Still with The Beatles

When I first borrowed The Beatles’ “Anthology 2” from my father when I was six, I found really great music that I thought no one in my generation knew about. At the expense of not following any current sounds outside of the stray Blink-182 and Smash Mouth albums my younger brother would buy, I listened to it and the other installments of “Anthology” over and over and over, as if it were something new.

And when it came time for me to buy my first album, I bought “Revolver,” which ranked at the top of some best-albums-ever lists but never got much radio play in my own childhood.

I then went through the first half of adolescence thinking at times that I’d made a mistake. The other music I listened to at that time (Billy Joel, Supertramp, Creedence Clearwater Revival) was by no means from my time, and so it wasn’t until high school that I gave any thought to anything current.

Every time someone asked me what my favorite band was, I’d reply, “The Beatles,” a bit sheepishly, because more modern names like The White Stripes and Coldplay never came into my head.

Turns out I had nothing to be ashamed of. Those “Anthology” CDs I listened to got a lot of people in my generation hooked on the Fab Four. Whether it was through those albums or through something more direct, the tastes of the parents seeped through.

Say what you will about the money (his Beatles work still feeds Sir Paul McCartney when he’s 68) or the sacrifice of any sort of message the band had tried to send (although the same McCartney said, “There are only four people who knew what The Beatles were about, anyway”). The music has passed onto another set of fans.

The music affected me to such an extent that, before visiting friends in London whom I hadn’t seen since last summer, I made a stop in the band’s hometown of Liverpool. The Beatles were far from the only good thing to come out of this city. The Beatles’ spirit, however, still lives here, and although the city has grown since then, its collective memory of the band has grown with it.

The clearest examples of this are the new Cavern Club and McCartney’s and John Lennon’s childhood homes. The original Cavern, where the Beatles performed 292 times before they made their first trip to the United States, was cleared to make way for an underground loop. It was rebuilt as close to the original as possible in 1984 after ownership passed to Liverpool F.C. player Tommy Smith.

Today, the place is both a world tourist stop and a thriving music venue, and the greatest tribute is that the original music outweighs the tribute bands.

Two other buildings have stayed right where they started. Thanks to donations from the McCartney family and Yoko Ono, the homes of the Lennon-McCartney duo have been restored to resemble their state in 1957, when the two met at a church festival. The UK’s National Trust runs tours through Lennon’s Mendips home (more accurately known as Aunt Mimi’s Mendips home) and the McCartney flat at 20 Forthlin Road.
Beatles sights abound in Liverpool. Penny Lane still has a barbershop, the red gate at Strawberry Field still stands, and the Beatles Story museum has more history than even I knew.

The amazing thing is that I wasn’t the only one seeing those sights who wasn’t born when the band broke up in 1970. The music lives and still seems new for so many people.

I’m not alone.