Nancy Johnson, left, as a 13-year-old, with her best friend, Virginia Mayor, also 13, at the Beatles’ first concert in Cleveland on Sept. 15, 1964. (PHOTO PROVIDED)
My mother, Kay Lucarelli, discovered the Beatles. Like a modern-day Paul Revere, she heard the rumbling of the British Invasion long before it reached our shores.
“This is going to be important,” she said, flicking on the TV so I could watch a clip of the Beatles on the Jack Paar show in January 1964, “You’re going to be a teenager. You need to know about this stuff.”
I didn’t need convincing. By the time the Beatles touched down at JFK airport on Feb. 7, 1964, I was rocking Beatlemania at full throttle. For the first and only time in her life, my mom had been right.
Two days later, when Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles on his Sunday show, my father huffed down to the basement to listen to Italian music, my brothers couldn’t stop laughing at the Beatles’ girly hair, my mother shushed the boys and clucked over the Beatles’ bad teeth and my overwhelmed 4-year-old sister burst into tears.
As for me, I was mesmerized.
One week later, on my 13th birthday, the Beatles appeared for the second time on Ed Sullivan. I was certain they had been invented for me, a fab-gear quartet created specifically to catapult me into teenage-land.
For the rest of the year, my mother carted me to Beatles’ rallies and hosted the manic members of my Beatles Fan Club, The Jelly Babies, named after George Harrison’s favorite candy.
The thing is, it wasn’t really all that cool to be a Beatlemaniac. Oh sure, everybody liked the Beatles and bought their records. But carrying your peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school in a Beatles lunchbox was the fastest way to be demoted to the nerd table. You had to hunt out other Beatlemaniacs in order to have a few friends.
But I didn’t care. If you didn’t collect Beatles cards, speak in a fake British accent or sit through seven consecutive runs of “A Hard Day’s Night,” you were no friend of mine. And you definitely were not going to join me at the upcoming Beatles concert.
It was the WHK Radio Good Guys who scooped the WIXY 1260 Supermen to the Beatles the first time around, hosting the band at Cleveland’s Public Hall on Sept. 15, 1964.
Fans had to enter to win the opportunity to purchase tickets. My family flooded WHK with requests, and I eventually won several opportunities to purchase the $6.50 tickets.
There was no doubt in my mind that my friend, Virginia, would go with me to the concert.
Through that long summer of ’64, Virginia and I had sat up late into the night writing glowing letters to Paul McCartney and sobbing because John Lennon was married. We recited Beatles lyrics as if we were memorizing the Dead Sea Scrolls, and played “All My Loving” so much that my father threatened to throw my record player out the window.
When the time finally came for the Beatles concert, we weren’t allowed to go to it alone. An entourage followed us to Public Hall: my mother, Virginia’s mother and father and two of my cousins.
We tried to ignore all of them as we graciously made a pact with each other that if Paul noticed one of us and not the other, we wouldn’t get mad.
When the Beatles bounded onstage — microscopic from our seats in the 28th row — an enormous sound rose from the 11,000 girls in the audience. It was nearly palpable, a wall of screams, so loud I could almost see it, so loud I couldn’t hear the Beatles, and so loud it made me do something I have never done before or since — I swooned. Nope, I didn’t faint — I swooned.
I was standing on the back of the seat in front of me when it happened. I fell backwards, knocking Virginia into the aisle behind me. It took a couple security guards and Virginia’s father to retrieve her. Meanwhile I scrambled back onto the seat in front of me, ignoring my mother who was attempting to check for cuts and bruises.
Meanwhile a bunch of girls had stormed the stage, the concert was stopped abruptly, and the entire audience burst into tears.
The Beatles eventually returned and finished the concert, but I couldn’t hear a thing because the ungodly barrage of screams rose up again, the first ever human surround-sound.
I couldn’t hear them, I could barely see them, but I was in the very same room the Beatles were in. I was breathing the very same air the Beatles were breathing. Life just couldn’t get any better.
On the way home, Virginia and I couldn’t stop screaming, crying and reliving every moment. And although 50 years later I’ve forgotten many of the moments of that concert, I still remember how I felt that evening. Over the moon. Madly, passionately, devastatingly in love with the Beatles.
When I think back to that time, I know the Beatles were the most important thing in my young life. But now, I have come to realize it was never just about the Beatles.
It was about Virginia sharing my feverish Beatles angst and when I swooned, taking the fall for me; my mother helping me glue hundreds of jelly beans to my Jelly Babies banner; my dad smiling ear-to-ear when he brought home a Beatles single for me; my cousin and I at the corner drugstore for hours, reading Beatles magazines; my British pen pal; those crazy stories I wrote where the Beatles magically came to live with our family; and always, always, always the sound of 12-inch vinyl on my record player, spinning me into my teen years.
The Beatles did indeed set me on a course I followed for the rest of my life. By high school I was one of Jane Scott’s Plain Dealer Young Ohio Correspondents, interviewing artists and writing about them for my school newspaper. Eventually, I wandered into the music business and enjoyed a 30-year career working for several different record labels.
I never stopped writing stories and actually have sold a few. Best of all, Virginia and I are still friends. We meet every September for the Cleveland Italian Film Festival.
I’m happy to report we are still Beatlemaniacs.
Contact reporter Nancy Johnson at (330) 721-4065 or areanews@medina-gazette.com.
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