If I Were 64 (The Beatles and Me)

If I were 64, then maybe I could have truly reacted to the Beatles. As it is, I was not yet one when the Fab Four made their Ed Sullivan debut. I was always--we're talking just about all of my conscious life--somehow aware of the Beatles, as some kind of cultural entities, but I can't say I really started listening to their music until I was about 12 or 13. One of my first exposures to their actual music was singing "Let It Be" at so-called hippie masses in the early 70s. The upshot of it is, after all these years, that I guess you can love, admire, etc. a museum piece, but you can't really live it.

If I were 64, then the Beatles would have hit when I was about twenty, significantly I believe, roughly the same age I was when the bands that have meant the most to me over the years--Husker Du, The Replacements, R.E.M., The Meat Puppets, and Elvis Costello (a few years earlier)--were starting to make their marks. I lived those bands: waiting impatiently for a new release, absorbing it when it came out and constantly adjusting my judgment upon further listenings, seeing all their shows over the years (in R.E.M.'s case, from a small club--with the Replacements opening up, by the way--to a couple of huge "hockey arena" venues). Those bands and others were indeed my life (Minutemen, too, naturally).

A guy I knew in college, a couple years younger than I, even, worshipped the Beatles and went to crazy ends to exhibit his worship. I remember being in the same room with him as he read the Rolling Stone review of The Replacements' Let It Be album. "How can someone have the audacity," he proclaimed like some constipated Luther, "to name an album Let It Be?" Cooly, as, um, always, I replied, "Because it's a much better album than The Beatles'" Well, if I were Mark David Chapman, I don't think I would have received a more despicable look. Anyway, that night, after some fun, I took my genuine Apple label copy of The Beatles' Let It Be LP(which could probably fetch me a few quid these days) and Frisbeed the whole thing--disc and sleeve and fold-out cover--against my dorm room wall a few times. When such activity resulted in a sleeve-full of vinyl crumbs, I took the album down the hall and shoved it under the guy's door. A bit cruel, perhaps, but I'll go to my grave defending the intent.

I love the Beatles. I own all the music, have read all the pertinent books, know all the stories and arcana, still hunt down alternate takes and demos. But they've never really come down for me from the pedestal they've been cemented on MY whole life. I never knew the crazy mind games listening to Revolver or Sgt. Peppers for the first time, in real time, must have been. The first Beatles album I ever bought was the blue greatest hits one (though I never bought the red one--I started accumulating the actual albums instead--I'm sure now I'd prefer that one, though at the time, the long-hairs on the blue one looked a lot more fun than the squarish ones on the red album; see, I'm too young to even think the mop-top `dos were anything special).

I never had to honestly react to the Beatles. They were always great; I was supposed to like them, and upon hearing them I did. I knew the lore and mystique of The White Album before I ever bought it or heard it. How do you react to seeing the Mona Lisa--you've known it your whole life. I remember a friend of mine asking me how I liked the Rolling Stones' Some Girls album a couple weeks after its release (the first new Stones album since I started listening to/buying music). I said I liked it, he said he thought it was a bit of a bullshit album (he had older brothers, or maybe his reaction was wholly his own; we were both right, I think--it is BS, but thirty years later it still sounds good). To me, the only significant "Beatle" issue of new music in my listening lifetime (1976 on) was Lennon-Ono's Double Fantasy, and by the time the John is Back hype started to die down a little, he died, and thus it instantly became another museum piece. Whenever you see one of those roped-off chairs in a museum, don't you just want to hop on it and fart into the big cushion? You can't fart at the Beatles, because once you do, some Beatlemaniac gets all offended (fine) and starts lecturing (not fine). The Stones, the Replacements--music you can fart to, no problem.

Anyway, the point of all this bunk is that with all the new Beatles hype happening presently, with re-issues and video games (the last video game I played was Pac-Man in a bar around 1987), I can't get excited. It's just another re-packaging job on music that's been re-packaged in Teflon (albeit great Teflon) since I can remember. I love the Beatles, but it's always just a history field trip when I hear them, never a visceral, this matters to me moment. And what else is music fanaticism about than "this matters to me"?

That's why my favorite Beatles' songs are the ones that don't really hang in the museum's main hall: "And Your Bird Can Sing," "Dr. Robert," "Long, Long, Long," "Bad Boy," "If I Needed Someone." Those ones I discovered myself, in a way.

That's why my answer to the standard, Who's your favorite Beatle question, is Brian Epstein: the first meaningful fan, the one whose visceral reaction made it possible for millions to react. Without him...

That's why, when it comes to the Beatles, I wish I were 64.

The Del McCoury Band-When I'm 64