The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years

Rating: 5

The problem confronting any documentary about The Beatles is that of finding something new to say about them.  Their music, their personalities, their history, their influences, their influence, the phenomenon of world fame on a scale never seen before or, putatively, since they hit the big time in 1962, it’s all been dissected. So THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK — THE TOURING YEARS comes as a welcome and surprise addition to the voluminous canon of Beatlemania. It hews, as the title suggest, to the years of constant touring that the Fab Four did as they rode their first wave of mega-fame, told as eye-witness accounts, from the lads themselves, to Larry Kane, the reporter who accompanied them on their U.S. tour in 1964 (and whose father warned him about how dangerous they were), to Whoopi Goldberg describing what it like first seeing them on television and deciding that they were beyond color.  It’s at once an intimate look from the inside out about what it was like to be them, and a literate consideration from the outside in on their impact on the culture, including a memorable clip of Paul McCartney being asked back in the day about his thoughts on their place in the culture and shrugging it off by replying “It’s not culture, it’s all a laugh.”

All four Beatles speak, George Harrison and John Lennon in interviews that spanned their professional lives, and Paul and Ringo Starr in interviews done for the film. Those interviews form the backbone of everything else as they describe, and we see in footage, both familiar and rare, the giddy ebullience in their first taste of fame and the slow, inevitable, march through fatigue and, finally, to an irritated ennui as they are overworked in order to take advantage of a fame that was not seen as long term proposition. The latter perfectly summed up as we see them lose their spirit singing over sound systems so bad that they couldn’t hear themselves, and to audiences who couldn’t hear them anyway over the hysterical screams that Beatlemania provoked in them.

There is an introspective quality to the interviews. George compares their youth to being force-grown like a rhubarb. Paul’s recollections of John’s apology for saying in an interview that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus with teenagers, brings context to the clip that shows a contrite John who is dying to crack one of his clever quips, but held in check because of what is riding on America forgiving him for the remark. Paul also gives Ringo his due, describing the moment that Ringo started playing with the group and the other three realized that they had found the missing piece of their musical structure. In the expression on the face of the 70+ McCartney there is the gobsmacked teenager experiencing that seminal moment.

The usual tropes are succinctly covered, the ones about their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg, how their manager Brian Epstein shaped their talent into a viable act, how they grew apart once they could afford their own homes, and the groundbreaking nature of the music and albums they produced when they stopped touring are covered, the latter with a notable recollection by Elvis Costello about great musicians being able to take a listener to new places.  Due deference is paid to the effect that their fame had beyond their one group. The first stadium concert, sure, that changed the way music tours were conducted, but a much bigger impact was the clause in their contract that forbade segregated audiences. At a time when racial tensions were at their boiling point, their absolute and very public refusal was not just something that was the right thing to do, it also ran the risk of stemming their popularity across a large part of the United States, a risk, unlike the fallout from John’s ci-mentioned controversial remark, they were willing to take. Yet, the best of the film is found in its smaller moments, the ones that have a tendency to be overlooked elsewhere. The outtakes of working out a new song on the fly under the firm but loving hand of producer George Martin, or way the band would make a point of asking how their opening act, the one no one paid any attention to, was doing by hanging out with them on the tour plane, for example.

And that’s ironic considering the bonus that rolls after the credits. That would be a 30-minute, digitally remastered excerpt of their Shea Stadium concert (Ed Sullivan’s eyes have never been so blue).  The opening act is deleted. Aside from that one tiny nitpick, it is the perfect moment of their career to unfurl before us.  The doc has full performances of several of their songs, but after seeing the film, and learning the back story, the changes they were going through as kids becoming adults, and musicians becoming artists, the sight John pranking on a keyboard, Paul muffing a lyric, takes on a sort of iconic significance.  Plus, 30 minutes of the pure phenomenon that was, is, and always will be, The Beatles is just what we need.