Joan Baez’s wild tale of touring with The Beatles
There’s no hiding from the fact that in 1964, everyone was dying to catch a glimpse of The Beatles up close. There had been few cultural phenomena quite like the Fab Four before them, and considering that they’d begun to grab the attention of audiences overseas by this point, the global demand for concerts, meet and greets and television appearances was becoming virtually unmanageable. While many members of the public were clamouring for the attention of one of their mop-topped idols, their popularity was circulating among some high-profile names as well.
When the group arrived in the States for a second time, they stopped off for a couple of nights on their tour in Colorado towards the end of their scheduled run, and on the second night, they were blessed to have folk royalty in their midst in the form of Joan Baez. She’d just rounded up her own tour the day before in Denver, and was intrigued by the hullabaloo that was surrounding the group to the point that she wanted to see if she could get her own opportunity to brush shoulders with the group.
Baez herself describes the situation as surreal, being surrounded by shrieking groupies who were all eager to be picked out for some time with one of their four heartthrobs. When someone emerged to tell the folk singer that the group wanted to meet her, her legs suddenly turned to jelly, as though she were just as perturbed by the prospect of shaking hands with the biggest stars in the world at the time.
The foursome would, of course, be cordial upon Baez’s arrival and individually introduce themselves to her in turn as though she hadn’t been seeing their images plastered all over the press for the past few months. However, what she didn’t expect them to do to her was to extend the offer of her joining them on the road for the remaining four nights of their US tour. Baez, like anyone in that situation would have done, happily obliged and chose to accompany them.
However, things got considerably more surreal for her as the nights went on, and when they arrived at a mansion where the group were staying in Los Angeles, there were further rooms full of fans looking to “hang out” with a Beatle. In a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, Baez revealed all about the slightly sordid environment she found herself in, saying that after every member had been mobbed upon their exit from the limousine, their management would round up the groupies for the band to handpick.
“These poor girls, just sitting downstairs waiting to see whether they’re gonna be picked by somebody,” Baez recalled of her surroundings. “They don’t talk, they don’t even knit. They just sit there in these little outfits that they’ve worked on for months, waiting for this thing to happen. And eventually a Beatle will come by and pick one of them and, you know, drag her off to his lair.”
Having been brought on the road by John Lennon, he felt somewhat obliged to offer Baez a place to stay in his room, with a “bed in it the size of a small swimming pool”, and when he returned in the middle of the night, Baez claims that “he started coming on to me, very unenthusiastically.” Rejecting his advances with a simple get-out clause of being too tired, when in actual fact, she had little to no interest in bedding Lennon, he allegedly responded in his monotonous Scouse accent: “Oh, luvly! I mean, what a relief! Because you see, well, you might say I’ve already been fooked downstairs.”
Baez attests that the two had a laugh about the entire situation and then subsequently hit the hay, but the strangeness and sleaziness of the entire situation is one that she’ll no doubt take to the grave with her, whether she wants to remember it or not.
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