Aug. 27, 1964 - What will they do when the wave of Beatlemania subsides?
Beatle John Lennon had the answer today in a Cincinnati press conference: “Count the money.”
The four British singers sat it out in sweltering heat in a private room in Cincinnati Gardens while newspaper, radio, and T.V. men fired questions.
The Beatles — Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and Lennon — were cheerful and cooperative. They answered questions on almost everything, sometimes wittily, often seriously, and occasionally in a manner that cut cocky questioners down to size. Never, though, did a Beatle crack border on malice.
When a T.V. reporter asked what excuse they had for their collar-length hair, Lennon began: “Well, it just grows out y’er head…” McCartney cut in: “We don’t need an excuse. You need an excuse.”
A newspaperman from Dayton, who said the four ought to be able to handle a crowd of 30,000 without police protection, was told by Lennon: “Well, maybe you could. You’re fatter than we are.”
Somebody asked the boys what they thought of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. McCartney, baby-faced member of the group and their most ready speaker, admitted he did not know too much about the American political scene. But he said he thought “Mr. Johnson was a better man.”
Teenagers stand up and scream piercingly when the Beatles appear. Why?
McCartney said none of them knew, but he had heard teenagers pay to go to their shows just to scream. “A lot of them don’t even want to listen,” he said, “because they have got the records.”
A reporter asked what they thought of the psychiatrist who drew an analogy between the hysteria generated by their beat and the speeches of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Lennon said abruptly: “Tell him to shut up. He’s off his head.”
What would they have done had they not become Beatles?
“We would have just been bad entertainers,” Harrison said. They all have had only one ambition, to be in show business.
Ringo said he could not see anything to replace their magical power other than a new generation of teenagers with different tastes.
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