The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

Beatles '64 (documentary)
A Hard Day's Night (film, 1964)
A Hard Day's Night (UK record, 1964)
Beatles For Sale (UK record, 1964)
                                                            "We were the army that never was."
                                                                                             -John Lennon to Marshall McLuhan 

    A while back I shared the introduction to a book project on the music of 1964. Had I continued with the project, I wanted the second chapter to be about the Beatles. In a weird way, I've always felt that, despite being the biggest band in the world at the time, the music the Beatles made in 1964 has always been a bit underrated, overshadowed, as it were, by the albums they would release for the rest of their careers. In the introduction, I tried to do a good job of explaining why that is, how the music and lyrics the Beatles were writing at breakneck speed in 1964 were seen to be immature compared to the "adult" subjects (one night stands, self-alienation, disillusionment) and musical sophistication (sitar, harpsichord, strings) they would release in 1965 and after. 
It would appear that this view might have changed given not one but two documentaries within the past eight years (The Beatles: Eight Days a Week and now Beatles 64) that cover 1964 fairly extensively. I found Eight Days a Week to be pretty forgettable. It seemed to exist so that there would be reason to remix and remaster the Live at Hollywood Bowl tapes and wrap a documentary around that. Honestly, centering a Beatles documentary around "the touring years" was always going to be mixed blessing: no one doubts that the Beatles could be an amazing live act, but, more often than not, the touring years as the biggest band in the world was merely an excuse to get them in front of as many screaming fans as possible. They couldn't hear themselves and no amount of remixing and remastering can help us hear them in this context either. 
In-between these two documentaries focused on the early Beatles came Peter Jackson's epic nine hour Get Back documentary. There's an interesting mirroring between these two periods: the Get Back/Let It Be project was the Beatles attempting to return to the type of music they could easily play live if they wished. If the two 1964 documentaries are about the ascendency of the Beatles, then Get Back is the descent. The two 1964 documentaries show the Beatles moving out into the world, even if that world is seen from the back seats of cars and hotel rooms; Get Back is about what happens when you're stuck in a room with four people with whom you've been stuck in rooms most of the decade and you realize you can actually open the door and get out. "See you at the pub, lads." 
Get Back is pretty much universally loved. I love it. I find the opening 20-30 minutes of the second episode, after George has left the band and Paul is waiting on John (then going through heroin withdrawal) to arrive, to be some of the most emotionally devastating material ever associated with the Beatles. Since Get Back in 2021 there has been a feeling that the desire for more Beatles "content" (god help me) might be waning. There was the great Revolver box set in 2022 but 2023 saw a remix/remaster of the red and blue greatest hits records coupled with the "final" Beatles song "Now and Then," a song cobbled together from a John demo, recordings of George playing guitar in 1995 and Paul and Ringo playing instruments and singing in (presumably) 2023. The recording also apparently features a stew of AI selected Beatles moments throughout their catalogue to make the final Beatles' song more Beatles-like. It's a song that I enjoyed listening to when it came out and haven't thought about since. 
So when Disney+ announced it was releasing yet another Beatles documentary in time for the holidays--along with a box set of all the U.S. albums in mono--there really wasn't much excitement. There was definitely a feeling that the Apple/Disney monolith that had turned the Beatles into another franchise (the Beatles Collection is a tab on the Disney+ app along Star Wars and Marvel) was scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. Yet, yet Beatles 64 is actually pretty good and interesting. I think the first thing that suggests we might not just be dealing with another hagiographic depiction is the involvement of Martin Scorsese and his long-time collaborator David Tedeschi, who had previously worked as an editor on Scorsese's documentary about George Harrison, Living in the Material World as well as Scorsese's documentary about Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review. 
The Rolling Thunder Review film, especially, playfully warped and outright lied about its subject, with said subject happily engaging with aforementioned lies throughout the film. Such things might be expected of Bob Dylan, but you rarely see the post-break up Beatles as anything other than god-like figures from whom nothing but the truth is emitted. The closest the group had to a trickster (and, therefore, was the rawest member with regard to the truth) was John Lennon. George loved to lie about the group itself, but reserved that for parodies such as the Rutles. Paul was too busy not taking himself seriously to bother with not taking his former group seriously. Ringo was a tiny train conductor at some point. While documentaries like Get Back produced epic, nearly ten hour narratives about our demigods and whether or not they would perform up on the roof, the Beatles have never really experimented with their history the way Dylan has. Just as the albums mixed for Blu Ray/Atmos/Dolby etc have a sonic uniformity that never existed on the original albums, the narrative the Beatles have finally settled upon is somewhat uniform in its presentation. The documentary Beatles 64 doesn't really play with that narrative much, but what it does is open its heart to the world and let the world come in. 
My favorite part of the documentary takes place in Harlem, with archival footage of a reporter asking several different groups of African Americans what they thought of the Beatles. Little kids are kind of indifferent, teenage girls (unsurprisingly) are entranced and offer up who they think the cutest Beatle is. Finally the interviewer finds a youngish African American man to give his opinion: "I think they're disgusting," he says indifferently, behind sunglasses. "Disgusting?!" the interviewer responds, taken aback, "well, who do you listen to? Who isn't disgusting?" "The Miles Davis quartet." As someone who has loved Miles Davis and the Beatles all (well, in the case of Miles Davis, most of) his life, I found this moment a wonderful reminder of both the amazing music being created at this moment in time and, yes, how absolutely (to put it milder than the aforementioned interviewee did) inconsequential something like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" would sound to someone listening to Kind of Blue in 1964. 
What Beatles 64 does is chronicle the material culture that was produced from the Beatles' trip to America, the land of commerce, in 1964. People proudly show their cheaply made Beatles wigs. We see archival footage of young women (who all look like my mom of her friends in the New York of the early 1960s, which means that this whole review must be taken with a grain of salt because several times I actually broke down watching this thing, missing my parents and realizing that what I am watching is a memory of a world I was only obliquely aware of, yet a world that so impressed itself upon me that I would not know what my identity would be were I not raised amongst this stuff) stalking the Beatles in a hotel, asking the camera operators if they've seen the Beatles anywhere in the area. Leonard Bernstein's daughter talks about wheeling the TV into the dining room so that she could show her father the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. My favorite sequence, whether real or a little bit of editing trickery I'm not sure, is a young woman in a kitchen with her family watching the Beatles perform in Miami during their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. She seems entranced, not in the ecstatic way the young women in New York are, rather she focuses on the TV and kind of sways her head to the music, oblivious of the family surrounding her. And before I could think "there's something Lynchian about the scene," sure enough David Lynch shows up as a talking head, with actual footage he took from the Beatles show to which he went, eyes moist, talking about the Beatles and the healing power of music in general (I wrote the paragraph before Lynch passed and now realize that this is most likely Lynch's last filmed appearance).
As for the Beatles themselves, it's fascinating to see them here, looking almost identical to the Beatles they would play in A Hard Days Night. Yet, in that film, the Beatles play cool, detached, versions of themselves, seemingly always one step ahead of the crowds, the managers and all those who want something from them. We understand that they are cool, while everyone around them tries to access some of what makes the Beatles the Beatles. In a scene I think about often, George is pulled into am advertising executive's office, assuming he is a Beatles fan rather than an actual member of the group. When the executives show him styles that they know will be a hit with teenagers, George points out that the styles are "grotty," short for grotesque. He's quickly ushered out of the office. There's a fascinating doubling going on: the true Beatles fan would never be so co-opted as to fall for the "Beatles" fashion sold to young people in 1964. Not only do you feel that to be true, George himself has confirmed that for you. This is the beginning of what Thomas Frank would call "the conquest of cool:" assuming the Beatles are trying to sell you something, i.e. more Beatles records, the Beatles themselves are distinguishing what they are selling from what the Beatles' industrial complex is selling. 
Contrast this to the figure of Murray the K. A disk jockey who seemed hopelessly hokey in his Beatles wig and hipster phraseology. In a much later interview, George Harrison seems genuinely perplexed as to how Murry the K managed to ingratiate himself to the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein so that he would constantly be interviewing, following, haranguing the Beatles during their American visit. At any moment the viewer expects that one of the Beatles, any of the Beatles, will tell off this weirdo but they do nothing but humor him in his increasingly ridiculous and pushy appearances throughout the documentary. If the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night were all knowing, impervious to the foolish press, managers and fans, the real Beatles represented in Beatles 64  really did seem to be deer caught in the preverbal headlights of the global village (McLuhan is genuinely a co-star for sections of this documentary). 
But what about the music? If anything gets lost in both Beatles 64 and maybe A Hard Day's Night, it's the music. Historically, the Beatles of 1964 weren't really about the music, even if the talking heads in the documentary give lip service to it. Given the music that would come after 1964, it's difficult to justify a discussion about the music independent of the media onslaught that accompanied it. And yet I think the music is remarkable. In fact, I wish the music could be divorced from the tours, press conferences and television appearances that accompanied it. Because, of course, what the artists were doing while the hurricane swirled around them was document their feelings. First, it should be noted that in 1963 the Beatles released two records that featured a mix of originals and covers taken from their Cavern and Hamburg days. The third record from 1964, A Hard Days Night, features no covers. The opening guitar riff from "A Hard Day's Night," the first track of A Hard Day's Night, has been the subject of decades-long speculation. The emotional depth of songwriting by Lennon and McCartney is as good and significant as anything they wrote later on. 
My entire book on the music of 1964 (were it to ever be written) would be called Someday When We're Dreaming, a lyric from "Things We Said Today" from A Hard Day's Night. I think the Beatles of 1964 are just as complex and exploratory as anything they did for the rest of their careers. The idea that they would all be dreaming someday about what they had already said in 1964 suggests that they themselves never desired to separate the artistic endeavors undertaken as the Beatles. So much of the Beatles music is about anticipating some future idea of self ("When I'm 64") projected against some version of the self in childhood or some state of immaturity ("Strawberry Fields"). They were already mature enough to express how time in relation to the self is a malleable concept for the songwriter. The I, i.e. the ego, is the defense mechanism against the tempest of past and future which moves the subject in time. "I'll Cry Instead" is about the wounded ego that both must express itself and cannot express itself for fear that it will be mocked and belittled. The ego cannot give itself over to the precipice of oblivion so it can only coyly ask in the subjunctive "If I Fell...Would you promise." It's worth remembering that around this time the Beatles met (and apparently got high with) Bob Dylan who mistook the "I can't hide" of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I get high." When corrected, Dylan apparently asked "why would you want to hide your love?" For the wounded egos that populated Beatles lyrics, it's pretty clear why love would want to be hidden. 
Beatles for Sale is the follow up record to A Hard Day's Night. It returns to the older format of originals plus covers, but the originals are the most complex lyrics the band had released up until that point. "No Reply" is, along with any number of other songs in the catalogue, John's very disturbing ease in which he falls back into the angry, violent, stalker-like boyfriend. Only to be followed up by John's overwhelming self pity in "I'm a Loser," which might very well be a sequel to "No Reply" in so far as this is the kind of self pitying shit a man who'd been stalking his ex might say to his friends after a few drinks. That said, the idea that Lennon might be so nakedly honest on a Beatles record is already a fascinating step forward from anything they had recorded previously, The next track "Baby's in Black" is all de-tuned drone and faux-murder ballad. The dual harmonies (beautiful in parts) seem incapable of understanding why their latest paramour is still mourning for a past love. It's their own take on a murder ballad but, given they seem like perfectly nice boys from Liverpool, there's no murder here. "I'll Follow the Sun" could be Paul's credo: no matter how dark things get, you should just follow the sun. "Mr. Moonlight" is the closest the Beatles got to exotica. 
Beatles for Sale is the end result of Beatles 64 (not A Hard Day's Night). By the end of the year the Beatles are clearly tired, alienated from themselves, commodified too many times to give a shit any longer. The album itself is combination of so many things (Dylan's influence, something unheard before, a bunch of covers they'd been playing since before they were signed) that it almost can't help but be a harbinger of things to come. No wonder Capitol in the states didn't know what to do with the record. It was spread out over several releases where it made even less sense. This was a band tired with being the band they were in A Hard Day's Night as well as the band depicted in Beatles 64. I'm not sure it was even an aesthetic choice. They physically couldn't be the band happy to entertain people like Murry the K all the time. They'd have one more year of doing shit like that, but by the end of 1965, the band went on a wildcat strike, ready to withhold any new Beatles music until they had some time off. The Beatles were conscripted into some kind of role, but they also realized the power that comes with being that which those in power wish to conscript above all others.