Paul McCartney lookalike recalls his brush with Beatlemania
He’d been watching movies at the same theater in his Cape Cod hometown since he was 7 years old. Now, though, the old man who ran the place didn’t want to let him in.
Herb Van Dam was letting his hair grow out, a moptop inspired by a certain new rock ‘n’ roll group from England.
“Take a haircut!” the proprietor of the Buzzards Bay Theater groused to the shaggy teenager, who was planning to bring his best friend’s sister to a movie. “What are you, a girl?”
Back in the early ’60s, Van Dam — now a longtime Salem resident — was the first kid on the Cape to be told to cut his hair, he thinks. Within months, it would give him the story of a lifetime: His fashionable look would land him, for one brief, unexpectedly terrifying moment, at the epicenter of Beatlemania.