THE BEATLES' SECOND BOSTON VISIT, a hair-raising concert at Suffolk Downs in August 1966, was a scenario of screaming teen-agers whose din almost drowned out the Fab Four's skimpy 33-minute performance.

-- Ernie Santosuosso, Boston Globe, January 29, 1988

"THINK FOR YOURSELF," "If I Needed Someone" (on the British Rubber Soul album), and the Dylan-inspired "Taxman" are among the strongest music the Beatles ever recorded. They all have a crisp rhythmic punch and unhackneyed harmonies.

-- Ran Blake, Third Stream Musician and Educator

Source: Boston Globe, February 13, 1984

THE BEATLES BROUGHT FORTH AN ART FORM for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let's call it, for meditation and Oriental music. Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it's about. We are hearing more and more of it, and it's being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That's what the Beatles started.

-- Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth

I WAS A SENIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL when Abbey Road came out. We had something euphemistically called senior study which consisted of a record player and a ping pong table. I played a lot of ping pong and when Abbey Road came out I put it on in senior study while I played a game. "She's So Heavy" was cranked up pretty good and I became totally hypnotized as we smashed the ball back and forth. When it suddenly stopped, I stopped, put down the paddle and walked over to the record player and stared at it until people kept asking me what was going on. I was flabbergasted.

-- Jim Armenti of the Lonesome Brothers

Source: Brattleboro (VT) Reformer, June 28, 2001

THE STRIKING THING about listening to Lennon in the memorial tributes and on the albums old and new is how easily he triumphs over all the cliches about him. Of course his most famous lyrics are on an extraordinary level of verbal sophistication not heard in popular music since the great theater lyricists of the '30s, but the fascinating thing about the earliest songs--some of which are represented even on the final Beatle LP, Let It Be--is the way he can restore energy and meaning, through music and intensity of delivery, to the semi-articulate language of daily life ("You'll never know how much I really care"). The most worldly of the Beatles, the cheekiest and most satirical gave us "Dear Prudence," one of the loveliest of all popular evocations of innocence; the most eloquently angry of the rockers, the "Walrus," wrote and composed "Julia," a song of love for his mother; the wittiest of the Beatles was also the most direct in the expression of naked, autobiographical feeling.

-- Richard Dyer, Boston Globe, December 14, 1980

I'm sure that I wouldn't have known where to get started in music if it wasn't for the Beatles.

-- Brad Delp of the bands Boston and Beatlejuice

Source: Boston Globe, December 11, 1980

ONE OF THE DEFINING DAYS for a significant proportion of the population was June 2, 1967, the day that Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was issued in America--I imagine most people between the ages of 30 and 40 can tell you what they were doing that day and can claim that all the afterwards were different because of it. Many were standing in lines waiting for the record stores to open; many more kept their radios on. And everyone was talking about the album.

I remember that I was at an end-of-the-school-year party to celebrate, of all arcane things, several friends' having passed their PhD orals. But for once the conversation at the party wasn't about teachers and students and books you should have read and hadn't; it was about Rita the meter maid, and Mr. Kite, and Lucy in the Sky and the joys of getting to be 64 after a life full of days. The record was played over and over again at the party, and the next day I went out and bought it--it was my first rock album.

Of course by that time the music of the Beatles was everywhere, and whether or not you were a fan of rock music it was associated with your life--it was there when you met people, it was there when you broke up, and it was there when you were having a good time. Some of it was mindless noise--that was its attraction; some of it was articulting what you thought and giving voice to what you were feeling; the best of it, represented by "Sgt. Pepper," was doing what all significant art does--it was out there ahead of you, anticipating and educating what you thought and what you felt, and making you feel good while it was happening.

-- Richard Dyer, Boston Globe, December 14, 1980

[John Lennon has] probably had the biggest influence over my life. He probably had the biggest influence on everybody's life, more than they know.

-- John Hartcorn of the Neighborhoods

Source: Boston Globe, December 11, 1980

---

MY FIRST EXPOSURE TO THE BEATLES was when I saw the movie Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The mix of stars that were in that movie was really interesting and I always liked the song "Strawberry Fields Forever." I think I was about 10 at the time, but I didn't realize that it was the Beatles' music until much later. We grew up with the staples in urban music at the time (Temptations, Dells, Barry White, Curtis Mayfield, the Dramatics, Blue Magic, etc.) so aside from the Carpenters, I didn't get much exposure to pop music until later in life. I still haven't explored the depths of the Beatles music, maybe one day I will.

-- Cassandra Reeves, Recording Artist, ex-Ladysoul

Source: E-mail message, September 23, 2002

JOHN LENNON WROTE WORDS and, though he cheerfully admitted that he never could learn to read music, he knew how to find musical tunes. Because he was John Lennon the words and music immediately and automatically became something else--a political statement, a sociological phenomenon, a source of controversy and, for many, a further turn in a continuing, highly personal conversation. He lived a life of allegory, really, right up through the end.

-- Richard Dyer, Boston Globe, December 14, 1980

I HAVE THREE BROTHERS, and one of them made particularly sure that I was educated and well-rounded enough in Beatles music and lore to go off into the world knowing what the rest of the world was crazed and in love with. Since I was a baby when the Beatles broke up, I was appreciative he filled me in on everything, and my first Beatles albums from my brother were Rubber Soul and a double platinum covered promo.... It was the crossover of some Beatles covers of their early influences and some early pop stuff, and then the lyric junkie in me appreciated Rubber Soul cuts; basically I spun them both a lot, but I listened to music absolutely all the time. So at sixteen I delved into the history and the whole skiffle, Merseybeat, Stu/Pete/Silver Beatles evolution and really listened to all the songwriting styles and musicianship in the group. A few years ago, reading Behind the Glass (which is a great book by Howard Massey with many producers commenting on their styles and experiences) I had more hindsight to George Martin and the fact that he was the quintessential complement to the amazing combination of the Beatles during their place in time. I often go back and rediscover all the phases of their music with a new ear.

One reason I am so enamored with music as medium is the profound power with which it captures time, memory and emotion and then can reinvent those three things at a later date or through someone else's eyes, ears, love. I think the Beatles did and do this still.

-- Amy Fox, Maine Recording Artist

Source: E-mail message, October 6, 2002

Boston Does the Beatles should have been a single strong early CD, but ... NO! Production partners disagreed on the viability of the new compact disc music format (I obviously lost that argument somehow) and the promotion partner (A. J. Wachtel) was geared up for the anniversary of the Beatles white album. A vote of confidence to that end by one Tom McDonald, then president of the local Beatles fan club, sealed the effort as a double vinyl piece. Great Rick Berlin version of "Eleanor Rigby," and a nice ska version of "Rain" by Bim Skala Bim--then fronted by one female, Jackie Starr.

-- Mickey O'Halloran, Boston Rock Legend

Source: E-mail message, September 29, 1999

THE MOST AMBITIOUS TAPE flipped our way this summer is the advance sampler cassette of Mickey O'Halloran's Boston Does the Beatles project. Surmounting the problems of tracing mechanical licenses through the six companies that hold the right to Beatles songs and finding 30 local bands interested in performing Fab Four covers didn't stop Mr. O'.

Kris Fell, Boston Phoenix, September 9, 1988

[T]HE BOSTON ROCK OPERA folks find themselves at the right place at the right time. The BRO is not a company to lack for ambition. They revamped Jesus Christ Superstar, mixing kitsch with poignancy, and staged the Kinks' underappreciated, politically astute Preservation Act 2. Here, they are kicking up something that is neither kitschy nor political. Sgt. Pepper was the seminal progressive rock album of 1967, a semiconceptual record still considered one of rock's finest. (And all done on a four-track!) It hit during the Summer of Love and was the confirmation of the Beatles' move from mop-top to hippie, from pop star to artist.

-- Jim Sullivan, Boston Globe, November 3, 1995

Hippies Beneath the Waves

I GUESS THE ONLY OTHER BEATLES MEMORY that really stands out in my mind is getting stoned and watching the Yellow Submarine. I think it opened up my eyes to what plane they were on when they were making music at that point in time. Before then it was just a cute song about a submarine and a bunch of hippies underwater.

-- Rose Gerber of the Relative Strangers

Source: E-mail message, September 20, 2002

Not only was I part of two separate and very different performances of Sgt. Pepper, I sang in the one-time performance of BRO's Abbey Road--the most love-filled performance I've ever been a part of.

-- T Max of The Noise and Boston Rock Opera

Source: E-mail message, September 22, 2002

BRO, MORE THAN TWO DOZEN STRONG THURSDAY, has tackled Sgt. Pepper in a theatrical fashion. Abbey Road, which the troupe rehearsed seven times, was done without theatrical fanfare. They played the 17 songs in order, with a variety of singers swapping lead roles and some gorgeous choral singing, especially in "Sun King," "Carry That Weight," and "The End." Part of the pleasure simply came in hearing this audacious work played live, especially the song-suite from side two where the band was cranking. Gary Cherone, formerly of Van Halen and Extreme, took BRO down that home stretch superbly. Kudos, too, to guitarist Mike Loce, who channeled George Harrison during the closing guitar blitz, and drummer Larry Dersch, who expertly executed Ringo Starr's short and simple, but delectable, drum break.

-- Jim Sullivan, Boston Globe, May 5, 2002

BY THE WAY, THE CURRENT CONCERT [Paul McCartney] was nothing like the one in 1964 which was almost inaudible with prehistoric mikes and amps, and the screaming. But being there was less like being part of an audience and more like a life changing experience. I came away from that concert not just entertained, but feeling a part of a totally new and radically different movement, and the next few years did shape my life in many ways.

-- Kelly Gifford of the Pandoras

Source: E-mail message, October 2, 2002

^THE BEaTLeS

Copyright © 2002 by Alan Lewis.
All rights reserved.

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