The anniversary of John Lennon’s death leads Andrew to remind us of an excellent – and lengthy – 2001 piece from Reason magazine: Still Fab by Charles Paul Freund. Of course I gre up with the Beatles and experienced them as a purely British English phenomenon. As a result, I’ve never had any reason to doubt the standard account of how the Beatles conquered America and revolutionized rock’n’roll. My mistake.
“But there’s another nagging question raised by the new Beatlemania. Not just who are the Beatles now, but who were they then? New fans may be using the group for their own purposes, but then so did the original generation of fans. The years since the group’s breakup have seen a lot of myth-making and obscuring, in order to fit them better into a pliable narrative of the era and its aftermath. It is worth pausing to listen to the group anew in the context of their own time, because there are some lost chords in their music waiting to sound again.”