Beatles Fiendish Thingy's and Other Great Stuff!

Playboy Interview Part 1 ~Journos Blurbo

February 1965 Issue of Playboy Magazine went on a wild ride with the Beatles... I mean a wild ride by... They talked, queers, churches, drinking, god, Ringo and George getting married, going out, their homes and Liverpool, John in the gutter, George as a giant cutout, chocolate, dirty old men's clubs, the Ad Lib club, Australia and them not liking sport compared to America and them being agnostics, royals ~ everything and anything!

Part 1 is the journalists retelling of the meeting and his views on the lads one para stood out to me and I'll pop it here as its funny :

"Of the four, George Harrison seems to be the one most amused and least unsettled by it all. The truest swinger among them, he is also the most sarcastic, and unquestionably the most egotistical; he fingers his hair a lot, and has a marked tendency to pause meaningfully and frequently before mirrors. Even so, he's a very likeable chap - if he happens to like you. John Lennon, on the other hand, is a rather cool customer, and far less hip than he's made out to be. He does radiate a kind of on-the-top-of-it kind of confidence, however, and is the unacknowledged leader of the group. Equally poised, but far more articulate and outgoing, Paul McCartney (sometimes known as 'the cute Beatle') reminded me of Ned, the fun-loving Rover Boy: He's bright, open-faced and friendly - the friendliest of the lot; but unlike Ned, he also has a keen eye for a well-turned figure, and he worries a lot about the future. Ringo, the smallest Beatle - even smaller in person than he appears to be on the screen - is a curious contrast with the others. Taciturn, even a bit sullen, he spends a good deal of his time sitting in corners staring moodily at the Venetian blinds. Perhaps because he wasn't their original drummer, he seems slightly apart from the rest, a loner. Still, he has a way of growing on you - if he doesn't grow away from you.

Onto the journos blurbo:

Our interviewer this month is the inimitable Jean Shepard, whose nostalgically comic boyhood reminiscences and acerbic social commentary have earned him not only the applause of Playboy's readers, but also a loyal audience of three-million for the free-form one-man radio talkathon which he wings weekly over New York's WOR from the stage of the Limelight in Greenwich Village. A nimble-witted and resourceful broadcast reporter who's tilted verbal lances with such formidable subjects as Malcom X and Harry S. Truman, he debuts herein as an interviewer for the printed page. Shepherd writes of his subjects:

"I joined the Beatles in Edinburgh in the midst of a wild, swinging personal-appearance tour they were making throughout the British Isles. The first glimpse I had of them was in a tiny, overheated, totally disorganized dressing room backstage between their first and second shows. I had taken the night flight up from London and suddenly found myself face to face with one, or rather four, of the 20th Century's major living legends. All of them looked up suspiciously as I walked in, then went back to eating, drinking, and tuning guitars as though I didn't exist. Legends have a way of ignoring mere mortals. I looked hard at them through the cigarette smoke, and they began to come into focus, sprawling half-dressed and self-involved amid the continuous uproar that surrounds their lives.

"They had been playing one-night stands in Glasgow and Dundee, and I went along with them from Edinburgh to Plymouth, Bournemouth and half a dozen other towns. They were all the same: wild, ravening multitudes, hundreds of policemen, mad rushes through the night in a black Austin Princess to a carefully guarded inn or chalet for a few fitful hours of sleep. And then the cycle started all over again.

"It became impossible to tell one town from another, since to us they were just a succession of dressing rooms and hotel suites. The screams were the same. The music was the same. It all assumed the ritual quality of a fertility rite. Latter-day Druids, the Beatles sat in their dressing room - a plywood Stonehenge - surrounded by sweaty T-shirts, trays of french fries, steak, pots of tea, and the inevitable TV set; while from somewhere off beyond the walls of the theatre came the faint, eerie wailing of their worshipers, like the sea or the wind. But the Beatles no more heard it than a New York cop hears traffic. Totally oblivious to the mob - and to the honks and plunks of other Liverpudlian rock 'n' rollers warming up down the hall - they sat sipping scotch from paper cups and watching 'Dr. Kildare' on the telly.