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A working-class hero is something to be: the American Musicians’ Union's attempt to ban the Beatles, 1964

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2010

Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-4423, USA E-mail: mroberts@mail.sdsu.edu
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Abstract

This article examines the historical and cultural significance of the attempted ban on the Beatles’ concerts in the US by the American Federation of Musicians and the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States government in 1964. While there has been much attention given to the court case against John Lennon waged by the INS and the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, much less is known about the earlier case brought against the Beatles by the INS and the Department of Labor on behalf of the AFM, which became a national scandal in 1964, pitting fans of the Beatles against the AFM and the INS. Fans framed the controversy over the Beatles as a cultural conflict between generations, while the AFM framed the problem as a labour market issue. My examination of the incident reveals the way in which a submerged cultural problem embedded in a putatively economic discourse rose to the surface through conflicts over the discursive framing of the Beatles controversy. This case is important not only in terms of expanding our empirical knowledge of the internal history of the Beatles and rock and roll music, but also more generally as an episode that foreshadowed the cultural conflict between the American labour union bureaucracy and the counter-culture that emerged in the late 1960s. This essay analyses heretofore-unexamined documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration.

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Articles
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Popular Music , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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