Diagnosing Beatlemania
THE PHENOMENON WE know as Beatlemania was unprecedented in world history, and it has never been duplicated. True, other popular performers had generated “hysteria” in young girls, from Rudolph Valentino to Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley. But the public reaction to these charismatic performers was far removed from the kind of mass pathology that the Beatles inspired in both England and America, where uncountable thousands of teenage girls fainted, wept, and peed themselves en masse, even as battalions of police officers herded them behind fences and barricades.
These images have long ago been anaesthetizied into the highlight reel of 1960s nostalgia. But it was all very disconcerting at the time. Journalists compared the sounds made at Beatles concerts to the nerve-shredding cries of pigs being brought to slaughter or the screech that New York City’s subway trains make as they grind along the rails. When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1965, The New York Times reported that the crowd’s “immature lungs produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it crossed the lines from enthusiasm into hysteria and soon it was in the classic Greek meaning of the word ‘pandemonium’ — the region of the demons.” Small riots broke out at many Beatles concerts, and some people feared a major riot. The Beatles worried about being torn to bits or causing a potentially fatal stampede.
The Beatles remain, of course, an evergreen source of public fascination; a Ron Howard-directed documentary (“The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years”) due to be released next month is just the latest evidence. But even as Aug. 29 marks the 50th anniversary of the last proper Beatles concert (at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park), Beatlemania remains a singular phenomenon for which we still don’t have an adequate explanation. Many writers and academics have tried to provide one, with only limited success.
By: John McMillian
Source: The Boston Globe
