Beatlemania -- Sugar and Spice Hysteria

As a young man anxiously seeking the next Beatles release, I distinctly remember hovering over my transistor radio in 1963 and painstakingly tuning in WLS, the Chicago radio station whose tremendous nighttime signal reached masses of fans in over 38 states.

WLS DJ Dick Biondi was the first to play "Please Please Me" in February. I was hooked. These early Beatles recordings changed my life. I was twelve years-old at the time – impressionable and searching for something. (What? I had no clue.) It was then I first began to “rock,” and immediately I began a lifelong musical journey I would never abandon. But, let me tell you about my female classmates and their insatiable obsession with the band.

Beatlemania!

How I remember the unprecedented adulation of the Beatles. All we young people felt the incredible excitement of the times and the impact of their music; however, the mass hysteria for the Fab Four exhibited by girls – their manic, their uncontrollable and frenzied fixation – exemplified this unique cultural phenomena. Girls simply loved the Beatles and everything about them – they were truly “hysterical” in their idol worship of the group. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr enraptured the very souls of those teenyboppers.

“We love you, Beatles
Oh, yes, we do
We love you, Beatles
And we'll be true”

– popular song by the Carefrees

The word “hysteria” describes involuntary conversion of psychological stress, or specific frustrated impulses, into symbolic symptoms or behavior. The frenzied hysteria of Beatlemania-bitten girls – screaming, fainting, wild paroxysms – was akin to an involuntary orgasmic reaction or wave of collective hypnotism.

“I didn't understand why you had to scream and I didn't have an impulse to scream but it was what you did. It was mandatory. There was this cult-like element to it.”

– Linda Grant, English novelist and journalist

By the time the Beatles hit their stride, the first wave of post-World War II baby boomers were reaching their teens. It a time of unprecedented economic prosperity in the West, and for many listeners, the Beatles’ joyous and optimistic music seemed as suited to the era as a soundtrack. The boomers were preparing to enter the Age of Aquarius: peace, love, and understanding. Along came the Beatles. The British Invasion swept America like a tsunami.

At Beatles concerts and public appearances, battalions of policemen herded fans behind fences and barricades. The screams and cries of young ladies was deafening. Journalists compared the sounds made at Beatles’ concerts to the nerve-shredding cries of pigs being brought to slaughter.

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 line from enthusiasm into hysteria and soon it was in the area of the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium – the region of the demons.”

"Teenage girls were perceived as a mindless horde: one huge, undifferentiated emerging hormone."

– Linda Grant

Of course, the great talent and fortuitous timing of the Beatles was solidified by the fact they acted and behaved as a tightly-knit group. Previously, in both England and America, most successful pop and rock acts emphasized individuals: solo performers like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Bill Haley, all of whom fronted a band. The Beatles were the first iconic rock band, and they came in a time of togetherness.

John McMillian of The Daily Beast wrote this of the band:

“The Beatles, on the other hand, were an indivisible group in which each member nevertheless had distinctive attributes: John was typecast as the clever, intellectual one; Paul, the romantic charmer; George, quiet and mysterious; and Ringo, the easygoing goof.”

Teens loved the group as a whole and as individuals. Doting teenyboppers found the fellows irresistible. The lads from Liverpool were the “coolest,” the “grooviest,” the “most far out,” and simply “gear.” 60s culture began and ended with Beatlemania.

And, oh my, did those young girls express their unashamed desire for “everything Beatles.” Then teenage girls were still expected to be paragons of purity – quiet and passive, perfectly well-behaved ladies. The fashionable Beatlemaniacs ushered in a revolution to protest the sexual repressiveness and the rigid double standard of female teen culture. 

In 1977, a trio of scholars – Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs – observed an rudimentary element of protest in Beatlemania. Their argument (professed in the essay “Beatlemania: A Sexually Defiant Subculture?”) went like this …

“Society was becoming increasingly sexualized in the ’50s, yet girls were always asked to walk a delicate line. They were advised to make themselves appealing to boys and to get dates, but also to remain pure and chaste. To those ends, girls were expected to police their own ranks; a young teenager who was too sexually forthcoming risked being ostracized by her peers. In that context, “to abandon control – to scream, faint, and dash about in mobs – was, in form, if not conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, and rigid double standard, of female teen culture.”

In addition, some scholars argued that the Beatles' famous moptop haircuts signaled androgyny and thus presented a less threatening version of male sexuality to teenage girls. Maybe it was just that girls thought the Beatles with their revolutionary longer hair were so darned cute. All I know is that every testosterone-filled young male was soon engaged with his parents in a battle to grow long Beatle locks.

By 1963, the Beatle haircut was firmly established as an easily-recognizable part of the Beatles joint persona. CBS report Bill Crandall put it nicely …

“Their trademark moptops not only made possible the Ramones' bowl cuts, Justin Bieber's combover and an entire decade of hair metal, but it gave the Sixties its most iconic image: long hair. Thanks to the Beatles, follicle freedom soon flowed from the ports of Liverpool to the parks of San Francisco to the lights of Broadway in the form of a smash musical, naturally entitled Hair.”

Of those sexually repressed female Beatles fans, McMillian asserts …

“These young girls were not yet ready for the women’s liberation movement, the argument goes, but they were willing to trespass on propriety by asserting 'something' (it’s hard to say precisely what) about their sexuality, or their innermost desires, in a public and ritualized fashion. So Beatlemania was not just rebellious but also 'in its own unformulated, dizzy way, revolutionary.'”

Young people in the 60s were looking for community and identity. The Beatles supplied that and much more – charisma, taste, and sexuality, They endeared themselves to the public, and while mocking the media and their own celebrity status, the group won the undying devotion of their teenage fans. One female fan wrote of her Beatlemania …

"People think they're silly but they're not. It's the togetherness. We had this big communal thing that we all knew and loved and understood — something that was yours and nothing to do with your mum and dad. We were all in it together. It was lovely."

Thus, the Beatles were icons of the rebellious counter-culture of the 60s. The fathers and elder brothers of Beatles fans scorned what they saw as their unmanly appearance and music, but that made their appeal even stronger, particularly after the Beatles took a darker and more psychedelic path later in the decade.

So, as part of all of that frenzy and hysteria, the swooning masses of Beatlemaniac females helped change the culture of the world. During the span of their recording years between 1962-1970, the Beatles transcended popular music while leaving a lasting legacy that signaled significant youth-driven changes in post-World War II society.

As pop stars bigger than Sinatra or Elvis before them, the Beatles captured the hearts and minds of youth. Music, art, politics, fashion, sexual morality – the socio-cultural impact of the band transcended Beatlemania and the religion of teenage culture. They remain the most influential band of all time.

And, by the way, those young ladies who were so widely overtaken in the overwhelming "involuntary conversion" many decades ago can still testify to the legitimacy of the hysteria. I feel confident that their old scrapbooks, magazines, recordings, and memorabilia forever occupy sacred places in their memories, if not as articles of their lasting possessions.