Fifty years of Beatlemania
Ignorance and a selective ear for music are not admirable while required to write a memorial piece on the world’s most successful rock and roll band. The only thing left to do was to go in search of BeatleMania.
Why were they the only band everyone still wants a piece of and what is it about them that makes people go, “Who doesn’t love The Beatles?”
This was followed a major Beatles binge, hours of listening to their songs and scanning through a zillion articles online. Their most popular track of all time, I wanna hold your hand keeps playing in one’s head like a broken gramophone record.
What kind of magic did Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, weave together in 1960, an era of bell-bottom pants and ridiculously long sideburns? Finally the answer dawned.
The Beatles are an experience, not just a rock band. Their music, in the most basic sense of the word, was honest. They were four young boys who wanted to perform with a passion which ended in continuously bleeding fingers, headaches and flying tempers. Beyond even that was an urge to create music, pen down some of the best lyrics ever written and perform like no band did then or now.
Their stint with music was fairly short, their last-ever song ‘The End’, was sung in 1969. This was followed by repeated efforts to get back together and concerts around the world, after which on a fateful night in 1980, a man who wanted to become famous, shot John Lennon. Never was the loss of a singer mourned so much. Harrison’s tribute to Lennon, ‘All those years ago’, became a slogan for the late singer.
The striking thing about the band was that there was no particular audience they played for. They were truly a global band. Whether it is Hey Jude or Hard Day’s night or Yesterday or even Let it Be, (one of their later songs), everyone, from a teenager to a 70-year-old, will fondly remember a memory attached to it or sing it in perfect tune.
The contexts of most Beatles songs are easy to relate to and the rhythm is best described as ‘soulful,’ the kind one can hear on a lazy Sunday evening or gift on a CDt.
To connect with The Beatles, is to connect with their music. To date, the band has sold over 1.3 billion units world wide, and has entered the Guinness Book of World Records for crossing 300 million units by 1969.
Whether it was Paul McCartney’s on-stage sense of humor or John Lennon’s inspired, brilliant guitar-playing or even Ringo’s drumming, everything about them felt good and their concerts drew the kind of crowds (55,000 being the highest draw in the 60s) that no one had ever imagined.
Finally, at the end of the BeatleMania search, it is inevitable that you will become a part of it too, falling in love with the simplicity of their tunes and slowly begin to look past shallow music and know, what it really is, whacking yourself on the head for not realizing it earlier. After all, who doesn’t love The Beatles?
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