Book chronicles Beatles' American tour

Ivor Davis knows exactly where he was 50 years ago today—hanging out with The Beatles. As the West Coast bureau chief for the London Daily Express, Davis was assigned to cover the first U.S. tour by the Fab Four that started with a performance at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on Aug. 19, 1964 and ended Sept. 20, 1964 at the Paramount Theater in New York. From young women bargaining with him to get near John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison or Ringo Starr to the late night Monopoly games (where Lennon was known to cheat), Davis recounts his ticket to ride along with the band on that cross-country trek in his new book “The Beatles and Me On Tour” (Cockney Kid Publishing, $15.99). Davis never planned to write a book on the experience. “When you are a reporter on a daily paper, you do a story and then you forget about it. That’s what happened for years and years,” Davis says. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but I would go to a dinner party and people would find out that I toured with The Beatles and they wanted to talk about it.”

In the book, he talks about the 34 days where he had unrestricted access to the lads from Liverpool. He was there when The Beatles couldn’t leave their hotel rooms because of the rabid fans outside. He watched when slot machines were placed in their rooms in Las Vegas because they couldn’t go into a casino without causing a riot. Davis was there when Bob Dylan introduced the band to pot. Davis also spent a lot of time ghostwriting for Harrison, who gave a first-person account of what was happening on tour for a newspaper column in the Express. Things started poorly because Davis had a noon deadline and Harrison often didn’t get out of bed until 3 p.m. “I made up the column the first week, and I wrote a lot of rubbish. Harrison finally told me that the column was (expletive deleted). I told him that if he woke up earlier and talked to me the column would get better. He did and the column did get better,” Davis says.

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Source: San Angelo Standard-Times, TX