No one expected an early Beatles fan from the group’s legendary early
1960s residency at the Cavern Club in Liverpool to be there.
That was value-added for 200 or so students and visitors to professor
Kenneth Womack’s Beatles presentation Monday at the Wittliff
Collections on the 7th floor of the Alkek Library on the Texas State
University campus.
Erika Bale was at the Cavern Club back in 1961. |
In the audience (and participating in a question and answer session
later) was Erika Bale, who saw the Beatles more than 200 times beginning
when she was 15 at the Cavern Club. That was 1961.
She was there the day the Beatles sacked drummer Pete Best and
replaced him with Ringo Starr on August, 1962. She saw George Harrison
get a black eye that day when he told a disgruntled Pete Best fan to
“bugger off.”
“I was pro-Pete. We all were,” Bale said. “He was there that day and was crying. It was so sad. He was the best looking.”
Womack, Penn State University Scholar Laureate and author of such
books as “The Beatles Encyclopedia,” “Long and Winding Roads” and
“Reading the Beatles,” delivered a concise multimedia lecture titled,
“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles.”
He described the 1960s band as “an evolving art object.”
Womack chose to begin his lecture with photographs and film from the
Beatles last day together as friends – August 22, 1969. The occasion was
a photo shoot at John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s new Tittenhurst Park
home.
Lennon, Harrison and Starr are bearded; Paul McCartney is
clean-shaven with new wife, Linda, and sheepdog Martha in tow. Womack
described the photos as “brimming with nostalgia” and evoking “Butch and
Sundance on a last ride.”
Even for longtime Beatlemaniacs, Womack’s presentation was informative and thought-provoking.
The Beatles came out of the skiffle craze in post-War Britain in the
1950s, a fast folk-oriented music that launched more than 10,000 bands –
1,000 of which were named the Blackjacks. The king was Lonnie Donegan
whose hit “Rock Island Line” inspired Lennon’s schoolboy band the
Quarrymen. Womack played a rare 30-second clip of Lennon singing
“Puttin’ On the Style” at a fete at St. Peter’s Church on July 6, 1957,
the day he met Paul McCartney. “Most people were there for the dog
show,” Womack joked.
After McCartney joins the band, and influenced by his father Jim
McCartney’s love of jazz and Broadway show tunes, the two teenage
musicians form the Lennon-McCartney partnership. “What I love about
their story is the ambition of it,” said Womack.
The Beatles scholar also explained the songwriters’ favorite device,
the so-called middle-eight “which functioned for the Beatles like a
second chorus.” He cited and presented several audio examples, the
funniest moment coming while discussing “I Saw Her Standing There” and
its opening line, “Well, she was just seventeen, you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s dirty, he said.
Womack, who is writing a biography of Beatles producer George Martin,
talked about his role: “Without him, we have a very different
achievement, if anything at all.”
Martin was 36 when he signed the Beatles. Up until that point, the
classically trained musician and arranger had produced comedy and spoken
word records. But his technological expertise and willingness to
experiment (for example, the “wound-up piano” sound that graced songs
such as “Misery,” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “In My Life”) matched the
Beatles inventiveness.
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