In article <19990121180037.29860.00000685@ng36.aol.com> brodie37ks@aol.com
(Brodie37ks) writes:

>And also, isn't it better that we Beatle fans be objective about them
>than any number of varying uninformed sources?   

No. And you may quote me.
  
Objective...what a concept!
  
I've been thinking about this for days, ever since I saw your post. There
were times when I couldn't quite get straight if you were admonishing us
to be "objective" or "obsessive".

I'll opt for the second, if I may.

Objective I've never been.

Don't get me wrong. As a clear, ravishing plateau, I've never once
imagined that true objectivity might not be the best of all possible peaks
to conquer. One gets so much further with it. One can lay out one's
credentials so much more efficiently without the giveaway trembling that
reveals a deep, hidden love...a passion much more grand than the mountain
of impartiality to which we pretend to aspire. 

In the scholarly world---a cold height whose rarefied air some of us have
breathed---there's an equally chilly dismissal of all things passionate.

It's such a bother, really. You spend years getting your gears revved up
for the chase; you stoke your fires with equal measures of these inner
teeming energies and the Chicago Manual of Style. And then once you get
"there", wherever "there" is and whatever it means, you have to sit still
and quell your manic gasps, lest you reveal that you have, trapped within
you, the primal bacchanal, where "know" and the existentialist "no" are
equal...where you know more for what you jettison than for what you drag
along with you. 

Best, in fact, that you leave all your own words behind you, and turn up
"Revolver" or "Rubber Soul" or "Please Please Me" or "Beatles For Sale" a
little louder.

Nuts? Crazy? Silly?
  
Is that what you really are, underneath?

Don't hide your love away. We can tell. We know. 

It's the one thing we share.

Some of us have shared it since the distant grey days thirty-five years
ago.

Don't trouble me with England. I know England was different. Of course it
was different; they had decent tea and civilization and propriety; they
knew the virtue of the slow build, the resistant chase. They had
coquettish charts, filled with the remnants of skiffle and the flotsam of
Joe Loss and men with names like Wilde and Eager and Faith, who strove as
best they could to hide what really made them move. They were neither wild
nor eager, and their faith was transitory at best.

What you saw, in those days, was a cautious reflection of Merseyside fire,
the slow warm surrender of a culture to a new wave of music. If you were
English, you might have thought it was going to be The Shadows
forever...but you kept hearing this delicious Northern tang in the
airwaves and on your turntable, and you felt your ears happily burn.

Slowly, serenely, the Beatles broke down those bastions of civility. It
was a most polite mania, for awhile...at least until the London Palladium
show.

There was nothing slow about their conquest here. The suits were nice; so
were their manners...or so it seemed. They were all artifice. They had no
intention of sparing us.

The feeling was mutual.

You'll pardon me for admitting it, but we wanted this swift, relentless
musical conquest. Whether it was a rescue from our tragic political
circumstance (as you'll hear some insist) or a deliverance from Bobby
Vinton and the Singing Nun (neither a convincing argument), or some
undefinable confluence of the pop charts and modern culture, something
made a flame catch and burn here in America.  Before you could protest,
the inferno enveloped you, and you embraced its heat. 

What enhanced it? Not much we can trace. Think about it. Before we saw
their irresistible kinetic images on TV, we had just a few bits of subtle
kindling. 

A hitbound song, rushed into release; an LP to cash in on the song,
without apparent color or surface passion, its blacks and whites stark and
frozen in its cover frieze. 

It was the admixture of ice and fire perhaps that did it. Don't you agree? 
The blended sound of their voices and guitars, the foursome whose members
we could not distinguish, at the beginning. The thrumming amalgam of
rhythm, the intangible drum; the tune that did our breathing for us, that
squeezed out of us all sense and logic and objectivity. 

There's that word again.

Our elders could be objective. Maybe they could because in their youth
they'd had something on which to spend their own allocated passion. Every
generation seems to have such a expenditure. But there was nothing like
ours, was there? And how many of us were caught unaware, offguard? 

I know I was.

I didn't intend to fall like that. I didn't intend to give up my good
sense and judgment. I *liked* the music of 1963. I was ten. I was old
enough to know what was already perfectly good.

But I liked this more. I liked it beyond being able to express it, or
admit it. And that I liked too.

Losing one's voice means giving in to the voices of those who sing to you
about love; who, in the early days, would sing about it sans embellishment
but with the sincerest truth; and whose message would grow in complexity
over time, almost as deftly as their music grew from album to
album---almost as persistently as we ourselves grew and evolved.

I can't recall, in popular music of *any* era, any group whose songs
showed quite such a remarkable capacity for evolution; whose songs could
leap from one plateau to another till before you knew it this foursome was
scaling peaks that you yourself couldn't even see till they defined their
new ground.

Objective? How do you do it, in the face of such an unfathomable
phenomenon?

I haven't been objective since January 1964. I've been absolutely nuts,
ever since. In all the words I've written about the Beatles---all the
times I've tried to be accurate and thorough and keep a clear sight for
whatever is the best and most documentable truth about their inexplicable
vision---I've hoped that somehow my views and feelings made some sense in
the real world of scholarship. 

More likely, my words, however sincere, fumble and stall.

Because, to be honest, I'm entirely blind. What I feel, viscerally, is the
beat and the warmth and the passion of the music and the time itself. Any
words describing what happened are a dim echo of what really went on, and
it's pure luck if anyone makes sense in trying to describe it.

Maybe description is beyond us. Maybe the best circumstance involves our
ear and our eyes, unencumbered by analysis and learned documentation.

Maybe the best thing is to let go of intellect, and let the heart lead us
back to the wonder of those first days when a new musical world was
revealed to us...when, without logic, we moved forward into a new era
of sense and sound.

I'm ready, as I am every year about this time, for a fresh surrender. It's
one of the the best celebrations of life.

-- 
"So where are the strong? And who are the trusted? And where is the
harmony, sweet harmony?" 
--------------------------
saki@evolution.bchs.uh.edu