Love them, they did.
When The Beatles launched their US invasion in 1964 — complete with their historic debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — the mop-topped Brits were under siege by the screaming masses 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.
But as the Fab Four were taking refuge from the hysteria at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, the Ronettes came to their rescue.
“We were already friends with them from England. George [Harrison] was dating Estelle, my sister, so it was very simple,” says head Ronnie Spector — front woman of the “Be My Baby” girl group — in 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.’ ”
But Spector, along with the other two Ronettes, came to the hotel and orchestrated The Beatles’ great escape uptown to the home of the Apollo.
“So I got a limousine, we went down the backstairs and went to Harlem,” recalls the singer, who passed away in 2022. “I said, ‘I’m taking you to Harlem. Nobody will notice you up there.’ And they didn’t. They thought they were a bunch of Spanish dorks, because it was Spanish Harlem. So they didn’t pay them any mind.
“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 also gave The Beatles a chance to visit the mecca of African American music that had influenced them in 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.
Indeed, The Beatles covered the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” — written by Motown master Smokey Robinson, who is featured in the documentary — and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” before they ever even came 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.’”
But The Beatles, putting their Brit spin on American R&B and rock ’n’ roll, would conquer the US on that legendary 14-day trip 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.”
Still, Sir Paul believes that the US was ready to let loose from its grief after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 — just three months before The Beatles arrived on Feb. 7,1964.
“When we came, America had been in mourning,” he reflects. “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, though, doesn’t see The Beatles as the leader of any kind of revolution when they landed on US shores 60 years ago.
“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!’”
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