"That evening they accepted their first and last Embassy invitation....

"Reports of what exactly happened at the Embassy party vary in detail but it started off amicably enough.

"'Hello, John,' said Sir David Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech) when they arrived.

"'I'm not John,' said John, 'I'm Charlie. That's John.'

"'Hello, John,' said the Ambassador to George. "'I'm not John,' said George. 'I'm Frank. That's John.'

"'Oh dear,' said the Ambassador."

You see you can't get through to reporters or Lords, anyway: "They'd ask joke questions so you'd give joke answers." As John Lennon said. If you can't talk to someone, if your worlds are so far apart that dialogue is meaningless, but some social situation forces you to talk to them why you...put them on!

And it became our generation's style for dealing with authority, with our parents particularly. "Yes mother, I promise you I won't smoke any L.S.D."

III.

THEIR public manner towards the adult world was just part of their playfulness. Their larking about on stage was a more innocent aspect.

It is hard to remember now what a departure this was for performers. But in the years after Presley, white Rock and Roll became a very restrained affair for the most part. At the time the Beatles really began to make it, the English scene was dominated by a group called the Shadows. The Shadows wore "sober, terribly neat stage dress of gray suits, matching ties and highly polished shoes. They did little dance steps, three one way and three the other. Everything was neat, polished but restained in their appearance as well as their music."

The adult world ran pop music, and they didn't want things becoming too loud, or too wild. Pop singers were not, despite their nostalgia, a very talented bunch, and none of them wrote their own music.

In truth, the Beatles didn't write too much of their music at the time, but they weren't too resrained onstage either. They "played loud and wild and looked scruffy...they had...their own new sound...A sound you had to run away and hide your ears from, or go as wild and ecstatisc as the people producing it...It was a new sound but it was being made by people who were like the audience, natural, unaffected, unsmooth..."

BRIAN EPSTEIN may have put the Beatles in suits, but their sound and their hair was still their own, and so was their stage presence, their "larking about." And it communicated something many of us hadn't tasted before, something wild, exuberant, playful, young, funny, and joyous.

Apparently they loved playing music together, and they communicated the love. As George Harrison says, "In Hamburg we had played for...eight hours at a stretch, loving it all...Back in Liverpool...it was still as enjoyable...We never rehearsed an act...It was so spontaneous, all jokes and laughs...Then came touring which was great at first..."