Love them, they did.
When The Beatles launched their US invasion in 1964 — full with their historic debut look on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — the mop-topped Brits have been beneath siege by the screaming lots upon their arrival in New York.
“It was like being in the eye of a hurricane,” says John Lennon in “Beatles ’64,” the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary that premieres on Disney+ Nov. 29.
However because the Fab 4 have been taking refuge from the hysteria at Manhattan’s Plaza Lodge, the Ronettes got here to their rescue.
“We were already friends with them from England. George [Harrison] was dating Estelle, my sister, so it was very simple,” says Ronnie Spector — frontwoman of the “Be My Baby” lady group — within the doc.
“John called me at my house, and he said, ‘Ronnie, we’re prisoners. We can’t get out. The whole place is surrounded by girls around the whole Plaza building.’ ”
However Spector, together with the opposite two Ronettes, got here to the lodge and orchestrated The Beatles’ nice escape uptown to the house of the Apollo.
“So I got a limousine, we went down the backstairs and went to Harlem,” recollects the singer, who handed away in 2022. “I mentioned, ‘I’m taking you to Harlem. No person will discover you up there.’ And so they didn’t. They thought they have been a bunch of Spanish dorks, as a result of it was Spanish Harlem. In order that they didn’t pay them any thoughts.
“We went into Sherman’s Bar-B-Q [at] 151st and Amsterdam,” she continued. “They went in, and they loved it because nobody recognized them. You know, the black guys are eating their ribs, and the Spanish guys.”
It additionally gave The Beatles an opportunity to go to the mecca of African American music that had influenced them of their early years — from Little Richard, whose signature “Wooo!” was imitated by Paul McCartney on “I Saw Her Standing There,” to the Miracles and the Isley Brothers.
Certainly, The Beatles lined the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” — written by Motown grasp Smokey Robinson, who’s featured within the documentary — and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” earlier than they ever even got here to the US.
“We were glad, we were so glad. It was great for us that they did our songs,” says Ronald Isley. “Paul McCartney would often say, ‘If it wasn’t for the Isley Brothers, we would still be in Liverpool.’”
However The Beatles, placing their Brit spin on American R&B and rock ’n’ roll, would conquer the US on that legendary 14-day journey that took them from New York to Washington, DC, to Miami.
“Coming to America, this was, ‘Give me your huddled masses,’” says McCartney. “This was, to us, the land of freedom. It was funny because after we got here, we learned it wasn’t quite the story.”
Nonetheless, Sir Paul believes that the US was able to let free from its grief after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 — simply three months earlier than The Beatles arrived on Feb. 7,1964.
“When we came, America had been in mourning,” he displays. “It was quite shortly after Kennedy had been assassinated. Maybe America needed something like The Beatles to lift it out of mourning and just sort of say, ‘Life goes on.’ ”
Lennon, although, doesn’t see The Beatles because the chief of any type of revolution after they landed on US shores 60 years in the past.
“The thing I didn’t like was the insistence that we’d led something,” he says. “So my picture of it now is there was a ship going to discover the New World, you know? And The Beatles were in the crow’s nest … and we just say, ‘Land ho!’”
