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The Beatles? My wife and I are children of the '70s, and for us the phrase just brings to mind creepy guys with stringy hair and granny glasses. But the four are groovy once more, and our 14-year-old son loves them. So we draft along in his excitement and head to the Beatles concert in Virginia Beach.
It is July 4, and we're on vacation. "The Beatles" aren't. This version of the fab four goes by the name "Revolution" and makes (one imagines) a pretty good living doing dead-on covers of Beatles songs, complete with wigs and changes of costume that go from the sleek thin-tie look of the early sixties to the sunburst radiance of the late-sixties. The resemblance of "John" to John is particularly uncanny, even eerie, but George's hairpiece is awful. Ringo's "With a Little Help From My Friends" rings true, if a bit heavy. Paul is bright, light, young, and magnetic. He even plays left-handed bass.
It works. The crowd, the Atlantic Ocean to its back, chants and sways. The evening begins with sunshiny harmonies, Sinatra, Como, and Cole not so far away. It ends with Lucy in the sky with diamonds imagining there's no heaven, guitars unshackled, voices unthrottled, the crowd swept into another summer of love, guided, indeed, through a revolution, as true a revolution as we in our time have known.
I watch. My son joins in.
The distance between "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "I Am the Walrus" seems inexplicable. How do you move in less than four years from Oh please say to me/you'll let me be your man to Yellow matter custard/dripping from a dead dog's eye?
These guys do it every night in two hours. From the start the crowd knows what's coming, that the sweet chirpy harmonies are only preparing the way for the raw intensity of Real Rock and Roll. When the Sergeant Pepper's transformation begins, the number standing at the stage triples and all manner of manic activity breaks out. My wife and I notice (what she calls) "the bouncing girls," a pair of pretty teenagers who, seized by the spirit, enact the famed psychedelic rhythms with enormous infectious creativity, bending, swaying, entwining with shrieking serpentine delight, utterly enraptured by the moment. They bounce from the right side of the stage to the center, directly beside our son. He's so taken with the music he barely notices them (or so he says).
This concert, compressing the Beatles' lifespan into one short evening (yet somehow giving it the feel of eternity), makes it clear that in the 1960s an encompassing tautness, a still lingering tension, was swiftly and permanently eased, neck-ties turned magically to tie-dye. Tightness, once the friend, quickly became the enemy; flowers, formerly dainty, now had power. We began to rock!
What do the Beatles stand for if not this change?
What happened? What does it mean?
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