by Charly Mann

Most people remember the start of Beatlemania as February 9th, 1964 when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan Show. That may have been true in the rest of the United States, but the Beatles had become a popular in Chapel Hill almost a month earlier. The Record Bar on Henderson Street began a campaign entitled The Beatles Are Coming in early January. As you walked in the door there were stacks of a free newspaper called National Record News with the headline SPECIAL BEATLES ISSUE and a large rack displaying the first album to be released by the Beatles in America called Introducing the Beatles.

This "newspaper" was given away to all customers at the Record Bar in January of 1964. I think this was the one and only issue of this publication which Capital Records actually published as a promotional tool to get people excited about the Beatles.

I had become interested in the Beatles the previous December when Walter Cronkite did a feature about their phenomenal success in England on his evening news program, and eagerly bought several of their singles and their first two albums at the Record Bar in January. Local radio station WKIX had also been playing the Beatle songs I Want To Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, Please Please Me, and From Me to You since late December.

These stickers were found on poles in downtown Chapel Hill more than a month before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. 

The Beatle phenomenon was quite strange that January. Here was a new group that had yet to perform in the United States, that no one had heard of two months earlier, that had top charting singles on three labels, Capital Records, Vee Jay, and Swan Records. I was fourteen and had been an avid popular music fan for about two years. Up until that time "hype", as we now call it, had not been used much to promote musical groups, but across Chapel Hill, many lamp poles had a sticker posted with four long-haired heads that said "The Beatles are Coming." During the next five years the Beatles proved that the hype of their enormous talent was merited and they continued producing incredibly innovative records. I was fortunate to see the Beatles perform three times, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and 1965, and at Dodger Stadium on August 28, 1966, which was their next to last concert performance together.

   
A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles first movie, played to large crowds at The Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill for more than a month. I attended the first showing of it there. Also above is an ad for the Beatles Help album at the Chapel Hill Record Bar in 1965, then located on Henderson Streeet.

On the morning of November 25th, 1968 I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina and my best friend Richard Abbott and I stood in a long line that stretched more than a block waiting to purchase the Beatles latest album at the Record Bar. After we finished classes at about 4 PM we headed over to my house with great anticipation to listen to the record. We spent the next 16 hours laying on separate beds in a darkened room as we played the this two-record album with only a white cover that was titled simply "The Beatles" (but commonly called The White Album) over and over again. It was a bewildering and exhilarating experience, somehow the Beatles had put together the most disjointed album we had ever heard, yet the quality of most of the songs was incredible. We soon agreed that this was not really a Beatle album, but a combination of three separate solo albums by Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison. By four in the morning we also concluded it was the also the first Beatle album with "filler" material, which is what we thought of the songs "Revolution #9", "Wild Honey Pie", and "Don't Pass Me By".

My best friend at UNC was Richard Abbott who I spent almost 14 hours with in late November 1968 listening over and over to the Beatles White Album. Richard was from Asheville, but this is a photograph from Chapel Hill High School in 1968, which I believe is the school that he graduated from. Richard died at the age of 54 in 2004.

Less than a year later, in August of 1969, I was the manager of a local record store and had a friend named Ervin Hester who was the program director of WSRC, a soul and gospel radio station, that had somehow gotten an advance copy of a new Beatles album on cassette. The album was called Abbey Road and I was mesmerized by it almost instantly. I had never heard such a perfect collection of songs, and it remains in my estimation the greatest album of all time. Each of the Beatles had contributed the best songs of their career, and the sonic brilliance and production of the work was light years ahead of anything yet recorded. The wonderful song medley on the second side still sounds as fresh and exciting today as it did when I was sitting on the stone wall across from the Chapel Hill Post Office and playing the album for my friends a full month before the album appeared in stores.

The Beatles also played a critical role in launching the career of Chapel Hillian, James Taylor. In 1967, James was 19 and decided to move to the center of the musical universe at the time, London, to try to launch a career as a singer-songwriter. He had made some demo recordings and through a friend had a connection to Peter Asher who had just taken on the role of signing artists to a new record label the Beatles had started called Apple Records. Asher had recently been half of the folk-rock duo Peter and Gordon which had several top songs written by Peter's sister's Jane's boyfriend Paul McCartney. In fact McCartney had been living in the Asher home for several years and written many of his best songs there, most of which were about Jane. Asher saw potential in Taylor's songs and let Paul have a listen. McCartney was impressed and signed Taylor to the Beatles record label.

This is James Taylor's first album and was on the Beatles' Apple Records label. It was released in England in December 1968, and in the United States the following February. In December, I was able to import the album directly from England to my store, The Record and Tape Center, which made us the first place in North Carolina where "Carolina in My Mind" was ever played.

Taylor recorded his album in the same studio and at the same time as the Beatles were recording the White Album. McCartney even played bass on James's signature song, Carolina in My Mind, and there is evidence that George Harrison also played guitar on the same song. Harrison definitely enjoyed listening to Taylor in the studio, and was so inspired by a song he had written and recorded called  Something in the Way She Moves, that he borrowed that phrase as the opening of the song Something.

James Taylor left Apple with his now friend and manager Peter Asher in 1969. Taylor's career continues to thrive, and Asher has gone on to manage and produce some of the biggest names in the music business including Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Cher, Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman, Ringo Starr, and Diana Ross. However in my humble opinion his Asher's best produced album is that of another Chapel Hill resident Kate Taylor's debut album, Sister Kate, in 1971.

James Taylor and his manager Peter Asher who was the brother of Paul McCartney's 1968 fiance Jane Asher 

The Taylor family all loved the music of the Beatles, and in the musical jukebox above I have included James, Kate, and Livingston singing some of their favorite Beatles songs.

This is an 8th grade picture of Livingston Taylor from Chapel Hill's Guy B. Phillips Junior High School in 1965. This is the same year the Beatles recorded "If I Needed Someone" for their Rubber Soul album which Liv sings on the music player at the top of this article. (This song was originally released in the United States on the album Yesterday and Today.)

In 1977 I gathered a group of Chapel Hill musicians to produce an album called Hot as Sun filled with rare and unreleased Beatle songs. The album was recorded in a small studio that was once The Little Red Schoolhouse. The record was released on my label Pied Piper Records later that year.

This is the front and back cover of the 1977 Beatles Tribute album, Hot as Sun, that I produced featuring Chapel Hill musicians singing rare and unreleased songs by the Beatles

Over the last 40 years I have become an archivist of rare Beatle items and videos. Ironically, the day after John Lennon was murdered, the CBS Evenings News (on which I had first seen the Beatles on December 10, 1963) contacted me so that they could use a rare video I had of John Lennon on their broadcast that day.

I am a long time archivist of rare Beatles-related material. Shortly after John Lennon died the Chapel Hill Newspaper did a piece on my collection and my opinion of John Lennon's importance in modern music.

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