Beatles '64

In a 2024 interview with Variety, David Tedeschi spoke about some of the previously unseen footage and one interview in particular that surprised him: "That Harlem footage had never been seen before. So you have various reactions from young, black teenage girls and boys, and a few older people, and of course you have these young men in the record store. The one guy says, 'It's just disgusting the way they play that music over and over again. I like Miles Davis. I like John Coltrane.' But it was sort of interesting the way the teenage girls in Harlem just loved The Beatles, loved their hair, loved their music. That to me was a surprising thing, because of course the civil rights movement was going on. Of course I knew that later on when they actually toured the States, they refused to play before segregated audiences. But when we decided to interview Smokey Robinson, I didn't expect him to say everything that he said. One of the things was that the Beatles were the first white artist of their magnitude that said they loved and learned from black music and sang black music. We have several people, from David Lynch to Smokey, talking about the power of music, I thought in a very beautiful way. And when Smokey says in regards to the audiences being desegregated, that it gave kids a common love and that it was the power of music that literally overcame the barrier that was set up between the white audience and the black audience, I thought that was really a wonderful thing for him to say, and unexpected."

Features Toast of the Town: Meet The Beatles (1964)