10-Young people wade through musical cesspool to meet The Beatles

Tribute bands have always seemed a little too obsessed to me, kind of like the folks who show up as Trekkies at Star Trek conventions.

But when it comes to the Beatles, I’m all ears.  Much has been written about their musical revolution and journey.   I can’t hold a candle to the theories of historians and sociologists.

I do know that I grew up with them, musically and culturally, and I don’t remember a time without Beatles music.  While I was young – only 7 – when they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, their musical (r)evolution followed the issues of our lives.

Simply, they are the best.

Not “were.” Are.

You might expect someone age 55 to say that.  But 17-year-olds? 

Seventeen-year-olds were among the small audience in this boutique theater where The Revolution 5 – yes, five young men ages 21-44 from central Minnesota in Flyover Land – re-created the music of the Fab Four on a dark winter evening.  (They didn’t wear wigs, just white shirts and skinny black ties, and they weren’t impersonators.)  http://www.therevolution5.com/

Actually, a good smattering of people in their 20s and 30s were among the 50 and 60-somethings who turned out to hear the music played live.  One young man across the aisle obviously knew as many of the words to the songs as I did.  The 17-year-old to whom I spoke in the elevator after the concert simply explained, “I just like them (the Beatles).”  She brought her 19-year-old boyfriend.

Amazing.  She, like my sons, was rasied in a time when a good portion of popular music is crap.

Crap music exists for every generation, and who am I to judge?  I enjoyed The Monkees in my childhood. 

But somehow young people, and middle-aged people, and five musicians spanning 23 years, had waded through that musical cesspool and come to appreciate the genius of Beatles -- even without screaming crowds, fainting women, constant headlines or chart-topping new releases.

Most people my age or older can remember where they were on Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan, just like we can recall where we were when we heard Kennedy was shot, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Elvis died, and 9/11 occurred. 

I was sitting on a footstool in a shingled bungalow at 1645 Brenner Street, Saginaw, Mich., having my then-blonde hair painfully rolled up on those sticky pink sponge rollers.  Heavily indoctrinated in Lawrence Welk by my father, I tended to agree with his pronouncement that their rock-and-roll (which could barely be heard over the audience screams) was “noise.”

Thankfully, my musical development did not stop there.

I learned a few things at this tribute band concert.

·         “Act Naturally,” which Ringo Starr sang, was actually written by  Buck Owens.  That Buck Owens of “Hee Haw,” which I also remember from my childhood.  It was a campy, sexist, corn-pone, hillybilly-filled TV variety show hosted by Buck and Roy Clark -- who actually had a great deal of musical talent. 

·         Apparently the Beatles used more cowbell earlier than Will Farrell and Blue Oyster Cult.

·         When Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday,” none of the other three Beatles could add a thing to it, pronouncing it perfect.  Paul did the first Beatles solo on their fourth Ed Sullivan appearance, taped, which ran Sept. 12, 1965.  (Some say this is the most musically-perfect song ever written.  View performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLVuwIJvMX4 )

No one will ever see another Beatles concert.  McCartney still tours, but attending the expensive Sir Elton John concert here in Duluth, Minn., last year is probably as close as I’ll get to seeing Sir Paul. 

So bands like The Revolution 5 are a good thing.  They show us that great melodies, harmonies and lyrics, whether simple, poignant or political commentary, are still treasured by younger people who didn’t experience them the first time around.

They remind us that, despite the lewdness and degradation of women in today’s popular music, great music doesn’t  have to do that.  Controversy arose when John said “Christ” in “the Ballad of John and Yoko,” and the group used the anatomically correct word “breast” in “Lady Madonna,” in relation to nursing, not sex.  Other than that, the most obscene thing I can recall might have been an inference in “Penny Lane,” where the fireman “liked to keep his fire engine clean, it was a clean machine.”  (Or not.  It may have simply referred to a clean fire engine.)

In fact, though they were international superstars arguably more popular than Jesus, their songs throughout their careers and their often-complicated lives still searched for the simple things we wanted in 1964 and still want in 2012:  love, peace, spiritual fulfillment and simple joy, whether it’s “a couple of kids running in the yard” or love and companionship “when I’m 64.”  Turning 70 this June, widower and divorcee McCartney, now one of the world’s richest men, is still seeking the love about which he wrote so many wonderful songs.  He attempted marriage for the third time in 2011. 

All of that is timeless. 

Young people are turned on and tuned into the Beatles, still.  It gives me hope.

And I say, it’s alright.