Who wouldn’t want a peek at Paul McCartney’s personal pics of The Beatles?
That’s the perspective afforded in “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” a hefty new coffee table book (Liveright/Norton, 336 pp., on sale now) that collects 275 of McCartney’s mostly black-and-white images, taken between December 1963 and February 1964 as the Fab Four exploded to superstardom and, ultimately, immortality.
“As much as the world enjoyed gazing at us, we loved returning their gaze,” he writes. “It’s still daunting to me to imagine how many eyes were in that storm.”
The largely never-seen photographs captured by Paul’s 35mm Pentax are both instantly recognizable and banal. Page after page depicts the four Liverpool friends parked in cars and dressing rooms, clad in their trademark smart suits and Beatle boots, waiting restlessly for their cues.
Then there are pictures of aching intimacy: John Lennon, handsome in his despised thick-lensed glasses, typically whipped off for the cameras. An impossibly young George Harrison (not yet 21), sacked out in the backseat of a limo. McCartney’s girlfriend, British actress Jane Asher, carefully styling her ginger hair.
And, inevitably, photos that will make you feel a pang for the band’s fishbowl existence: uniformed women in starched aprons and caps gawking at them from behind a glass wall, and McCartney’s first glimpse of the White House, hastily shot out a car window.
Entire contact sheets are reproduced, complete with McCartney’s red grease-penciled “X” on his favorites. The photos are accompanied by several McCartney essays and document the quartet’s transatlantic trip from Liverpool and London to Paris and finally New York, Washington and Miami. They’ll be displayed in a companion exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London that runs June 28 to Oct. 1.
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A look at select images from the book:
A self-portrait, captured in London 1963, before The Beatles won over America. “I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” McCartney writes of looking at the photos decades later.
“The crowds chasing us in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ were based on moments like this,” McCartney writes. “Taken out of the back of our car on West Fifty-Eighth, crossing the Avenue of the Americas” in New York City on The Beatles’ first trip to the U.S.
For McCartney, poring through the photos, “It’s not so much a feeling of loss but a joy in the past. … How great does John look? How handsome is George and how cool is Ringo?”
After the band’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” they retreated to Miami for downtime. “George looking young, handsome and relaxed. Living the life. Miami Beach, 1964,” McCartney writes.
After “Ed Sullivan,” he says, “We finally had to admit that we would not, as we had originally feared, just fizzle out as many groups do. We were in the vanguard of something more momentous, a revolution in the culture.”
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