BOOK: ‘Beatleness: How the Beatles and Their Fans Remade the World,’ by Candy Leonard
Although there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books about the Beatles out there, very few of them have taken the time to look at the phenomenon of Beatlemania from the point of view of the fans who grew up with the music. Only one other book, Ron Schaumberg’s Growing Up with the Beatles, published in 1978, really tried to explain what it was like to have this music as a seminal part of one’s youth — and that book was from the perspective of just one teenage boy, not a whole generation.
Candy Leonard is a sociologist as well as a Beatles fan, and her new book, Beatleness, attempts to explain the personal experience of being a fan from the people who lived it at the time. She interviewed a multitude of first-generation fans born between 1945 and 1961, and gleaned the hundreds of hours of discussion for information about what really made the Beatles such a worldwide phenomenon, through the eyes of these fans. The book is divided chronologically, set up in much the same way American fans would have experienced the release of Beatles albums and the presentation of new music. Leonard further divides the book by the ages of the fans themselves — teens, middle childhood, and early childhood — to discover how each age group experienced the same things, because developmental differences definitely created differences in the way fans related and responded to the group.
“Beatleness,” as Leonard defines it, is a quality made up of many aspects of the group and fans’ reactions to them, both the immediately tangible and the more elusive, emotional ones, along with cultural references. The Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 was a pivotal moment for so many people, a true division of “before” and “after.” Even the youngest fans, who were two, three, or four years old at the time, have vivid memories of the Beatles and their effect on everything that came after them. Older kids and teenagers, of course, noted the even more immediate impact of the group on their lives and those of their peers, when suddenly, every single kid in America seemed to be a Beatles fan.
Leonard also does not confine her research strictly to female fans; perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the book are the interviews with male first-generation Beatles fans, a segment that is often overlooked in many more conventional popular histories. Certainly the group’s influence on the boys of that same generation was as all-pervasive as it was for the girls, but it is particularly gratifying to see this borne out by the recollections of the men who were experiencing them at the same time.
Although this is, strictly speaking, a sociological study, it is highly accessible and a fascinating read, and does not come off like a textbook. It is very much a popular history, with the emphasis on “popular.” Hearing directly from the fans about the way the Beatles impacted their lives is definitely unique; few, if any, books have taken this approach in quite this way. The great influence of the Beatles on the social mores of the day, above and beyond music, on fashion, politics, and popular culture in general, was certainly not lost on these first-generation fans. Overnight, it seemed, the Beatles were everywhere — and things were never the same.
Being a Beatles fan was not just a passive experience; one of the recurrent themes among the interviews Leonard presents is the fact that the 
group and their music made fans think, made them want to know more about the world, made them want to question the status quo. Certainly it is no accident that those same young teens who watched on that fateful Sunday night in 1964 continued to follow the Beatles through all of their personal and musical changes and grew up to become the hippies, war protesters, and movers and shakers of the late ’60s and beyond. Being a Beatles fan made many people believe that if the Beatles could change the world, so could they.
Leonard has done a masterful job in presenting a true popular study of the Beatles from the point of view of the most important people — their fans. Those who were there at the time will find touchstones in this book that resonate with them. Younger fans will understand what it was that made the Beatles so special, and why their influence continues to this day. Beatleness is a truly interesting study of the way these four guys changed the course of a generation.
