John Kruth - This Bird Has Flown: The Enduring Beauty of Rubber Soul, Fifty Years on

I Still Feel Fine

I was nine years old and nothing else mattered, except for maybe... girls. Any interest I had in sports was instantly crushed on the night of Sunday, February 9,1964. One look at the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and I immediately abandoned my (very brief) lifelong dream of playing third base for the New York Yankeesmy future in pro ball was over before they finished singing All My Loving.

Although I thought John Lennon was cool, bobbing up and down as if he were riding an invisible horse as he strummed his guitar, it was Ringo Starr, with his hair flying everywhere, laughing at the madness of the moment as he bashed the beat, that made my heart pound in double time. I had simply never seen anyone having that much fun before in my life.

Trash, my pop grumbled as the mop-tops bowed in unison in their nicely tailored suits and pudding-bowl hairdos. Nothing but a lotta noise. From my dads response, it was clear my odds of getting a drum set for my next birthday were pretty slim.

That spring a bunch of us fourth graders got together and conspired to dress up like the Beatles to lip-synch Twist and Shout at the annual school talent show. I auditioned for the part of John, giving it my best shot, bobbing up and down on my own invisible horse while trying to strum a guitar. I had actually learned to play a couple folk songs, like Kumbaya and Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, on a nylon-string guitar the previous summer at sleepaway camp, so I already knew how to form an A chord. I imagined the whole auditorium filled with screaming girls as I rocked as hard as a fourth grader could. But a minute later I got the thumbs down from my teacher, Mr. Grant. Crestfallen, I was heading dejectedly toward the exit when he caught my profile in the stage lights. Ringo! he shouted, inspired by my ample Semitic nose. (Richard Starkey, despite the many rumors at the time, was not Jewish.)

My friend Danny Schecter, whose parents had recently bought him a brand-new sparkling set of champagne-pink Rogers drums, had been slated to play Ringo, although he looked more like George. Schecter had even taken a couple of drum lessons and could actually stumble through the Surfaris classic surf anthem Wipe Out. But it was quickly decided, much to his dismay, that he would be George and that I should play Ringo, although Id never sat behind a drum kit in my life.

The day of the show soon arrived. Backstage, dressed like four junior bankers in our nice, neat suits and ties, we waited for Mr. Grant to ceremoniously place the Beatle wigs over our crew cuts. That hair falling in our eyes seemed to give us an intoxicating new powersomething TV and magazines called sex appeal.

As the curtain rose, the girls immediately began to scream, even before Mr. Grant had the chance to drop the needle on a new 45 of Twist and Shout. As the first chord of the song burst through the P.A., we broke into our well-rehearsed routine. Everything was going fine until, in the heat of the moment, I accidentally whacked the snare drum out of time, and everyone started to see through our little charade. I inadvertently slapped a cymbal and the crowd began to turn ugly. I noticed some of the older kids in the back pointing at us and laughing. Hoping to convince the scoffers, I began shaking my head like Ringo while waving the drumsticks in the air. Suddenly the wig went flying off my head and landed on the floor, where it laid like a dead cat. I sat there stunned, naked, my crew cut exposed. I tried to carry on, but my palms, slippery with sweat, could no longer hold the drumsticks. A moment later they fell out of my hands and came crashing down on the cymbals.

As the record ended John, Paul, and George all took their well-rehearsed bows as I bolted from the stage, down the hall, and out of the school door. From that day forth I was known as Ringo, or, even worse... the Spaz!

After the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show , the world was a different place. Girls across the country were suddenly taking a second look at their boyfriends and wondering what they were doing going out with such Neanderthals. Overnight crew cuts, Arrow shirts, and penny loafers had become relics of a square past. Bangs and pointy-toed ankle boots, previously a fashion essential of hoods and greasers, were now in vogue. You were gold if you could fake a British accent.

I never went anywhere without my ear glued to a transistor radio, listening to Bruce Morrow, aka Cousin Brucie, on the local Top 40 station WABCor as he called it, W-A-Beatle-Cor Murray the K, whod dubbed himself the Fifth Beatle. I would do anything, even rake leaves, to get my mom to drive me to the department store, Two Guys from Harrison, to buy whatever new Beatles record had just come out.

Whenever a new song by the Beatles was released, Baldonis pizza parlor was the first place in town to get it on their jukebox. So after school, Id hop on my Schwinn and race over to check it out.

It was the Beatlesor rather, my total obsession with themthat made Mr. Baldoni blow his top one day and throw me out of his pizza parlor. I had just stopped by the bank, where Id cashed in a dollar bill for ten dimes, which I then proceeded to pump, one after the next, into his jukebox, with the intent of playing the new Beatles single, I Feel Fine, ten times in a row. Id actually made it to seven or eight, as I still had a couple of dimes left in my pocket when Mr. Baldoni began to scream in Italian as he threw open the door and tossed me out onto the sidewalk. Then he told me to stay out of his restaurant for good. And dont-a come-a back-a no more! he hollered.

I liked Mr. Baldoni, even though his pizza sucked. My moms spaghetti beat his any day. But he liked music. His jukebox played lots of corny old Italian songs like Dean Martin singing Amore and the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra, who sang about Chicago and Witchcraft. He had lots of old rock n roll on there, tooElvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and sad, old Roy Orbisonmusic that greasers liked. He even had some black singers on his jukebox, like Ray Charles and James Brown. I think Baldonis wouldve been the first integrated place in my hometown if there had actually been any black people living there.