Home		Dinty W. Moore Getting Better All the Time
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		Becky Bloom radiated all the raw seductiveness and uninhibited self-confidence a seven-year-old with braces could ever hope to possess. A face full of freckles, red-plastic eyeglasses, two oversized front teeth, a giggle that weakened my knees—all made her the indisputable sweetheart of the second grade, and I loved her. I admit it. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone. It was February 1964, and with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, every other boy in our St. Andrew’s Catholic class wanted Becky’s attention as well. My friend Tommy Patterson planned to fall down in front of Becky on the macadam playground, perhaps tear his blue uniform pants and scrape his knees. Ricky Molloy intended to bring in candy, lots of it. Eric Ploof was going to impress her by eating glue. I had no plan. By Sunday, February 9th, I was just moping around the house, resigned to total defeat at love. My older sisters, though, were busy huddling around the television, clearly excited. “The Beatles,” they told me. “The Beatles are on Ed Sullivan.” I immediately started screaming—screaming, because my favorite show of all time, The Scarecrow with Patrick McGoohan, was airing on The Wonderful World of Disney, on an opposite network, at the same time. The Scarecrow had horses, a man in a cool mask, real adventure. I had been looking forward all week to watching the Disney re-airing, and now my sisters wanted to watch these singing bugs. I shouted, then sobbed, then implored my mother to intervene. She didn’t. So that night seventy-three million fans and one inconsolable sobbing boy watched the Fab Four bound onto Ed Sullivan’s vaudeville stage. Outside CBS’s Studio 50, hundreds of police struggled to contain the growing mob, and in our living room my sister Sally struggled too, just to keep me quiet. My kicking and screaming was threatening to ruin it for everyone. Until I saw Ringo. As the Fab Four performed their catchy “She Loves You,” Ringo, twirling his sticks, throwing back his long-mopped head in gleeful abandon, grinning that ridiculously inane grin, seemed through my tear-streaked eyes to be the most wonderfully marvelous man ever to have lived. * I Read the News Today, Oh Boy! Reporter: Are you scared when crowds scream at you? John: More so in Dallas than in other places, perhaps. The explosion of Beatlemania that resulted, among other things, in my becoming a lifelong Ringo fan was attributable to factors beyond Lennon and McCartney’s clear genius at hooks and melodies. America, in a deep trough of national depression following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, needed diversion, new news for the grim front page, something decidedly not earth-shattering. Though for the most part we didn’t understand this at the time, part of the Beatles’ appeal was that these four British boys singing silly ballads represented an “invasion” we could discuss and denounce far more easily than we could comprehend the many sinister Cold War forces thought to be waiting directly off our shores. “It’s a relief from Cyprus and Malaysia and Vietnam and racial demonstrations and Khrushchev,” Anthony Burton wrote in the New York Daily News in February 1964. “Beset by troubles all around the globe, America has turned to the four young men with the ridiculous haircuts for a bit of light entertainment.” The ridiculous haircuts—a feature that gained John, Paul, George, and Ringo massive notoriety well before most of us in America had any idea whether or not we liked the music –- were part of the allure. “In the United States, teen-aged girls seemed to be particularly turned on by an alternative to the all-American male,” Nicholas Schaffner writes in The Beatles Forever: How They Changed Our Culture (MJF Books, 1978). “The implications of the Beatles’ relatively androgynous appearance may well have had a far more profound effect on sexual and women’s liberation than anyone could have guessed at the time.” The Beatles “burst onto the scene,” as the saying goes, at the right time, with the right sound, and the right hair. No one in the music industry had ever seen anything quite like it. Within roughly a year after the Ed Sullivan appearance, the Beatles dominated the Top Ten week after week after week, and sales of guitars in the United States had doubled from two years before. * Here, There and Everywhere Reporter: What is the secret of your success? John: We have a press agent. All of this might seem distant rock and roll history, as out-of-date as poor Eleanor Rigby, but don’t try to convince my twelve-year-old daughter. Maria spent the early weeks of the new year persistently downloading Beatles MP3s from Napster, burning racks of bootleg CDs and selling them on the sixth grade black market. The music was as new and fresh to her, it seemed, as it was to my twelve-year-old sister in the 1960s. A few weeks ago, Maria’s friend Adriana rode in the backseat of my car, pumping her arms, shaking her hair, singing “Lady Madonna, children at your breast…” as enthusiastically as any flower child. Adriana was wearing a new Beatles t-shirt. She had just borrowed my copy of Schaffner’s book. She loved these guys. The Liverpool Boys clearly have bounce. Thirty years after the big break-up, twenty years after John Lennon’s death, around what would have been Lennon’s 60^th birthday, the Beatles greatest-hits CD 1 sold 1.6 million copies in one week. The album, though released late in the year, eventually became the seventh biggest selling CD of 2000. A Hard Day’s Night was resurrected for theatrical re-release in New York and L.A. The four Liverpudlians made the cover of Rolling Stone, again. The Beatles not only came back, but they came back with a bit of the old irony— nudging the Backstreet Boys right out of first place, and crushing them in album sales. The irony, if you will excuse me saying so, is that the Beatles themselves were once a boy band. All those delirious pre-teen and early-teen girls performing the Beatle Bounce at the foot of Ed Sullivan’s stage obviously knew this, even if most of us have since let the fact slip our minds. Watching Help! with Maria, though, reminded me—that John, Paul, George, and Ringo started their amazing climb as just four cute teens in corny coordinated outfits. So I find it truly ironic that when the boy band phenomenon sputters back, just as we enter a new century, John, Paul and the boys return again to show their stuff. The stuff, by the way, is still very good. But I’m left wondering where exactly is the appeal for a pre-teen in 2001? How do the Beatles manage to erase thirty years of music history and emerge as “the” band once again? The Backstreet Boys, and their counterparts N Sync, are cute, or at least young enough to seem so. The Beatles today, on the other hand, consist of one dead man, a virtual hermit, and two aging cartoon characters: Ringo, best known to my daughter’s generation as the conductor on the PBS kids’ show Shining Time Station, and Paul, becoming seemingly less real with each passing year, and more and more just another pop culture icon. Maybe it’s the music. * Everybody Had Something to Hide Except for John and His Monkey Reporter: Do you worry about smoking in public? Do you think it might set a bad example for your younger fans? George: We don’t set examples. We smoke because we’ve always smoked. Kids don’t smoke because we do. They smoke because they want to. If we changed we’d be putting on an act. Ringo: We even drink. Driving home from the ice-skating party we held for my daughter’s birthday, I have five twelve-year-olds crammed into the back of my Mazda. The tweeners—born in 1989 – are obsessed with the Beatles, and parse the lyrics endlessly, looking for life lessons. “How about ‘Yellow Submarine’?” one of them asks. Loud giggles all around. “I’ll bet they were on drugs when they wrote that.” More giggles. “They were on drugs a lot,” my daughter offers. “All the time.” “Yeah.” There is a certain downside to re-introducing your pre-teen daughter to the music of your youth. Many of us were flat-out stoned when we listened to it. And most of our favorite acts were higher than the Mir space station when they hit the stage. “Did you know they were on drugs?” Maria asks. “Um, sort of,” I answer. What she doesn’t ask is, “Why didn’t you care? Drugs are bad, right?” She knows enough to stop. The conversation I really dread goes something like this: “Dad, where were you during the war?” “Smoking pot, honey. Smoking pot, and trying desperately to cash in on some of that free love. Now go do your homework.” Bob Dylan handed the four Beatles their first joint, in May 1964, after Dylan’s London concert. John liked it a lot. By the 1966 release of Revolver, he had discovered LSD as well, and apparently liked that even more. Listen to “Doctor Robert” or “I’m Only Sleeping” if you need to be reminded. Of course, we viewed recreational drugs differently then. “It would mean a whole new world if the politicians would take LSD,” Paul glowed to a Life magazine reporter in 1967. “There wouldn’t be any more war or poverty or famine.” How delightfully naïve that sounds in the year that our nation transfers power from a President who once smoked marijuana to one who probably snorted coke. “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now,” John once exclaimed. Soon after, George grew a beard. The Beatles’ cute boy band characteristics dropped away one by one and they became harbingers of a revolution. They were the Marilyn Mansons, the Eminems of their time. * When I’m 64 Reporter: How do you add up success? All four: Money! Reporter: What will you do when Beatlemania subsides? John: Count the money. I ask Maria why she likes the Beatles. “They’re good,” she says. I ask her friend Sarah to explain the appeal of a band where the living members are grandparent age. “Everybody gets old some time.” An adult friend suggests that the girls, at an age where they are still quite ambivalent about boys and sexuality, are perhaps more comfortable with the Shining Time conductor as heart-throb, rather than someone more real. “Are these little girls finding safe haven in a boy band that’s half dead or invisible (John and George) and half androgynous or Peter Pan-ish (Paul and Ringo)?” he asks. Not bad as theories go, but I don’t see these girls flocking toward the Monkees, or Paul Revere and the Raiders. Herman and the Hermits, thankfully, haven’t bounced back onto the charts. And besides, my daughter and her friends aren’t just hanging up posters, wearing shirts, dreaming about the boys in this old boy band. They are listening. They know the tunes, the lyrics. They hear something that makes sense to them. The brilliance of the Beatles, I think, was their capacity to evolve. They began as just another four cute moptops with guitars, but four cute moptops who wrote their own tunes and composed their own lyrics, at a time when few bands were really doing so. When that became stale, they went to India, transformed the acceptable range of instruments, not just for themselves, but for rock and roll generally. They had publicly-stated opinions, controversial political minds. They created music by running tape backwards, or sampling randomly. “Number nine.” They chose to go decidedly counter to the culture back when counter-culture still meant something. The Beatles pushed musical boundaries to make way for the coming of psychedelic rock, symphonic rock, and (thank you, Yoko) eventually even new wave. What they did still sounds pretty damned interesting today—to me at 45, and apparently to my daughter’s 12-year-old friends. As times change, the collective cultural ear inevitably seeks out new sounds, new spokespeople, new margins to transcend. The genius of John, Paul, George, and Ringo was more than musical—it was that they somehow managed not just to change with the times, but, amazingly, to move out ahead, well beyond the curve. For many memorable years, whenever we as a culture arrived at our new destination, we found our favorite musicians already there, laying down new tracks. When I’m 64, Sir Paul will be 78. It is not entirely impossible to imagine that he might still be writing pretty love songs. Maybe he and Ringo will form a half-reunion, and some inconsolable sobbing boy who wants to watch something else on television will see them, smile, and what was old will suddenly be new again. And by the way, the Beatles were right. She did love me. By Friday, February 14th, 1964, I had the song memorized: “You say you lost your love, well I saw her yester-day-yay. It’s you she’s thinking of, and she told me what to say-yay.” My second-grade sweetheart Becky Bloom stood on the playground in her blue plaid skirt and white uniform blouse, flashing her bright metal smile, feeding me one-by-one each of the red candy hearts Ricky Molloy had slipped her during second period. “Sing it again, Dinty,” she giggled. “Sing it one more time.” Molloy, Patterson, and all the other unsuccessful boys, stood many feet away, furious and confused. She loved me, and nobody else.
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