John breaks down the band’s appeal. “We reckoned we could make it because there were four of us. None of us would’ve made it alone, because Paul wasn’t quite strong enough, I didn’t have enough girl-appeal, George was too quiet, and Ringo was the drummer. But we thought that everyone would be able to dig at least one of us, and that’s how it turned out.”

During performances, audience members toss objects at them, especially candies. Initially, the gesture is meant as a tribute to George, who was quoted in an article as professing a love of sweets, but by 1963 he replies to a fan letter and specifically asks it to stop.

“We don’t like Jelly Babies, or Fruit Gums for that matter, so think how we feel standing on the stage trying to dodge the stuff, before you throw some more at us. Couldn’t you eat them yourself, besides it is dangerous. I was hit in the eye once with a boiled sweet, and it’s not funny!”

But instead the behavior only escalates. “They hurt,” Ringo says of being pelted with hard candies and objects like flashbulbs and hair curlers. “They just felt like hailstones.”

John, who refuses to wear his heavy horn-rimmed glasses onstage—“Mustn’t spoil the image,” he says—has even had contact lenses painfully knocked out after flying offerings hit him in the face.

“You feel a clonk on the back of the head,” John says, “and you look and it’s a shoe. Then once one comes they all start thinking, ‘Shoes: that’ll attract their attention. If they get a shoe on the head, they’re bound to look over here.’”

Beatlemania has intensified to a level that the group’s press man, Brian Sommerville, deems “entirely out of control.”

Photographer David Magnus, who travels with the band, illustrates the phenomenon. “I had been in one of the back dressing rooms, and one of the female studio staff put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I must touch you—you’ve been in the same room as the Beatles.’”

“What happened to us in the States was just like Britain,” Ringo says, “only ten times bigger, so I suppose it wasn’t like Britain at all.”

It was, John later says, “madness from morning to night with not one moment’s peace.”

America in 1964 is a vastly different place from England. Though John and Cyn are used to encountering some “really weird characters” outside their London flat, they seem more annoying than dangerous. But in America, where armed police are around and a popular president was recently gunned down, things feel more ominous. John wonders if someone out there in the mob of screaming fans is harboring dark thoughts.