Nowadays, everyone loves The Beatles. Professors in their 60s, girls of 13, all love The Beatles. And each one expresses it in exactly the same way: "I love The Beatles." (No one ever says: "I love The Beatles’ music." Always the allegiance is to The Beatles as personalities.)
It never occurs to anyone that they love The Beatles because they have been compelled to love The Beatles, that Beatles songs somehow convey the message: "You must love us." Last night I saw The Hard Nut, a dance by Mark Morris based on Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The Mark Morris Dance Company has their own 34-piece orchestra, which played masterfully. Tchaikovsky shares a quality with The Beatles: a persuasive Classicism. He provides memorable melodies, lots of major chords, but another presence, as well: a hypnotic familiarity. You sense you are rediscovering an uncle you knew when you were 2 years old, and never met again.
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A new Beatles album has just been released, the BBC somewhat deceptively announced last night. Actually, it’s a remix of Beatles songs by George Martin, their influential producer — and it exists because George Harrison was a fan of Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian circus. This new CD will be the soundtrack to their next show. Martin took rare recordings (in many cases) and created a DJ-style pastiche of the Beatles catalog. One snippet I heard was "Here Comes the Sun" played backwards. I liked it.
The Beatles are much better backwards.
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I ran into Phillip Levine, the poet, who told me he’s been listening to the new Beatles album. "It makes me sad," he admitted, "because The Beatles can never reunite, to make a real new album."
I know what Philip means. For many years, I also believed that if the Fab Four played again, they could save the world.
Many of the first generation of Beatles fans, like me, were ten years old when the group appeared on Ed Sullivan’s show in April, 1964. We were at the height of our comic book period, reading tales of Batman, The Green Lantern, The Flash. For us, The Beatles were just like The Justice League of America, a team of superheroes — or more particularly The Fantastic Four, who also wore matching uniforms (though The Beatles wisely avoided bright blue). In Help, John, Paul, George and Ringo actually perform superhuman acts. (At one point, Ringo disappears down a bathtub drain.) The movie Yellow Submarine further solidified the group’s status as costumed heroes.
I vividly remember standing in a bookstore on St. Mark’s Place the first time I heard John Lennon’s "The Dream Is Over":
I was the Dreamweaver,
but now I’m reborn.
I was the Walrus,
but now I’m John.
And so, my friends,
you’ll just have to
carry on.
The dream is over!
I was devastated. Superman never resigned from his post. (Though Captain America did, briefly.) Neither did The Hulk. This was unfair.
Perhaps Lennon would reconsider?
No. One could hear the finality in his voice.
I staggered down the street, attempting to reconstruct my life.
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It just hit me — Simon & Garfunkel were the Jewish Beatles!