With the Beatles

Beatlemania is back, or at least it seems that way as we mark the 50th anniversary of their arrival in America.

When I was growing up, I had an older friend named Danny who carried a portable record player and all the Beatles albums everywhere he went. The result was that just about everything we did as kids was done to a Beatles soundtrack.

Danny also took me to A Hard Day’s Night, and I remember that the movie ticket came with the kind of glossy program that you never see any more. Many years later I learned that the program was worth thousands of dollars if in good condition.

Mine wasn’t, because I had cut most of the pictures out and taped them to the walls of my bedroom.

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My favorite Beatle was George, only because everyone else liked either Paul or John. The same contrariness led me to become a fan of the Cardinals instead of the hometown Cubs-the White Sox were irrelevant-and of Tom Landry’s Cowboys instead of Vince Lombardi’s Packers or George Halas’ Bears.

Wanting to be different than the other kids also led to an embrace of the Beatles’ great rivals, the Rolling Stones (like the White Sox in baseball, the Beach Boys didn’t count), such that the first album I owned was High Tide and Green Grass, and I was the only one in the neighborhood to buy “Paint it Black” instead of “Paperback Writer.”

When the Beatles broke up, we all thought it would be temporary, and that they were sure to get back together again before long (Lorne Michaels’ $3,000 reunion offer on Saturday Night Live was especially funny on that score).

And it was all Yoko’s fault anyway.

By the time I was in college, I had already gone through two complete sets of the Beatles albums, and recently gave the first set (the Capitol Records American versions), chipped and scratched as they were, to my youngest son as he went off to college like I once did-with an old-fashioned belt-drive turntable and a collection of classic rock albums.

I also remember (wrongly!) preferring McCartney to Plastic Ono Band after the breakup, and buying All Things Must Pass before realizing that George’s modest songwriting talents simply couldn’t carry a double, let alone a triple album (Along the same lines, I was shocked when learning that the guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” wasn’t George, but an uncredited Eric Clapton).

By the time I heard Howard Cosell announce on Monday Night Football that John was dead, I had already begun to lose interest in rock/pop music. Ninety percent of what I listen to is jazz, played by musicians who died long before the “smart” Beatle.

I wouldn’t recognize Beyoncé or Jay-Z or Lady Gaga if I saw them, and I still consider U2 and REM to be “new” bands.

Despite all that, I continue to submerge myself in the Beatles every few years, listening to virtually nothing else for several days in a gorgeous process of rediscovery and still getting that chill up the spine from the harpsichord-like break of “In My Life” or to the chorus of “Carry that Weight” on the second side of Abbey Road.

At the least, I feel profoundly grateful that I got to grow up during the “golden age” of rock music, when the Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix revolutionized a musical genre. Comparing the Beatles to contemporary pop seems faintly sacrilegious and a marker of bad taste, like pairing Citizen Kane in a double bill with Hot Tub Time Machine 2.

Although I’m not sure the later Beatles albums have aged quite as well as the ones the Stones recorded at their peak (Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street), I was offended then and now by Mick Jagger and company billing themselves as the “world’s greatest rock and roll band” before the Beatles had officially called it quits.

And I still think John (with all due respect to Mick and Van Morrison) has the closest thing to the perfect rock ’n’ roll voice, with “Twist and Shout” as the decisive item of evidence.

There is almost certainly lots of good rock/pop music out there of which I’m blissfully ignorant, but the hunch is that if you listen to even the best of it after Rubber Soul or Revolver, it won’t sound nearly good as before.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 02/24/2014

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