Meet the Tokyo Beatles, 1964

When LIFE photographer Michael Rougier shot the Tokyo Beatles (for that was their name) and their highly energized fans while working on a larger story about disaffected — and drug-addled — Japanese youth in 1964, his pictures captured not a laughably bad rock act, but a group of charming, sincere musicians who, like millions of young people around the globe, were swept up in the earliest wave of Beatlemania and simply had to find a way to be a part of it all.