Still Fab - The Beatles and their timeless influence

Reason, June, 2001 by Charles Paul Freund

A long list of later Beatles songs is drawn, directly or indirectly, from this tradition: "Martha, My Dear," "Your Mother Should Know," "Penny Lane," "All You Need Is Love," "All Together Now," "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," "Honey Pie," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," "Magical Mystery Tour," "Good Night," and almost everything on the B side of Abbey Road, down to and including the inner-groove run-out, "Her Majesty." While the Beatles continued to write and record rock songs such as "Revolution" and "Come Together," and while they engaged in some entirely different musical experiments on the White Album, the influences that shaped their major, later output--most of the music for which they are best known--emerges from an antique pop style.

These two elements of the Beatles' career--their development as narrators, and their exploitation of Music Hall content and style--lift the group's music into a context of its own. It is these elements that are able to claim the attention of an audience that was born long after the group broke up. But what do either of these elements have to do with the mythology that the rock establishment embraces? Precious little. In the end, the rock world's head was turned by music that was sweet, corny, artificial, and intensely sentimental. Rock has yet to come to grips with this.

"Their music doesn't grow old," according to Beatles authority Bill Harry, compiler of the 720-page Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia. Actually, much of it is drawn from musical conventions that were so old that the group's American following didn't know them. Fans were free to create their own context for the music, and to create their own associations and meanings. That the music's sensibilities arrived from such sources as Paul McCartney's musician father didn't matter decades ago, and certainly doesn't matter now. "A lot of my musicality came from my dad," says McCartney in the new Beatles coffee-table book. He cherishes his boyhood memories of lying on the rug while his father played the piano and explained the "clever" parts of the old songs he once performed. According to Paul, such memories are why he is "so open about sentimentality."

The Beatles' 21st century fans are already assembling their own memories of the group, choosing among Beatles "eras," and even asserting their primacy. One of them recently told USA Today that "In some ways, we are more sincere fans in that, unlike the baby boomers who see The Beatles as a form of nostalgia, we pick The Beatles over all the music of today and make a conscious choice to experience a group of 35 years ago."

"We hope you all will sing along," sang the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper's. In fact, singing along, pint in hand, was a staple of the 19th century Music Hall experience. In a sense, everybody did sing along, and more fans than ever seem to be joining in. Many of the original boomers thought at the time that the Beatles were helping raise the roof of a new culture. If so, they did it by opening the longest lasting Music Hall performance of all time, entertaining, infectious, and dripping with sentiment down to the last note.