Music journalist Larry Kane, who at age twenty-one is reporting for WFUN Miami, remembers, “They never did sound checks—usually there wasn’t time. And modern musicians will look at the puny sound equipment they had and will be amazed. Some concerts had the music going out on the stadium public address system.”

“No theater ever got it how we liked it,” John says of the setup on the microphones. “They’d either be in the wrong position or not loud enough. They would just set it up as they would for amateur talent night. Perhaps we had a chip about them not taking our music seriously. It drove us mad.”

*  *  *

The Beatles arrive in Miami, Florida, on February 16. Thirteen-year-old Lynn Henderson, a journalism student at Miami Springs Junior High, is wearing her construction-paper press badge when the band lands at Miami International Airport to a crowd of five thousand. She runs for the limousine, and the police give chase.

John Lennon sees Henderson’s homemade badge and holds off the cops while he, Paul, and Ringo answer her interview questions. Then “John blew me a kiss and the window slid shut and they took off.”

Henderson earns an A in class and so do the Beatles, whom Ed Sullivan introduces as “four of the nicest youngsters we’ve ever had on our stage.”

The Beatles have never seen a palm tree before—or a policeman carrying a gun. But a staged press opportunity is already familiar.

“It was all part of being a Beatle, really,” George says of the scene on February 18 at Miami Beach’s 5th Street Gym, where twenty-two-year-old 1960 Olympic gold medalist boxer Cassius Clay is in training for an upcoming fight against world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, and the Beatles are “just getting lugged around and thrust into rooms full of press men taking pictures and asking questions.” Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) “was quite cute” and goofed around with the band for a series of photographs. He delivers a taunt to his rival, the heavily favored thirty-one-year-old Liston, rhyming “When Liston reads about the Beatles visiting me / He’ll get so mad, I’ll knock him out in three!”

But Liston dismisses the gibes, sneering, “Are these motherfuckers what all the people are screaming about? My dog plays drums better than that kid with the big nose.”

Liston is wrong about the Beatles and about his prospects against Clay. On February 25, Cassius Clay dethrones Sonny Liston, and the Beatles are back in the studio (taking a break that evening to celebrate George’s twenty-first birthday), already hard at work recording for their next big project.

The Beatles are going to star in a film.

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

So glad we made it.

—“Gimme Some Lovin’”

The movie shoot is scheduled to take seven weeks. They’re calling it Beatlemania, and the assumption is it’ll be a cheap cookie-cutter teen flick designed to capitalize on the Beatles’ massive success with that audience.