Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
It’s possible that the Beatles would have never existed had it not been for an enterprising DJ from Calgary named David Gell.
Gell, who died in December of 2023 at the age of 93, had a proud history in broadcasting in his hometown for his early years at CFAC and later work in the 1970s. But he also had an influential globe-trotting career in radio and television that may have changed the world. In the mid-1950s, he was working at Radio Luxembourg and became the first DJ in Europe to play Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel.
Among the fans soaking up the tunes that night was a young John Lennon.
Less than a decade later, Gell attended an EMI reception in England. The Beatles had performed and after the show Gell was approached by Lennon. He said Gell had changed his life that night. After hearing Heartbreak Hotel, Lennon decided he was going to dedicate his life to rock ‘n’ roll.
He is the most direct Calgary connection in From Me to You: The Beatles in Canada 1964-1966, an exhibit at the National Music Centre that commemorates the 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ arrival in Canada.
Gell did not only inspire Lennon to become a Beatle, he was the first in Europe to write reviews of Beatles songs. Included in the exhibit are his thoughts on early tracks such as From Me to You, Thank You Girl and She Loves You. “A definite smash hit for the boys on this driver, which features some fine drum work-outs from stix-man, Ringo Starr,” he gushed about the latter.
“Here’s this Canadian guy, from Calgary, with this amazing Beatles connection,” says Piers Hemmingsen, the Toronto-based music historian and author who organized the exhibit.
Gell was one of many sources Hemmingsen enlisted when writing his 2016 book The Beatles in Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania, which is the basis of the new exhibit. There have been exhibitions based on the Beatles’ time in Canada before, of course. But they tended to focus in on specific cities where the Fab Four played concerts such as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. From Me to You may be the first exhibit that explores Canada’s impact on Beatlemania as a whole, making the argument that the Great White North was ahead of the curve compared to the United States when it came to Beatles appreciation. Hemmingsen and his family lived in England in the 1960s and he remembers his older brothers being fans of Radio Luxembourg and the Beatles in particular. They eventually moved to Canada, taking their Fab-Four appreciation with them.
“The question I wanted to answer was: Why did the Beatles take off in Canada before they took off in the States,” Hemmingsen says. “They were No. 1 in Canada in 1963. They didn’t play Ed Sullivan in the States until 1964. You had this period in Canada was like a cult with teens. The teens had come over here, like my family. My family, my brothers, we brought our records back with us. My family was military so we lived on bases. We moved to Camp Petawawa in the Upper Ottawa Valley and my brother pestered our local radio station to play the Beatles records and they did. They played them. It was just a word-of-mouth thing. Gradually, towards the end of 1963 . . . you had journalists that were picked up on what was happening in the U.K. At the end of October, The Toronto Daily Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Calgary papers are picking up stories sourced by the Canadian Press.”
The exhibit offers plenty of homegrown memorabilia for Beatles’ aficionados. There is an entire section, for instance, dedicated to the bewildering collection of merchandise offered at Eaton’s when Canada’s love affair with the Fab Four was in full bloom. The department store offered a “Beatle Bar” that featured everything from autographed albums, to brooches, bracelets, tote bags and even running shoes for girls, which cost a princely $3.99 at the time. An American collector lent Hemmingsen Canadian artifacts from his collection, which includes mint-condition figures, bed sheets, t-shirts, hats and wigs. There is a rare colour photograph of the Beatles in concert at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, with a line of policemen standing in front of the stage.
There are Beatles-inspired Canada Dry ads and contests, an early Canadian pressing of Love Me Do and an even rarer Canadian release of the LP Yesterday and Today featuring the short-lived original album art of the Fab Four dressed in butcher smocks, covered in pieces of raw meat and dismembered baby dolls. The exhibit follows the Beatles Canadian concerts in 1964 to 1966, which included one in Vancouver, one in Montreal and four in Toronto. Their final appearance at Maple Leaf Gardens was among their last of all time. The Beatles retired from performing live later that year, although there is an addendum of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-ins in Montreal, which happened in 1969 when Lennon was still a Beatle.
But some of the more fascinating pieces in the exhibit showcase the Canadians who helped spread Beatlemania. British-born, Toronto-based broadcaster was the first North American to play the Beatles on the air in 1962. Capital Canada A&R man Paul White released the Beatles first Canadian single before they were signed in the U.S. There are video interviews with Trudy Medcalf, who began Canada’s first Beatles fan club alongside fellow Scarborough, Ont. teen Dawne Hester. With the help of Toronto’s CHUM, membership eventually hit 90,000 members.
While Beatles’ lore may seem omnipresent in pop culture in general, Hemmingsen says he doubts many Canadians know about their country’s contributions to Beatlemania.
“I think that’s the the importance of this exhibit, is that not many people do,” says Hemmingsen, who will be releasing a followup to his book later this year. “There’s the big Beatles story and within that there’s a Canada story. Canada played a role in the entire Beatles story and the influence the Beatles have on the generation of the’60s and beyond still echoes. Every new generation discovers the Beatles on their own, either in school or mom and dad’s record collection. It just goes on.The Beatles are to the 20th Century what Beethoven was to his century and Tchaikovsky to the 19th century.”
From Me to You: The Beatles in Canada 1964-1966 runs until Jan. 5, 2025 at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre.