Let's talk about the Beatles for a minute...

I vaguely remember watching a programme on it. Some of the screaming hysteria was apparently manufactured. The idea was that others would copy it and it would mushroom. They were also girls of a particularly impressionable age.

So in some ways it was much like cults, and the techniques used by agitators behind say the Ukraine events.

And in some drink or drugs and the music and you've got a perfect cocktail for this to develop. Music can have a massive effect on people, even without other things coming into effect.

For some people, football matches are the explosive type of events your wife is alluding to.

 

I was 13 when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. I did not understand all the screaming either. They were the first music group that I was interested in listening to. My older sisters were into Bobby Darin.

 

i was an only child and in my second year of high school. my mother, who was monarch of the television, always watched laurance welk, and after the bubble machine ended, ed sullivan's really big shoe came on. and i believe this was either friday or saturday night, so there was no school the next day, and i remember topo gigo, and the first appearances of kermie, and senior winscesloss with his head in a box that looked like castro or somebody. and so there was all this screaming and over the top of it you could just bearly make out hearing him say, "and now, the beatles from haomberg" or something like that.

so you know, it took for ever before i ever actually heard THEM. when i finally did get to hear what they actually sounded like, i wasn't really all that impressed. but when they exchanged their bowl cuts for letting their hair grow out and started with the poetry about social issues i started listening. they really were just not that interesting in the beginning, but they were a big part of the birth of a popular movement at the time, that didn't really start with the music, but got a big boost from it, and when they became part of giving it that boost, yes i got interested. still thought many of the other "british invasion" groups had better sound and more interesting lyrics. but later on, they did start to do more interesting things.

oh yes, and i think what they sang was either "she loves you, yah, yah, yah", or "i wanna hold your hand". probably two of the least impressive lyrics i had ever heard before or since. but you couldn't really tell what they were singing anyway for all the screams and cheering.

when the first showed up in the u.s., they already had this huge fan base for europe and england. but it just seemed like, to me, so much hype and not knowing their history before they showed up here, it was just completely baffling what all the excitement was about. obviously the had tremendous stage presence, but until they did the white album, i really didn't understand what else they had.

later, much later, i began to learn a little bit about their history, and then it began, sort of, to make a little more sense.

what they became around the time they were getting ready to split up, and what each of them did shortly after, that to me is what makes them interesting.

 

I lost my allowance for a month when I brought home their first album.