I am watching it right now, I mean, the 50th anniversary tribute to the Beatles on CBS, the very same station on which they made their American debut in 1964. Paul is talking with Dave Letterman about "Yesterday" the song. I am writing about "yesterday" the reality of my life, our lives.
I didn't see it when it happened, when the "boys" came across the Atlantic and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. I don't know that my parents forbade it in any formal sense, but ours was a home of Cha Cha, Rumba's, classical music and WPAT, the elevator music station of New York. What the crowd was doing was none of our business. The Beatles, quite simply, had never come up. I think they were hoping I wouldn't notice what created outright hysteria in the youngsters around me. I remember hearing a song as I rode in our school van and being a little uppity in going against the times, although I had no idea that's what I was doing.
Hmmm, Imagine Dragon is doing a version of "Revolution" that sounds more country than the counterculture I remember. But these kids weren't even a gleam in anyone's eye when we lived in the middle of radicalism and free love and early rock and roll.
I was talking to my aunt today, as I visited with her and my ailing uncle, my dad's brother, the last of the siblings still alive. I asked her if she were going to be watching this show tonight. She waxed moralistically about how they were a kind of threshold (not her words but the sense of her dissertation) to the drugs that followed and to a form of spiritism and indulgence in the demonic. Let's put it this way, she is of the view that they, like Elvis just before them, ushered in the beginning of the decline of civilization. Long hair, rebellion against any idea of rules, hedonism of the most debauched kind, God is dead, the whole down the drain picture.
There is a very big part of me that completely agrees.
But today, listening to the panoply of their tunes, even some of the ones from the psychedelic love in, drop out phase, I hate that I missed their American debut, if you really want to know.
WWJT? This is my variation of WWJD, that is, "What Would Jesus Do?" Would Jesus have liked the Beatles, if He were of our time? Did the wreckage of our society have to happen and is loving Beatles music a gateway to contributing to the wreckage? I mean, "Yesterday", "Fool on the Hill", "Here Comes the Sun", "Hey Jude", "Eleanor Rigby", "Let It Be", name many of their songs, are these not deep, even moral, at some, even all levels? Is it their music that was the problem or something deeper within our society of which surely they were a part? Was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" an entrée into free sex?
I don't know. Sometimes maybe, as Dr. Freud said, "a cigar is just a cigar", and even if it isn't, I have been so tied up in knots morally my whole life, that just shaking my body and soul in my car, to "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" just seems a reasonable , nay may I say, innocent release. Yesterday, my girlfriends and I from Mount Saint Ursula were on a boat on the way to Bear Mountain upstate New York, singing "Hello, Goodbye" loudly on the deck. What could be more innocent than that? What do I know?
My friend Andrew says he has the DVD of the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan. Maybe I'll even buy it myself.
It won't be this that corrupts my moral fiber, methinks.
"There will be an answer. Let it Be."
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