Beatles: The Power To Move The World
The first concert the Beatles played in the United States was at the Washington Coliseum on Feb. 11, 1964 - two nights after the entire country had dropped everything to watch them on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
The only kid my friends and I knew who had a ticket was a girl whose father owned a car dealership. The rest of us literally were out in the cold - in front of the Shoreham Hotel, actually, where the Beatles were said to be arriving by late afternoon.
We had rushed there after school on the Connecticut Avenue bus.
It was hard to know what was propelling us. Yes, we had been listening to “Meet the Beatles” night and day during the three weeks since it first had appeared in the racks at Super Music City. And our own WWDC had been the first radio station in the country to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But we were not the kind of boys to scream about pop stars. We wore narrow belts, chinos and crew cuts; we took algebra II seriously.
Yet, here we were, screaming, any time a potential Beatlemobile pulled up to the Shoreham’s curb.
My oldest son - at 15, the same age now that I was then - has, at most, a bemused tolerance for the Beatles’ music: He indulges it as a parental whim, much as I once indulged my parents’ hankering for Frank Sinatra.
And, in truth, I don’t listen much to the Beatles these days either. Life goes on.
Yet, the songs remain old friends that usually are fun to re-encounter. Taking an advance look at “The Beatles Anthology,” the six-hour documentary that is expected to dominate prime-time television this week, I was amazed that I never was tempted to fast-forward through familiar old performances - even of the pre-“Rubber Soul” songs that long ago became elevator music, such as “All My Loving” and “This Boy.”
Is the documentary worth all the hype being lavished upon it by the temporarily and gratingly renamed network A-Beatles-C?
Of course not - nothing is. But it’s very smart - closer in feel to Ken Burns than to “Entertainment Tonight” - and it is laced with interviews, kinescopes and home movies which haven’t been seen before.
Even so, the six hours don’t fully capture what drew me and my friends down to the Shoreham on that freezing February afternoon or what kept a generation riveted to the Beatles until they broke up in 1970, just as we entered adulthood.
What yanked us down Connecticut Avenue, I think in retrospect, was an instinct that the Beatles were avatars of some change in our lives that we couldn’t define but knew was on the way.
In part, this was an accident of the Beatles’ timing: President John F. Kennedy had been shot less than three months earlier, and if a president’s corpse could be carried through the benign downtown where we bought records and saw James Bond movies, anything was up for grabs.
Having been handed a historical moment, however, the Beatles ran with it - becoming inseparable from the revolutions, not all of them for the better, in culture, politics, sex and fashion soon to come.
The immediate fallout of the Beatles’ invasion - inane confrontations with our high school principal over the new Beatles-inspired length of our hair - eventually gave way to the graver battles of what became the Vietnam decade. As the ‘60s darkened along with the war, the Beatles’ music did, too, uncannily in sync with history as it unfolded.
Hearing the songs out of that context decades later - “Revolution” in a Nike commercial, for instance - is another experience entirely, though not always unpleasant. The Beatles’ songs hold up in a way agitprop political art, whether of the ‘60s or any other era, does not.
But as their canon transcends its time, it is also of its time. If the Beatles had not expressed the ‘60s so articulately, all their music would sound as innocuous as “Love Me Do.”
Indeed, they did as much as anyone to create the counterculture that half the politicians in this country still are running against, as they purport to take us back to that pre-Beatles culture in which father knew best and listened to Lawrence Welk.
But such efforts to regulate culture are doomed to failure, now as then. When artists have the talent the Beatles did, they easily can circumvent the words of any politician.
That’s the power that drew my previously well-behaved friends and me to scream like maniacs on that cold day in February, though even we had yet to imagine it was the power to move the world.
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