Which is why even now, after a long and accomplished career in broadcast journalism, Kane still finds himself talking about his experiences with the Fab Four. And why not? He holds the distinction of being the only American journalist to travel with the Beatles on every stop of their North American tours of 1964 and 1965.

Kane's new book, "Ticket to Ride," details his relationships with John, Paul, George and Ringo, who together formed one of the greatest rock bands in the world.

"It's a strange feeling ... to see people adoring them and idolizing them and to know that I was there at the beginning, riding in those airplanes, getting beat up by mobs, watching them at their infancy," Kane said in an interview.

He received the assignment as a news director for a Miami radio station. As the Beatles prepared to barnstorm the country, Kane wrote to the band's manager, Brian Epstein, to secure an interview in Florida. A subsequent letter from Epstein invited Kane, then 21, to join the entire tour.

Kane caught up with the Beatles in San Francisco and would soon form what he called an "unspoken bond" with the band.

While reporters in each city would inundate the band with questions like — "Is your hair real?" or "What did you have to eat today?" — Kane had the opportunity to ask about racial segregation, police security and war.

"Larry Kane's approach to his tour reporting was that of a newsman," Tony Barrow, a former Beatles press secretary, said in an e-mail interview. "The Beatles reacted to his professionalism, enjoying the chance to answer interesting questions rather than some of the banal rubbish other interviewers threw at them."

The book focuses less on the Beatles' music than on the fans' frenzied reactions to it, with the band's concerts depicted as near riotous affairs.

In San Francisco, Kane was trampled by impassioned teens who ran toward the stage. A similar incident in Vancouver, British Columbia, left some fans with "bloody lips and noses, bruises, welts, abrasions and contusions."

Three girls, part of a mob trying to get close to the Beatles, were badly injured when they fell through a plate-glass window at a Dallas hotel.

Kane contends that the Beatles were "astonished" at their success, but they clearly enjoyed the fruits of celebrity. There was sex on the 1964 tour, though it was discreet, Kane said. The next year, there were drugs, too, primarily marijuana.

The book relates one incident on the first tour when Kane was awakened by the Beatles' handlers to deflate an incident with potentially devastating consequences. Kane was asked to calm a woman whose twin daughters were sleeping in John Lennon's Las Vegas hotel room. Lennon "professed his innocence" and Kane still remains unsure what happened.

At a later stop in Atlantic City, N.J., about 20 young women, "heavily perfumed" and most in "low-cut dresses," entered the Beatles' hotel suite. Kane writes that Lennon told his band mates to "take your pick." The event, which came to be known as "the hooker incident," went unreported, and the Beatles' image remained intact.

"I expressed some guilt in the book about not reporting things like that, but it just wasn't the era that you did," Kane said. "It was just-off limits, and it wasn't that salacious. I mean, it was a little crazy, a little barbaric, but it wasn't something that I would write about in a book in detail anyway."

Some incidents are recalled with less levity. Kane writes about hearing an anti-Semitic slug from the rear of the plane where the Beatles and a traveling press secretary, Derek Taylor, were sitting. Kane, who is Jewish, angrily confronted the group. Taylor initially acknowledged making the remark, but Kane recognized that the voice was not his. To this day, he said he has never learned who used the slur.

The book shows the Beatles interested in world affairs, an interest that the quartet, especially Lennon, later expressed publicly. In interviews, Paul McCartney criticizes racial prejudice and says the band doesn't approve of playing in a segregated venue. Ringo Starr laments that young men are sent to die in war, and Lennon rails against the impending Vietnam conflict.

Kane went on to a nearly four-decade career in Philadelphia, where he worked for all three network television affiliates. Despite his experiences, which included coverage of the pope and all U.S. presidents since Kennedy, Kane's best-known story may forever be the Beatles.