Mass Hysteria Case Study: Don’t Worry it’s Just Beatlemania

Mass Hysteria Case Study: Don’t Worry it’s Just Beatlemania Madeline McCullough Elliott School of Communication Wichita State University Abstract This paper explores the role of mass media and other forms of communication in the outbreak of the mass hysteria known as Beatlemania in the United States from 1964 to 1966 in reaction to the British rock-and-roll group, the Beatles. American cultural and political factors will be examined as to their contribution to the hysteric reaction to the Beatles. After exploring the mass hysteria, what fueled it and what had an impact on it, the circumstances surrounding Beatlemania subsiding are also considered. Finally this paper will look at a communication theory that could be applied to help explain the mass hysteria of Beatlemania. Mass Hysteria Case Study: Don’t Worry it’s Just Beatlemania Shrieking, screaming, sobbing, crying, clamoring and sometimes fainting hysteria took hold of masses of young people, mostly women, in the United States in reaction to the British rock-and-roll group, the Beatles. The airplane carrying the group landed in New York’s Kennedy International Airport on the Beatles’ first trip to the United States, Feb. 7, 1964. Before the British rock group had even sung one song or given one interview stateside: “More than 3,000 teenagers stood four deep…to greet them….There were girls, girls and more girls. Whistling girls, screaming girls. Singing girls. They held ‘Beatles we love you’ and ‘WELCOME,’ signs. When the plane touched down at 1:20 p.m. the girls chanted, ‘We want Beatles.’” (Gardner, 1964, p.25) The throngs of screaming fans at the airport that day were exhibiting the signs of what had already been defined in Europe as “Beatlemania.” The Beatles—Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Star— had flown stateside for their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan first noticed the musicians due to “thousands of youngsters” waiting excitedly in the rain to see the Beatles in London. Not only had Beatlemania already taken hold in Europe, it was beginning to drive aspects of the group’s popularity worldwide. One could say Beatlemania is what brought the Beatles to America via Ed Sullivan. The term “Beatlemania” was first used in a British tabloid, The Daily Mirror. The Beatles were performing in Cheltenham, England Oct. 15, 1963. According to Andi Lothian, a Scot involved in the entertainment business at the time, “The band was nearly swamped by these young women,” (Tay, 2007). When a reporter asked Lothian what was going on he said, “don’t worry, it’s just Beatlemania.” The term appeared in the subsequent story published in the Mirror and was quickly picked up by the press to describe the hysterical behavior witnessed in reaction to the Beatles. Long before the Beatles there had been incidents of young fans swooning over teen idols, typically singers. Frank Sinatra had quite a following. When Sinatra opened at the Paramount Theater in New York City, Dec. 30, 1942, Jack Benny reportedly said, “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion.” (O'Brien, 2011). Benny was speaking of the bobby soxers who found the young Frank Sinatra “dreamy.” Elvis Presley, too, drove the girls wild. At one of his first live performances, July 17, 1954, in Memphis, Tenn., he was so nervous his legs began to shake, accentuated by his large pant legs and young women in the audience began to scream. In September, playing a high school gym in Bethel Springs, Tenn. Elvis had “’an electric effect’ on the small audience, ‘particularly the girls.’” (Guralnick, Ernst; Jorgensen, 1964, p.21). A psychologist wrote, “The Beatles follow a line of glamorous figures who aroused passionate cries and deep swoons. Most prominent in the 1940s was Frank Sinatra and in the 1950s Elvis Presley. Their glory passed when they got too old to be teenage idols or when teenagers got too old to need them. The same, it is predicted, will happen to the Beatles.” (Science News Letter, 1964, p.141). Psychologists were as puzzled as parents over the explosive effect the Beatles had on American teenagers’ “hearts and vocal chords….Psychologists generally agree that the very fact that adults worry about phenomena like the Beatles makes them extra appealing.” The report states that one psychologist said there is a need for expressiveness particularly in girls. “Screaming and swooning over the Beatles offers ‘a release of sexual energy.’ Boys have sports as an outlet for their energies and do not seem to get carried away.” (Science News Letter, 1964). There were those who initially dismissed the Beatles popularity as the product of great public relations, promotions or marketing. “It is nonsense to attribute the Beatles’ success to skillful and effective promotion. No promotion ever conceived has maintained such continuity and diversity of support as the Beatles have achieved. Other similar groups have had as effective, if not better, promotion, but have failed to manifest the Beatle phenomenon. (Davies, Evan. pg 273) And yet, there was a certain amount of marketing and PR behind the Fab Four’s popularity. First off, there was a race between two United States record labels to get the first Beatle record out in the states. Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, released Introducing…the Beatles Jan. 10, 1964 getting the jump on the larger label, Capitol Records, which released Meet the Beatles! 10 days later. “News accounts of Beatlemania’s emergence in Britain appearing in the New York Times Magazine, Variety and elsewhere spawned such demand for Beatles records that Capitol Records rushed its Beatles releases ahead of schedule and distributed a ‘million copies of a four-page tabloid full of publicity on the Beatles [the National Record News] to disc jockeys, buyers and the press,’ in order to further increase demand throughout the United States.” (Frontani, p.64) Capitol Records also sent free LPs to hundreds of independent stations, which included an interview with the Beatles. Beatlemania could help the DJs. In turn the DJs would promote Capitol Records by promoting the Beatles. By the time of the Beatles Feb. 7, 1964, first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Beatlemania was firmly in place across Europe and was catching on in the United States. From the encounter with Beatlemania at Heathrow Airport, Sullivan signed the as-yet-unknown-in-the-states Beatles to headline three appearances on his show, which in turn convinced Capitol Records to release I Want to Hold Your Hand in the United States and back it with a $40,000 promotional campaign. (History.com, 1963) Savvy public relations certainly helped fuel Beatlemania. In their first U.S. tour the Beatles not only headlined the Ed Sullivan Show three times, with 73 million viewers watching the first performance alone, they also played Carnegie Hall and the Washington Coliseum. Beatlemania hysteria greeted them at each venue. When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1966 Beatlemania hit such a frenzy that the musicians could not hear themselves playing and neither could the audience of 55,000. Ultimately the music was run through the stadium PA system. “The vast majority of the audience was composed of teenaged girls dressed in the latest mode….When the Beatles gained the field at 9:20 p.m., the shrieks began, building from a low moan to hurricane proportions. For the next half-hour, there was no let-up. Many girls cried, and a few waved articles of underclothing. The name Paul—the only unmarried Beatle—was on numerous lips. (Montgomery, 1966). “The police…suddenly found their hands full of struggling, weeping, hysterical teen-agers. Several dozen girls were carried off, overcome. Others tried to rush the bandstand, but were apprehended.” (Montgomery, 1966). “Their immature lungs produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it quickly crossed the line from enthusiasm into hysteria….The sound was accompanied by weeping, stamping, leaping, weaving — and in dozens of cases, fainting — by adolescent girls.” Several of the fans in the first row of the grandstands moaned, wept and called to the special police on the field: ‘Please, please. Give us some blades of the grass. They walked on the grass.’” (Montgomery, 1966). The Beatles were a huge news story, but certainly not the only big story in 1964, 1965 and 1966. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963, six months before the Beatles first U.S. appearance on Feb. 7, 1964. The November before their debut on Sullivan’s show President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And just a month prior the United States Surgeon General Luther Leonidas Terry reported in January that smoking may be hazardous to your health. The United States Post Office was adopting the ZIP code system, Valium and Lava Lamps made their debut and Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein exhibited their work in the first large-scale exhibition of Pop Art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It the midst of all this four Brits were capturing the nation’s attention — the world’s attention — in a big way. Countless television-news reports and newspaper articles reported more on the Beatlemania aspects of the Beatles than on their performance or music. The hysterical phenomenon was spreading. “…Beatlemania creeps in slowly. Collarless jackets, usually worn Saturday nights on Forty-second Street, are turning up in the strangest places, like the safe suburbs. Teenagers who once considered the G.I. crew-cut the height of adolescent fashion are letting their locks curl down their necks and over ears and across foreheads. Twenty thousand beatle [sic] wigs have been sold. (Gardner, 1964). In 1964, compared to today, there was significantly less communication media, even more so for media that would cover the Beatles. The nightly news was limited to 15-minute segments each evening on the three major networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. Radio disc jockeys promoted the Beatles, which is not the same as reporting. Newspapers ran stories with poor quality half-tone images. Rolling Stone magazine was not founded until 1967. Fans had less information and learned about the Beatles by extrapolating from the still images running in newspapers and magazines. Frequently, what the public saw, because that’s what the press was covering, was Beatlemania more than the Beatles themselves. While fans could see the symptoms of Beatlemania were physical—screaming, mobbing, fainting, crying—researchers might look at Beatlemania through the lens of Ray Birdwhistle’s theory of nonverbal, kinesics theory of communication. He says all body movement has potential meaning, behavior can be analyzed, bodily motion is part of our social system, people are influenced by visible bodily activity of others and how body movement functions in communication can be investigated. One might imagine a pre-teen girl, say in Wichita, Kan. She had heard of the Beatles, seen them on Ed Sullivan, had one 45 rpm record by the group and was hungry to learn more. Part of how she learned about the Beatles was through watching the body movements of those who had seen the Beatles perform, owned more of their records and were older and wiser than she. Applied to this young girl or anyone, Kinesic theory indicates that Beatlemania was a large part of how the world knew and what the world knew about the Beatles. The Beatles’ popularity grew. In April, after their February 1964 appearances, the Beatles held the top five positions in the Billboard Top 40 singles in America, an unprecedented achievement. The top songs in America as listed on April 4, were, in order: Can't Buy Me Love, Twist and Shout, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Please Please Me. All five were Beatles hits. The Beatles continued to record, perform and stir up their fans until August 29, 1966 when the Beatles played their last live concert at Candlestick Park to a crowd of 25,000 screaming fans. On that night The Beatles retired from touring and live performing, and with that Beatlemania subsided until it was all but eradicated from the land. With the end of the performing/touring era the Beatles were free to explore their art of music in new ways, but they never again performed in front of a live audience. In that sense Beatlemania is also what gave the four lads from Liverpool their artistic freedom. references Davies, Evan. (1969). Psychological Characteristics of Beatle Mania. Journal of the History of Ideas, University of Pennsylvania Press. Frontani, Michael R. (2007). The Beatles: Image and the Media. University Press of Mississippi. Gardner, Paul. (1964). 3,000 Fans Greet British Beatles: 4 Rock ‘n’ Roll Performs Hailed by Teenagers. New York Times. Guralnick, Peter and Jorgensen, Ernst. (1999). Elvis Day by Day: The Definitive Record of His Life and Music. Ballantine. Montgomery, Paul L. (1966). The Beatles Bring Shea to a Wild Pitch of Hysteria, New York Times. No author. (1964). Beatles Reaction Puzzles Even Psychologists, Science News Letter 85:141. O'Brien, Geoffrey. (2011). 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