It's just an overwelming task. I've been a religious fan all my life. In fact I wrote this piece for a newspaper right after George passed on
The Beatles
By
Thom Pelletier
The anticipation mounted as the torturous drivel that precluded their introduction persisted. I was transfixed to the television watching as Ed Sullivan droned on. I remember alternately sitting then standing while waiting anxiously to see in action for the first time, what was billed as the new order in music. Though the band was barely heard of only a couple of months previous, the electricity surrounding the event was irrefutable. It was my twelfth birthday, February 9, 1964. And even my being at that chaotic stage in a wanabe-a-teen-ager’s life where the attention span would be taxed to realize that my own hair was ablaze, I was somehow aware that I was witnessing history. Inexplicably, still today, closing in too quickly on 40 years later, there is probably no image more frozen in time for me.
Even as the boys launched into the unmistakable first verse of “All My Lovin’”, I knew that I had drawn from the virtues of the Vitalas trough for the last time. It was clear to me that slicked back hair and surfing tunes were about to be permanently preempted.
The country, still trying to sort out the emotions invoked by the fateful assassination of a president, was desperately aching for a buoyant diversion. This quartet would, in an emphatic way, become that diversion. That’s not to say that they healed the wounds, but they surely softened the grief.
The following months would introduce us to a perpetuation of acts like the high energy Dave Clark Five and the Searchers. We would be exposed to the edgy intensity of bands like the Kinks. We’d also become aquatinted with the mellow and harmonic offerings of Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy and the Zombies. There was also another band that somehow managed to prolong its fifteen minutes of fame a bit longer; the Rolling Stones.
But it was the Beatles, in their uniformed attire and non-threatening mop-top hairstyles that set the tone. The Stones, to some perceived as the anti-Beatles, projected and embodied a “bad boy” image and appearance that’s appeal to an element of society was and still is somehow romantic. The Beatles’ comparatively sanitized look belied the fact that they, too, had been around the block a time or two. Those early 60’s excursions into the bowels of the Hamburg music scene at legendary clubs like the Cavern had to inevitably engender a maturation and attitude within them.
The major difference between the Beatles and the Stones was that a man who obviously had a strategic plan was managing the Beatles. The passing of that manager, Brian Epstein, though essentially in their formative years as stars, seemed to take the choke chain off the band. It was no longer imperative to maintain a preconceived decorum in accouterments. Experimentation musically, as well as with other mind-expanding venues, flourished. They flexed their musical prowess in refusing to sustain or be constricted by the three-minute hit record formula unless it suited their purpose.
The dynamics and media mechanisms, or rather the evolution in them, will likely prohibit a phenomenon like the Fab Four from ever transpiring again. While the light years in advancements in communication technology have succeeded in reducing the world’s magnitude, in so doing, they have also deprived it of the adulation that the innocence, mystique and hysteria of Beatlemania spawned.
And now we are left with but two.
Paul McCartney has since gone on to become royalty both literally and figuratively within the realm of music. His talent on so many levels is peerless. He is celebrated for having written some of the most touching and beautiful love songs of all time. He became one of the richest and most successful musicians in history. He lived the picture perfect love story life until being tragically reminded with the loss of his Lovely Linda, that there are some things that money just can’t buy. In ’64, that night on Ed Sullivan, we only knew Paul as the cute one on the left who sang a lot and played that four stringed guitar pointing the wrong way.
And, of course, there’s Ringo. He endures. He’s like the melding of a Vaudevillian player and the Energizer Bunny. He tours with various artists still. He knew full well and was apparently comfortable with his station within the band. When people referred to them as three extraordinary musicians and the luckiest guy in the world, Ringo knew and seemed to gracefully accept which one he was. Although he proved to be a talented enough musician in his own right, the lofty homage admonished upon his bandmates set a bar difficult to parallel. He made up for it with a sense of humor and the ability to laugh at himself. In ’64 he was the guy with the big grin and the big nose, wearing a half dozen rings and sitting behind the drum kit.
John Lennon was pilfered from us at a brutally early stage of both his and our lives. At that time he had recently been blessed with a new son. He was determined not to make the same mistakes that had haunted him in his relationship with his first, so he had dropped out to become a househusband. He was just emerging from his self-imposed sabbatical, with a happy and content enthusiasm to his new music, when he was struck down. John was the one on the right with the message superimposed beneath his name declaring, “Sorry girls, he’s married”. At the time we were clueless as to what a political lightning rod he would become. We were oblivious as we watched him sing and strum while exercising an up and down motion as though he was riding a horse.
And now George Harrison too, is gone, though except for sporadic forays into the recording studio and occasional sightings, he has been publicly gone for quite some time. While always living in the eclipse of the larger than life Lennon and McCartney, his ably crafted musicology reflected through many of his compositions, a deeper thoughtful spirituality. Yet George never seemed to be nearly as driven or consumed by it as John and Paul. That night on Sullivan’s stage he was simply the one with the sheepish grin in the middle that seemed just a bit thunderstruck by the wild adoration being festooned upon them.
I had no idea as I watched in wonder and awe at these four Liverpoolian lads on The Ed Sullivan Show back on my twelfth birthday, February 9, 1964; that the tunes they conceived and presented would become the musical backdrop to the rest of my life.
By my eighteenth birthday they were no more. The pressures of their popularity and a no longer repressible need to cultivate individuality had ultimately become their undoing. Still today, their music summons a comfort zone kindred to a hot bowl of Mom’s homemade soup on a wintry night or a well-worn pair of jeans. As I listened then and I listen now, the lyrics to their songs continue to relate to and characterize many of the defining points of my own personal long and winding road.