Fanfare for an Uncommon Band

Why The Beatles Matter

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The Beatles have released a new single. The wonders of recording technology have made it possible for all four members to peform an unheard-until-now demo that includes the singing and playing of John Lennon and George Harrison. Happily, it’s not a pastiche but an original tune credited to Lennon. George Harrison, who died in 2001, recorded guitar lines in 1994. These were later augmented by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. It took 54 years to be created and released. It’s a touching and lovingly rendered song that sounds . . . utterly Beatlesque.

The song’s release took me back to when I was recovering from a cancer operation about a dozen years ago. Rather than tell you how important the Beatles were to mr, I thought I’d try to show you, by recording the effect  of their music to this benighted  young man:   

The mysterious and unwelcome introduction into my teenage body of strange hormones, the sudden emergence of an outsize honker, a generous splash of zits and the resultant blast of teenage angst provided lessons I believed I needed to live by in the mid-60s: Never let your emotions show. Forget you even have them. Meet everything you don't like, can't understand or feel threatened by with the mask of sarcasm.

So I became the Sneering One. The Smartass. The Hypocrite who disguised his jealousy of all things good and sweet with sour mockery. And my mockery was never so pronounced as when I heard my younger sister Karen play her Beatles albums. I might have brought her to tears one day with my unsolicited dismissal of the group's music and her love for it. 

No one in my family knew my real feeling for the Beatles. When everyone else was asleep, I would steal into the living room and lie on the floor, my head pressed between the removable twin speakers of my parents' stereo in order to listen to "Beatles '65" or "Meet the Beatles" at a barely audible level. My intense listening pleasure was salted by my fear of being discovered. But I was lonely and unhappy enough to build an entire day around the chance to get lost at night in those buoyant, simple songs of love lost and found. Though I couldn’t admit it, these were songs of relief and release, songs that provided me shelter from the storm of a world that seemed  stacked against me. 

But the Beatles were a girlie band. No self-respecting manly teenager boy could admit his love of the Fab Four. 

Much later, as I was lying in a hospital bed recovering from abdominal surgery, I felt the tendrils of depression creeping up my way. I was stuck with an IV in my arm in a room that featured a second-floor view of a scrawny treetop and a TV screen controlled by a roommate with an insatiable taste for the Food Network.

At lunchtime on the fourth day of my incarceration, I received not the greasy solid food my IV-fed body craved but something better—my daughter Annie's laptop. And miraculously, the hospital provided Wi-Fi. Flawless Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi that did what the hospital's menu couldn't do: provide sustenance for one of its ailing occupants.

It was there, on a sodden July afternoon, that I reconnected with my closeted teenage past. In place of my parents’ big gray stereo speakers, a pair of tiny white earbuds. Instead of my sister's platters, YouTube. For secretive volume, substitute full-blast sound.

On YouTube, I typed “beatles hard day’s night." A blank screen gave way to that bizarre opening chord—SPLANG gggg—that signaled the beginning of Richard Lester’s running, jumping, standing-still movie. A thrill ran through my battered body as I watched those grinning young men being pursued by a mob of screaming, delirious girls.

I played that clip a dozen times that day. Maybe two dozen. Every time I did, my hospital cell melted away, replaced by that remembered living room floor. I was my long-ago, skinny, secretive self again, but no longer constrained by the fear of discovery. 

Alone in my bed, I was being nourished as I had been so long ago. That opening chord was the moment everything changed for me—and arguably, the rest of the world.

I snapped the computer closed near midnight. It was the first time during my incarceration  that I finally felt satiated.

There I was, nearly half a century later, tears in my eyes, resembling no one in the movie more than Paul's “clean old” grandfather, knowing as much as it's possible for a grown man to know how thrilling it must have been to be a lovesick teenage girl back then, screaming her head off for her favorite Beatle, sobbing at the pure mysterious pleasure of the chase she knew she could never win but running just the same. It's a passion that should never have been sneered at but  treasured for the tender moment it was.

That song, that film clip, those screaming girls were as inspiring to me as any of the great freedom songs of the civil rights era. I felt utterly refreshed, ready for anything, ready to make my own mad dash down the dismal hallway outside my door, down to the streets below, running, running, running away from the misery and self-pity that had nearly taken me over. It had been a hard day's night, yeah, but I'd get out of that damned hospital no matter what, I'd get home and I would feel all right.