too young.” Here answer this time was:
“It’s a movie for girls.”
In the early 1970s, when cultural arbiters like the Sunday New York Times finally started recognizing The Beatles as a unique and somewhat enduring phenomenon (it was just four years after their breakup which is still making news), I saw A Hard Day’s Night, finally, at the Manchester City Library. It was a great movie, living up to its reputation.
I had seen it on TV, of course. A big screen TV was a 21-incher in the 1960s. Movies were cut up and the sides lopped doff to fit the 4:3 “Academy ratio” of the old boob tubes….
Everyone bitched about commercials then, if they weren’t like my mother claiming that they were the best things on TV. (For this was the era of people like William Friedkin and Michael Cimino, Best director Oscar winners both, worked in TV commercials). It was only five minutes per half hour of commercials then, which would be a blessing now, but the Greatest Generation had learned to bitch during a Depression and a World War and Red witch hunts where commies were hiding in the schools and under your daybed (though actually int he pages of your local newspaper, which were HUGE then, eight columns wide and packed with news stories), so they naturally passed this “Born to Bitch” proclivity onto the Baby Boomers.
That was 1964, the year after Kennedy was killed (and the year I got to see his successor, LBJ, and the fatal Lincoln Continental perched on my father’s shoulders at the corner of Elm and Merrimack Streets). The next year, 1965, brought the movie (and the album) Help! which my brother and I weren’t taken to the theater to see, either.
A Hard Day’s Night was a classic, but Help! is just not a situation where the sequel wasn’t as good as the original. It just wasn’t good. It didn’t play as well on TV, nor was it good a generation later when seen on videotape. DVD fidelity didn’t improve it either, though the movie sported two of my favorite character actors.
I finally did see a first-run Beatles movie around 1968 or ’69, with my brother, at one of the two Hanover St. movie houses: Yellow Submarine. Being nine years old, I can’t say I much liked it. Written by Harvard prof Erich Segal, whose novel Love Story would be turned into one of the top-grossing films of all time in 1970, the movie had little to do — in fact, nothing to do — with the song that I had listened to for four years, after it debuted on the American version of Revolver.
In those simpler and more simple-minded days, Saturday mornings were spent with your older brother and the next door neighbor — your best friend — and his older brother — watching “cartoons” on TV. Shows like The Mighty Hercules (the subtext of the theme songs lyrics “Hercules! Only the evil fear him/Softness in his eyes/Iron in his thighs/Virtue in his heart/Fire in every part/Of the mighty! HERCULES!” thankfully lost on us) and The Wacky Races (which represented a real drop in the quality of the images, not lost on us kids who were raised on Disney cartoons like Donald Duck and Looney Tunes), and cartoons featuring The Beatles themselves.
(If you wonder why Yoko was so hated, children were great fans of The Beatles, and some adults thought an avant garde musique concrete composition like Revolution #9 had no place on a Beatles record. My nine-year old self loved it.)
Yellow Submarine was a cartoon, too, and of higher visual quality — but your average Queen City nine-to-10 year old was still several years away from dropping acid, which became popular when I was at “junior high” — so it was interesting, but not as engaging as it would have been, had we been higher on anything other than Pepsi-Colas (10 cents a bottle versus 12 for a Coke) and Hershey bars.
The best part (translation: all that I can remember remembering coherently from that time) seemed to be the live action sequence at the end, where The Beatles themselves sand All Together Now, not one of their best songs, but one kids loved.
I would find out a decade later or ore that it was one of those Return to Childhood songs inspired by acid that proliferated when LSD-25 mid-wived the mutation of rock n roll to ROCK, with its longer-length songs and expansive sound textures.
The three remaining downtown movie houses would be put out of business in the 1970s by the opening of the Bedford Mall and its two modern theaters.
Let it Be played the Bedford Mall for what seemed like a half-year.
Music:
The Beatles
Let it Be ( Phil Spector produced version, 1970 album) (The Beatles won not only a Grammy for the soundtrack, but the Oscar for Best Original Soundtrack)
