BOOK: ‘Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 Tour That Changed the World’ by Larry Kane
In 1964, Larry Kane, a 21-year-old news director at Miami radio station WFUN, wrote a letter to Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The Beatles’ first American tour was scheduled to kick off that August, and Kane wanted to interview the group during their stop in Jacksonville, Florida. Epstein wrote back to Kane with an astonishing proposal: to join the Beatles’ traveling press party for all 33 days of their US tour.
Kane details his life on the road with the Fab Four in Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 Tour That Changed the World (Backbeat Books), first published in 2003 and now reprinted (though not updated) in honor of the tour’s 50th anniversary. While spending that much time with the world’s biggest band would be the dream of millions of fans, many of whom risked injury and incarceration for a close encounter with their idols, Kane was less enthused at the start. A news journalist with little interest in entertainment, and even less interest in the group he perceived as a flash in the pan, Kane had to be pressured by his station’s management to seize the one-of a-kind opportunity. It was a fortunate move for him: his time spent with the group would become one of the defining points of his long and prolific news career.
Despite Kane’s training as a journalist — and initial resistance to the band — Ticket to Ride‘s light, positive tone reads more like a fan’s account of an unbelievably lucky encounter with the Beatles than as an in-depth or critical approach to the band. Perhaps it would be less accurate to think of Ticket to Ride as a book about the Beatles than as a portrait of fandom. Kane’s initial indifference/skepticism begins to fade as he spends more time with the band, and he develops an appreciation for their music, personalities, and the overall Beatles phenomenon. By the time he wrote Ticket to Ride decades later, his feelings for the group, and John Lennon in particular, had blossomed into outright idolization — with the rose-colored glasses that implies.
The Beatles retain a mythic quality in Kane’s telling that seems to belie his intimate contact with them. He acknowledges the presence of women and drugs (especially on the 1965 tour, which Kane also covered as a traveling journalist), but doesn’t dwell on them. He takes pains to say nothing negative or salacious about the Beatles as either a group or as individuals, apart from a few playful jabs at Paul McCartney’s vanity (no astonishing revelation there). Any hints of impropriety or unpleasantness are either shifted to other parties in the band’s entourage or elided completely.
In other words, don’t crack open Ticket to Ride expecting a tell-all. Yet Kane’s discretion is probably why the band trusted him enough to answer his questions openly. The author has a reporter’s levelheaded style of being able to ask challenging questions without coming off as aggressive, but he’s also an affable narrator with an endearing “gee whiz!” attitude, who wisely avoids acting too cool or overstating his own importance.
In fact, Kane is keenly aware that, despite his proximity to the band and frequent conversations with them, there was an invisible barrier he could never cross. “Were we friends? Perhaps in a professional sense,” the author muses in the final chapter. As an outsider, however, it’s only fitting that Kane chooses to focus his attention on other outsiders: the fans, some of whom contribute their personal reminiscences of concerts and Beatles sightings to the book.
Ticket to Ride is most valuable as a vivid depiction of Beatlemania’s relentless intensity. While images of screaming, crying girls and swarming crowds have become familiar over the decades, Kane illustrates how unsettling it was to be in the midst of uncontrollable teenagers and hungry mobs pawing at the band for scraps of clothing or locks of hair. He fills Ticket to Ride with anecdotes of fans (and would-be groupies) acting out at concerts and public appearances, adopting costumes to sneak into the band’s hotels, and even sexually propositioning the author simply because he knew the band. Though Kane maintains that the Beatles were always grateful and respectful of their fans, he also portrays the group as constantly having their guard up by necessity.
Kane’s book works best when he focuses on his personal interactions with the group and the hysteria surrounding them, rather than trying to draw broader statements about the Beatles’ impact on culture and the 1960s as a whole. The highlights of Ticket to Ride, apart from the insider’s view of Beatlemania, are the brief excerpts of the author’s interviews with the group. While these could stand to be expanded further, a CD included with the book mitigates this somewhat by including audio clips of these conversations. Kane’s charming candid photographs of and with the group are another selling point.
Ticket to Ride is not a book for Beatles fans looking to find new information about their heroes or get a deeper understanding of their creative processes. (The closest it comes to the latter is when Kane recounts the band polishing up what would become “Eight Days a Week” during a flight between concerts.) But Kane’s appealing “lucky everyman” persona allows readers to clip on his press badge and imagine what it would be like to travel with the Beatles, to ask them questions, to banter with them good-naturedly — in short, to get a rare close-up glimpse of the greatest rock band ever.
