[Mb-hair] FW: The Beatles

[Sherwin]

> Why This Band Plays On
>
> By MIKAL GILMORE
>
>
> Los Angeles
>
> FORTY years ago this month, the Beatles began their second major tour 
> of America with a performance at Shea Stadium in Queens. It's an event 
> worth noting: more than 55,000 people attended that night, Aug. 15, 
> 1965. It set a world record at that time for a pop concert, and it was 
> the biggest public moment of the Beatles' remarkable career.
>
> It's also worth noting that these days we seem to be reconstructing a 
> shadow history of the band and its achievements. That is, almost every 
> year now we observe some milestone of the Beatles. Last year it was 
> the anniversary of the group's astonishing 1964 appearance on "The Ed 
> Sullivan Show." Two years from now, June 2007, the occasion will be a 
> commemoration of 1967's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" - an 
> epochal work that still stands as popular music's most famous and 
> form-breaking album. Commentators from all over the world will weigh 
> in on that one.
>
> Which raises a number of questions: Why do we continue to pore over 
> the Beatles' high points? Why is it that those lifetime-ago moments 
> still fascinate us? In part, of course, it's simply because there's 
> such an undeniable epic arc in both the Beatles' story and in their 
> music. Certainly, they possessed an extraordinarily intuitive skill 
> for filling the needs of their times, and for realizing the potential 
> of their own talents.
>
> But there's another reason, just as important, that accounts for the 
> lasting appeal of their history: The Beatles demonstrated that musical 
> and social change could emanate from the shared spirit of the same 
> body politic.
>
> Rock 'n' roll, of course, had already shown it could stir cultural 
> tumult. In the 1950's, Elvis Presley and numerous rhythm-and-blues and 
> rockabilly artists had brought new audiences and sensibilities into 
> the mainstream. Rough, rude and provocatively rhythmic music - from 
> both black and white upstarts - had broken through the barriers, 
> meeting fierce opposition, until the new spirit was almost tamed.
>
> Whether they meant to or not, the Beatles raised the stakes on all 
> this, and they did it right from the start.
>
> Their American debut, on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Feb. 9, 1964, 
> coincided with my 13th birthday. I certainly didn't understand 
> everything I was seeing - the girls in the audience sticking their 
> tongues out leeringly at the group, the whole shock-of-the-new effect 
> of these four men who looked so foreign and who commanded their 
> melodies with such assurance and their instruments with such 
> synchronous force - but I knew, as millions of others did, that I was 
> witnessing something seismic.
>
> The next day, the Beatles' performance was the only thing we talked 
> about at school. The girls loved the band members' long hair, the boys 
> seemed unnerved by it, but everyone agreed that the Beatles and their 
> music was an awakening.
>
> In the days following, the arguments and reactions around the country 
> only grew. While Elvis Presley had already shown us something about 
> using rebellious style as a means of change, the Beatles helped incite 
> something stronger in American youth that night - something that 
> started as a consensus, as a shared joy, but that in time would seem 
> like the prospect of power - a new kind of youth mandate.
>
> I wasn't at Shea, but I saw the Beatles a week later at Memorial 
> Coliseum in my hometown, Portland, Ore. I was 14 and had won tickets 
> to the concert in a local drawing, which I count among my life's 
> luckiest moments.
>
> I could see them on stage - small, suited figures moving and playing, 

> looking holy in the blinding luminescence of flashbulbs and house 
> lights. The collective yowling scream of the audience - to this day, 
> the loudest thing I've heard - seemed to emerge from a mass fever 
> dream. All these years later it still moves me to realize how jolting 
> and transcendent it was to be in a room - no matter how large - when 
> the Beatles played.
>
> And from film clips of the Aug. 15 concert, Shea was the same. 
> Everybody there that night - the thousands upon thousands of screaming 
> teenagers ("supersonic seagulls" as Paul McCartney recently described 
> them), the legion of exhausted policemen, even the Beatles themselves 
> - seemed overwhelmed by the intensity of the event and its 
> implications.
>
> The poet Allen Ginsberg attended the same performance I did at 
> Memorial and rendered the experience in his poem "Portland Coliseum":
>
> The million children
>
> the thousand worlds
>
> bounce in their seats, bash
>
> each other's sides, press
>
> legs together nervous
>
> Scream again & claphand
>
> become one Animal
>
> in the New World Auditorium
>
> - hands waving myriad
>
> snakes of thought
>
> screetch beyond hearing
>
> while a line of police with
>
> folded arms stands
>
> Sentry to contain the red
>
> sweatered ecstasy
>
> that rises upward to the
>
> wired roof.
>
> Ginsberg understood what he was witnessing: mass fervor that great - 
> especially from the young - has always felt threatening. That's 
> because it can seem unruly, powerful enough to upset traditions and 
> values or to incite dangerous action. There had been small riots at 
> rock 'n' roll concerts in the 1950's - chairs thrown, fisticuffs - but 
> the threat implicit in 1960's music was something else: it was about 
> setting things loose, about changing or upending the world. The 
> barricade of policemen I saw that day at the Beatles' show - the same 
> line Ginsberg had seen - certainly acted as if they were seeing 
> something more than mania. The scream the Beatles brought forth in 
> America was just too unforeseen and too big. It could help shake the 
> order of things, and in time it would.
>
> THAT August in 1965, we didn't fathom where the power in this sort of 
> communion might lead. We didn't know where we were going with the 
> Beatles, and they didn't know where they were headed. The music that 
> followed their 1966 retirement from live performances turned often 
> hopeful and generous (not to mention unbelievably creative), and more 
> important, compassionate. "Sgt. Pepper" is often viewed as whimsical 
> or naïve, and yet songs like "She's Leaving Home," "Getting Better" 
> and "A Day in the Life" gave voice to the combined senses of hope, 
> strangeness and anxiety that marked the lives of many in that period.
>
> By the end of the 1960's, though, the Beatles' songs had grown more 
> mournful, frightened and angry. John Lennon grew suspicious of his 
> audience's politics in "Revolution" and of the whole world in "The 
> Ballad of John and Yoko," whereas Paul McCartney's "Let It Be" and 
> "The Long and Winding Road" played like doleful prayers of solitude. 
> By 1969, the two men - who had once exemplified collaboration - could 
> barely sing to each other across a gulf of mutual recrimination.
>
> All this, sadly, reflected the tenor of the time. The spirit of 
> Western youth - especially American - descended from bliss to 
> disillusionment, as political assassinations, the madness of Vietnam, 
> the strife over civil rights and political protests, the effects of 
> unmonitored drug use and the violence of the Manson family and 
> Altamont all bore down, taking a steady toll.
>
> The Beatles came to their bitter, nasty end in April 1970 - the one 
> event we tend not to commemorate. It's more pleasurable remembering 
> the big bang of the "Ed Sullivan" appearance and the Shea Stadium 
> concert. But the sort of promises born in those moments may no longer 
> be possible. It's true, of course, that subsequent mass popular music 
> events like 1985's Live Aid and this year's Live 8 concerts have 
> followed through on some of what the Beatles made possible, albeit in 
> cautious, inoffensive ways.
>
> It's also true, though, that the sort of youth power that the Beatles 
> helped awaken is simply no longer even considered. The cultural 
> perspective that defines youth has changed drastically.
>
> We've infantilized adolescents. We view them as children whose 
> judgments are immature, who have to be protected from influences that 
> may steer them in wrong directions - directions that may threaten 
> decency or disrupt social authority. True, the same things were said 
> about teenagers in the 1950's and 1960's, but part of our ambition was 
> to dispute mores and intimidate hegemony. Today, the pressures against 
> such instincts for adolescents come from both within their peer group 
> and the culture at large. Teenagers now are themselves often the 
> harshest critics of young nonconformists.
>
> Meanwhile, watchdogs across the spectrum - from Bill O'Reilly to the 
> Rev. Al Sharpton to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton - worry over the 
> effects that rude rap or scandalous video games may be having on the 
> young. And today's conservative mind-set stigmatizes the sort of 
> insurrectionary voice that the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones 
> and others exercised in much of their 1960's music.
>
> Last year, when R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, the Dixie Chicks 
> and others played concerts to promote a defeat of President Bush, 
> their efforts were seen as a risky anomaly. It was as if songs like 
> the Beatles' "Revolution" or Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's 
> Worth," James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" and 
> Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" had never filled the air in those 
> years conveying a sense of political and generational transformation 
> that, for a time, seemed imminent and irrefutable.
>
> Maybe this sort of reflection seems too far a stretch from the joys 
> felt on those warm nights in the summer of 1965. There's no denying 
> that above all else the Beatles were fun; had they not been, they 
> would not have enjoyed so much effect or such staying power.
>
> But fun on the level that the Beatles managed to achieve - at least in 
> those days - implied more than a collective, thrilling scream. We 
> remember the Beatles for their music and spectacle, but we celebrate 
> them because, when they stood before their American audiences in 1964 
> and 1965, we witnessed the social and cultural power that a pop group 
> and its audience could create and share. From there, I guess, you 
> measure how much we've learned, or how much we've lost.
>
>
> Mikal Gilmore, the author of "Shot in the Heart," is working on a book 
> about the Beatles and the 1960's.
>
>
>     •     Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company 

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