In article <01bc9e9e$ab12f920$bda02299@infinia>,
Billy Shears <theflyu2@earthlink.net> wrote:
>I'm just wondering, but how did everyone here become a Beatle fan?  

By turning on the transistor radio. :-)

And that's where you heard this marvelous new sound.

Despite its antecedents, nothing like it had ever been heard. To this day
I lack the precise verbal skills to express *just how different* the
Beatles sounded to ears used to hearing a lot of previously pretty-
darn-good music.

Motown was beginning. Surf music was ubiquitous. Spector was in fine
fettle. Great songs abounded. But there was no sound, no music, no
harmonies woven together with *such* deftness and artistry--except what
was done by these new Beatles. Art...maybe that was it. Only the Beatles
didn't know they were making art. They just sang and played, and the
result to our ears was the audiophonic equivalent of discovering the
promised land.

You couldn't tell what it was. There were no words for it. Just a blend
of voices, smoother than good liquor. An amalgam of instruments, so
harmonious that there was no way (and no need!) to pull them apart. 

Critics tried. They were befuddled by the hysterical response of audiences
whose enthusiasm suggested a profound revolution was afoot. But no matter
who tried to use words to describe their songs---even the well-meaning
William Mann---it was all reduced to naught. The proper reduction was in
the vinyl. Spin for satori.

The sounds and the lyric spoke the clearest truth. And it was some new
truth we heard pouring forth from our radios. We were powerless to resist.

We were captured like England had been before us, but more swiftly, more
breathlessly. We didn't know what Fleet Street in Britain had already
called it. All we heard was the musical rush of a cyclone, and we felt
whipped round by its power. The songs did that..."I Want To Hold Your
Hand" first, and later in January 1964 *any* song they could find...  be
it the Beatles backing Tony Sheridan, or off-brand labels from Vee-Jay or
Swan or Tollie.

And what was *really* amazing was that we had not all quite seen the group
that made this revelatory noise. The pictures on the singles were strange,
I'll grant you, to music lovers raised on Elvis and all his imitators, all
the weak brews who followed him...the Frankies and Bobbys and Rickys and
sundry hearthrobs. 

The Beatles weren't like that.

We saw these foreigners as a new code not yet fully parsed. We didn't yet
know their charm, their deadly sweet humor, their unexpected innocence. We
hadn't quite heard their rare Northern lilt, and some of us who did
couldn't decipher it yet. We were being prepared; we were being reeled in. 

Not by the savvy marketing men at Capitol (whose inflated promotional
plans were punctured by the very band they thought needed help) but by the
scintillating sounds of the music itelf.

Who needed "payola" anymore? That was dead, and illegal besides. Program
managers fell in a swoon over the Fabs. Every disc jockey was transformed
into the Beatles' exclusive mouthpiece. Each station had a special Beatles
expert, the one soul whose voice bathed the ether and told you all about
your Boys. He'd share the rush you felt in your heart, he'd race to air
Beatle double-plays, triple-plays---whatever it took to show you they were
fans like you, reading your desires like a chartwise soulmate. 

We were all in it together, you see.

And we hadn't even seen them *move*. Maybe a flicker of something on the
evening news in November 1963, if we'd been lucky. But for most of us the
first hint of the new direction was in late December 1963, when their song
burst forth like a lusty newborn in the charts. Your finger flicked to the
volume control on the radio. You turned it up, the better to hear this
curious stream of vocal confluence. Your breath stopped. This was the new
world. And it was all in your ear. The chugging guitars; the soaring
voices. Could you resist? 

Not me. I gave up resisting that sound about the third time I heard it,
sometime in the waning days of December '63. I've never been sorry for the
surrender.

Their kinetic seduction was to come. It was at least a month off, planned
for a big Sunday night on a staid show that none of us made a habit of
watching, but (secretly) all of us planned to peruse once we knew they
would be there. That night we saw yet another dimension to the phenomenon
that had already won us over. Seeing was believing.

Remarkable, isn't it, that they had both ends of the spectrum covered? 
Just in case the Boys didn't nab you with their voices, they'd captivate
you with their simple, irresistible visual presence. But that's a
transitory power. After all, when all is said and done, it's the music
that will survive, not each and every image of their physical triumph.

That's nice, but it's not what makes your heart beat in time to their
rhythm. It wasn't the case for any of the musical greats of the past. No
one cares now whether Bach had long hair or whether Louis Armstrong's
charisma was responsible for his fame. Neither element is the deciding
factor in whether music is good or not. 

The only way you can tell is to open your ears, the way you did the
first moment you ever heard the Beatles.

And if you listen, you'll hear whatever it was you heard the day the music
changed your life.


-- 
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"She can play my guitar note by note."
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saki  (dlm3@midway.uchicago.edu)