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| From | Stewart Mason <flamingo@theworld.com> |
| Subject | Re: Beatles Truce |
| Date | Wed, 04 Aug 2004 02:52:39 -0400 |
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At 01:44 AM 8/4/2004 -0400, Miguel Motta wrote:
>Ok ok... wow! I never thought my little post with a typo'd Beatles
>spelling would inspire all this...
>
>...White flag... truce guys... Everyone has expressed incredibly
>deep opinions... One thing this topic did was bring out the writers
>in many of the auditeers...
Don't worry, Miguel. You're relatively new here, so you haven't seen true
divisiveness among Auditeers. The amusing thing to me about this entire
debate is that, frankly, all of us are arguing the same basic points; it's
just that, as Jason very astutely pointed out about power pop fans as a
whole, we all come from the Beatles from different directions.
Two things, though:
>a) If you-were-there like I was then The Beatles mean a heck of
>a lot to you and it hurts to even think that they will ever become
>a historical footnote (I highly doubt it tho')
I personally think it's really dangerous to speak without qualifiers,
because so little is 100% true. There are *always* exceptions. For
instance, although I personally fall into the GenX demographic category, I
am happily married to a woman who was born pretty much exactly in the
middle of the baby boom. She, like you, Was There: saw the Beatles on Ed
Sullivan when she was seven, A HARD DAY'S NIGHT was the first album she
ever bought, the whole thing. Honestly, Miguel, the Beatles don't mean
shit to my wife. She doesn't dislike them or anything, it's just that her
enthusiasm for the Beatles was quickly overtaken by other, deeper
enthusiasms: the Stones through STICKY FINGERS, Zappa up until the advent
of the Flo and Eddie period (when Frank moved into the "poo jokes and tasty
chops" epoch of his career), Dylan, the Byrds, the Incredible String Band
(shudder), the Velvets (as I've said here before, one of the things I most
admire about my wife is that she's the only person I know who got a copy of
WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT when it first came out), Iggy, Fairport, etc.
I am in no way saying that my wife is at all archetypal, I'm just saying
that even back in the '60s, it was entirely possible to be a rabid rock and
roll fan and be only casually interested in the Beatles. They were the
biggest game in town, but they weren't the only game in town.
>b) If your generation is once or twice removed then its understandably
>hard to see the true importance of the musical/cultural impact they had...
I'm sure you don't mean it to sound this way, but this strikes me as a
wildly condescending statement. While I admit that the only Beatles album
recorded during my lifetime was ABBEY ROAD, I spent enough of my early
years as the youngest Beatles obsessive in Northern Colorado (during a
local station's Beatles Weekend when I was eight years old, I ended up
winning a fairly difficult on-air trivia challenge, beating people three
and four times my age -- as I recall, the question that put it over for me
was that I knew who "Suzy and the Red Stripes" was a pseudonym for, the
name of the single released under that name and the derivation of the band
name) and enough time reading and writing about the band since then to feel
that, y'know, I might have some idea. The issue I have is not with the
musical and cultural impact the Beatles had at the time, but with the idea
that's so fixated in so many heads that all musical and cultural phenomena
ever since are but pale shadows.
S
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