Beatles News | Page 124 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I just used the link to pre-order my copy.

The release is in 52 days which is well within the time frame for Joe to get credit if you use his link.

Its been making the news since the TV show was broadcast on Saturday. Its fake outrage and nothing new. And they’ll have all have a heart attack if they look further into Beatles archive video as they’ll find many more instances of John doing this.

I dont agree with some things from the past but I dont think you can look back 40, 50 years and apply the exact same values that we have now.

Here’s the section in the Anthology book that covers it.

RINGO: I remember us standing on the roof of a building in one of the cities in Australia, and all the fans were down there, chanting. We were having fun with them and one guy, who was on crutches, threw his crutches away and went into: ‘I can walk, I can walk!’ What he felt I don’t know, but it was as if he was healed – and then he fell right on his face. He just fell over. Maybe that’s why it stuck in my head.

            Crippled people were constantly being brought backstage to be touched by ‘a Beatle’, and it was very strange. It happened in Britain as well, not only overseas. There were some really bad cases, God help them. There were some poor little children who would be brought in in baskets. And also some really sad Thalidomide kids with little broken bodies and no arms, no legs and little feet.

            The problem was, people would bring in these terrible cases and leave them in our dressing room. They’d go off for tea or whatever, and they would leave them behind. If it got very heavy we would shout, ‘Mal, cripples!’ and that became a saying – even when there were no handicapped people present. If there were any people around we didn’t like, we’d shout, ‘Mal, cripples!’ and they’d be escorted out.

PAUL: John used to do the spastic impersonations on stage a lot. He had a habit of putting a clear plastic bag on his foot with a couple of rubber bands. Brian wouldn’t like it – he had gone through RADA so he was straight showbiz and he wanted us to behave accordingly, not be too far out. But John would do his cripples impression just crossing a zebra crossing, which would make people stop.

            We used to think certain words were very funny that out of teenage nervousness made us laugh: ‘cripple’, ‘harelip’, ‘cleft palate’, ‘club-foot’ – when a guitar came out, a Club 40, we used to call it a Club-Foot. A sign on the way down to London used to make us howl: ‘Cripples crossing’. We used to think it was a place rather than an event.

            I remember John and I, shortly after we’d listen to Gene Vincent’s album, walking out in the street near Penny Lane and seeing a woman with elephantiasis, and it was so sort of terrifying we had to laugh. A lot of what we did was based in that. And that was the kind of thing that separated us from other people. It meant we had our own world. A world of black humour and of nervousness at other people’s afflictions. The way we got through our lives was laughing at them.

GEORGE: John was allergic to cripples. You could see he had a thing about them; I think it was a fear of something. You can see in all our home movies, whenever you switch a camera on John, he goes into his interpretation of a spastic. It’s not very nice to be afflicted, so John had this thing that he’d always joke about it. I think the reality was too much for him.

            We were only trying to play rock’n’roll and they’d be wheeling them in, not just in wheelchairs in oxygen tents. What did they think that we would be able to do? I don’t know. I think it was that those people whose job it was to push them around wanted to see the show, and this was a way to get in. It was a case of, ‘How many have we got tonight, Brian?’ We’d come out of the band room to go to the stage and we’d be fighting our way through all these poor unfortunate people.

            John didn’t like it. After a while, we used to call even normal people ‘cripples’, because most people are crippled in a way; in their brains, or in their legs. It’s somewhere. Like John wrote: ‘One thing you can’t hide, is when you’re crippled inside.’ When you look at some of the old footage of John, and read In His Own Write, and with a few other clues in his lyrics, you can piece it together that he definitely had a phobia about it. Most people do. It’s a question of, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’

JOHN: I don’t think I’d know a spastic from a Polaroid lens. I’m not hung up about them. When I use the term ‘spastic’ in general conversation, I don’t mean to say it literally. I feel terrible sympathy for these people – it seems the end of the world when you see deformed spastics, and we’ve had quite a lot of them in our travels.⁶⁵

            Wherever we went on tour, there were always a few seats laid aside for cripples and people in Wheelchairs. Because we were famous, we were supposed to have people, epileptics and whatever, in our dressing room all the time. We were supposed to be good for them.

            You want to be alone and you don’t know what to say, and they’re usually saying, ‘I’ve got your record,’ or they can’t speak and just want to touch you. And it’s always the mother or nurse pushing them on you. They would push these people at you like you were Christ, as if there were some aura about you that would rub off on them.

            It got to be like that, and we were very callous about it. It was just dreadful. When we would open up, every night, instead of seeing kids there, we would see a row full of cripples along the front. When we’d be running through, people would be lying around. It seemed that we were just surrounded by cripples and blind people all the time, and when we would go through corridors they would all be touching us. It was horrifying.⁷⁰

            In the States, they were bringing hundreds of them backstage, and it was fantastic. I can’t stand looking at them. I have to turn away. I have to laugh, or I’d just collapse from hate. They’d line them up, and I got the impression The Beatles were being treated as bloody faith healers. It was sickening.⁶⁵ It was sort of the ‘in’ joke that we were supposed to cure them. It was the kind of thing that we would say. I mean, we felt sorry for them – anybody would – but it was awful. There’s kind of embarrassment when you’re surrounded by blind, deaf and crippled people – and there is only so much we could say with the pressure on to perform.⁷⁰

PAUL: I THINK THAT, PARTICULARLY IN THE OLD DAYS, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEATLES SEEMED TO SUGGEST SOMETHING VERY HOPEFUL AND YOUTHFUL. So, often, someone would ask us to say ‘hello’ to handicapped kids; to give them some kind of hope, maybe. But it was difficult for us, because part of our himour was a sick kind of humour. We were almost having to bless the people in wheelchairs; so there was this dual inclination going on for us.

JOHN: We’re not cruel. We’ve seen enough tragedy in Merseyside. But when a mother shrieks, ‘Just touch my son and maybe he will walk again,’ we want to run, cry, empty our pockets. We’re going to remain normal if it kills us.⁶⁵

Examiner reports that a letter sent from the Beatles to the Crickets in 1962 has been discovered in Nashville by Freda Kelly who typed the letter in the first place. The letter reads

“Dear Crickets,

When we were rehearsing for a TV show the other day, we met someone who had known you during your recent trip to England, and they told us how you had complimented us. We also heard from EMI in London that you had a copy of our record. Well, we’d just like to say that this is a great compliment and appreciate it very much.

Yours sincerely,

The Beatles.”

And the letter (photo taken from the article).

I cant read the date clearly but an article over at buddyhollyarchives.com (dated 4th December 2012) gives it as the 24th January 1963 not 1962 and also quotes the text of the letter. Actually its blurry but looks like the 24th January 1963 when the picture is bigger before you click on the slideshow in the Examiner article.

Don Caldwell, owner of the Cactus Theater, recently handed out copies of a complimentary letter mailed to the surviving Crickets from the Beatles in Liverpool, England, on Jan. 24, 1963.

The letter boasts the personal signatures of Paul McCartney , Ringo Starr , John Lennon and George Harrison .

The Crickets appeared on the 12th January 1963 edition of ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’.

Saturday 12th January 1963 5:50 – 6:30 pm
Host Brian Matthew
Eden Kane,
Robert Earl,
Shane Fenton,
Kenny Lynch,
Patsy Ann Noble,
The Crickets,
The Lionel Blair Dancers
Spin-a-disc Shaw Taylor

The Beatles filmed their first appearance on the same show the next day (broadcast on the 19th January) so the previous days broadcast may have been the subject of discussion.

Actually, looking at the Beatles TV appearances in January 1963 the only other shows they appeared on where ‘Roundabout’, a programme broadcast in central Scotland (rehearsed 8th January), and ‘People And Places’, broadcast in North and North West England (rehearsed 16th January).