With the Beatles

When he was about eight, Glenn Gass ran over to a friend's house to say he had just heard a Ricky Nelson song they both liked. Until then, Ricky Nelson was the boys' favorite musician. But that was all about to change.\n"He said 'Forget Ricky Nelson,'" Gass remembered. The two boys ran over to another friend's house where Gass heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and had his first encounter with a group called the Beatles.\n"Everything weird about them in the space of three minutes seemed just right," he said.\nSince then, many of the things that Gass has done are a continuation of that day. As teacher of IU's rock and roll history and history of the Beatles classes he combines a passion he always knew he'd do for a living -- teaching -- with one he thought would only be a hobby.\n"I would not have believed it, but I would have been thrilled," he said of what his childhood self would think of his current occupation. "When I was that age the idea of pop music in a college class was unheard of. Pop music was not on the radar. It's amazing. I don't know how I ever got that lucky."\nAttending a Beatles class taught by Gass is proof that he still finds everything about the Beatles to be "just right." He leads the class in spirited, albeit slightly off key, renditions of Beatles songs; points out "classic Beatle moments" with obvious glee and, one day, after putting up a photo he especially likes, lies down on top of the piano in the lecture hall and entreats the class "let's just look at the Beatles."\nThe Beatles class has come a long way since Gass taught it for the first time at IU at Collins Living-Learning Center after John Lennon died in 1980. At the time, Gass, who came to IU to get his doctorate, was shocked because the students he encountered didn't really remember the Beatles. \n"(The class) seemed like a good way to pay tribute to John and pay my way through graduate school at the same time," he said.\nNowadays, the waitlist for the Beatles class is long, and at the beginning of each semester Gass has many people e-mailing him, begging for placement. The course used to be smaller, with rock and roll history as a prerequisite, but now it takes place in large lecture halls with over 300 students (a fact that is both a source of frustration and pleasure for Gass, as he moves away from teaching in a more intimate environment and from giving essay to multiple choice tests).\n"Making students lifelong fans of music is what keeps the course from getting stale," he said. "The best thing is when I feel like I had an impact on somebody's record collection and help made people lifelong Beatles fans."\nThe classes are also now more accepted by faculty at IU's School of Music. When Gass started teaching at IU in 1982 he was "amazed" by how traditional and classical-minded the music program was; people laughed at Gass when he wore a black armband after John Lennon died, and the head of the musicology department at the music school once asked him how he could "teach musical garbage." \n"I had a real chip on my shoulder for a long time," Gass said. "But the battles have been won. People accept pop culture."\nHistory of the Beatles was the first class about a specific band to be taught at IU, but now there are also classes about Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and the Beach Boys. Several of these classes are taught by music professor Andy Hollinden, who started out as Gass' grading assistant. The two met when Gass came to a restaurant where Hollinden's rock band was playing. It was April 15, tax day, and the band was playing the Beatles' "Taxman" in honor of that when Gass entered the restaurant.\n"I knew who (Gass) was but I didn't really know him and all I thought was 'Oh no, the Beatles' teacher is here and here I am playing 'Taxman,"' Hollinden said. \nWitnessing Gass' teaching style was something of a life-changing experience for Hollinden.\n"I was a music major and I had been through more music courses than you can shake a stick at," he said. "I was used to music classes from the music school and once I was exposed to what Glenn was doing, I was thrilled not only by the subject matter but by his teaching style, his enthusiasm and, even if it's a corny word, his passion. I never considered being a teacher until I saw what Glenn was doing. It was a whole new game and I wanted in."\nAlthough the two don't really work together to decide what each will teach in his class (and prefer not to), they are now friends who get together and "talk about music all the time like the cliche music nuts who sit together and discuss the state of the world -- only in musical terms," Hollinden said.\n"I just admire people who make things happen, and he's the perfect example of someone who just made this happen," Hollinden added. "He was a pioneer in his field, and I find that inspiring. Somebody has to be the first one to introduce topics and he did it. I wish I could say I did it, but he did it."\nThe Beatles and rock and roll classes that Hollinden assisted years ago are very different from the ones that Gass teaches now in part because both classes have gone multimedia. A few years ago, Gass worked with the campus Teaching and Learning Technologies Lab, a resource for professors, to combine music clips, sound clips and pictures into a computer program that he shows to the rock and roll history classes. \nAn IU grant funded by Ameritech gave him the resources to begin doing the same for the Beatles class. Gass said creating the multimedia programs with the staff and resources at the lab have been great because he no longer has to come to class lugging a sackful of tapes (although he does occasionally have to deal with malfunctioning computer equipment.)\n"My fear is that it looks easy," Gass said of the multimedia programs. "But everything up there represents ... I don't know how many hours of work. But I'll use it for the next 10 years."\nOccasionally the staff at the TLT Lab is able to learn something from the digitalized video files they help Gass prepare for the classes, said Kathryn Propst, a project coordinator at the Lab. A couple of days ago, Propst and the staff were working on a 1960s-era video clip of a mime contest with teenage girls lip-syncing to Brenda Lee songs.\n"We didn't understand what it was," she said.\nThat is until Gass pulled up a newspaper article about a runaway girl who was the basis for the song "She's Leaving Home," written by Paul McCartney. As it turns out Melanie Cue, the runaway in the article, was the winning contestant in said mime contest, which happened to be judged by none other than McCartney. The unlocking of this mystery is a good example of why Propst enjoys attending Gass' classes.\n"He's really playful with it and he likes to stop and talk about things," she said. "Because of that, it's really fun to go to lectures and see how he uses something you just made an hour before."\nAmong the many photos Gass uses for the Beatles classes are some taken of Gass and students at famous Beatle landmarks, from when Gass taught the class in London in the summer of 1998 and 1999. This summer, Gass will again take the class there and he hopes they feel the same way he did the first time he saw Abbey Road studios or the Cavern Club in Liverpool where the Beatles played early shows.\n"It was like going to my homeland," Gass said of his first trips to England. "Seeing all the places I read about my whole life was more moving than I thought it would be. In Liverpool, everyone sounds like the Beatles. I would walk around thinking 'the woman in the bakery sounds just like Paul!' I got such a sense of them as people because it was so much more real."\nThe photos also feature one of Gass' other passions: his family. Students in the Beatles classes can see Gass and sons Matthew and Julian posing at the grave of former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe or see his sons holding hands while standing in the parking lot where the Beatles would meet before departing for a tour ("They'll thank me someday," Gass joked as he cued up the photo for the class). \nAlthough Gass hopes his sons love the Beatles as much as he does, he credits wife Julia with helping him to stop judging people by their record collections (he claims thatwhen they met she had a "terrible" record collection, including John Denver and Barry Manilow.) \n"Julia helped remind me that music is not a prism through which everybody views the world," he said. "But she loves the Beatles now, as do my sons. Of course, they have no choice."\nBut Gass still believes the reason he made music tapes for girlfriends or for his wedding or for each of his sons' births was that songs can communicate feelings that letters or conversations can't.\n"I love music because that's what it does for you; it speaks for you if there's something you feel really deeply and want to share it," he said.\nGass said he admires artists recording today, but he feels more connected to the Beatles, Neil Young or Bob Dylan (the next artist he'd like to teach a class about.) Those artists and others are his way of carrying his youth into the rest of his life. But the popularity of the Beatles with his students makes perfect sense to him.\n"The Beatles live up so well because they're timeless," he said. "Some songs have memories you associate them with, but the Beatles transcend all that."\nNot that his youth doesn't have several Beatle-related memories. There's the Christmas of 1967 when his older brother gave him all four of artist Richard Avedon's portraits of the Beatles (the ones that appear in the liner notes of the Beatles 1 CD) or when he was ten years old and saw them in concert in Washington, D.C. during their 1966 American tour.\n"The moment I'll never forget is when they ran out onstage," Gass said. "There were warm-up acts but then suddenly they were there and 1000 flashbulbs went off. And there was this incredible scream. I knew it was really special at the time. I was in heaven."\nAll of the memories and all of the feeling Gass has piled up from years with the Beatles come out when he teaches the students in class. One of the best is the day he pulls up a slide of a letter written in childlike printing. It's a fan letter Gass wrote to the Beatles as a kid saying "You look so crazy with you funny haircuts" but also "I will always remember you John Paul George and Ringo from the (sic) you came to America till I die."\n"My mother gave me the letter when when I was teaching my first Beatles class," he said. "I gave it to my mother to mail but she didn't. She kept it because she said she thought I'd appreciate it someday. I doubt she knew how much but she was right"