When I was in junior high school, I fell in love with the Beatles music. I have no clue why. They hadn't been a band in about forever by that point and my parents didn't listen to their songs. I don't remember seeing any of their movies, but somehow, somewhere I must have heard them.
I went to a Beatles conference in Minneapolis. I went to see a tribute band with Beatles lookalikes. I bought lots and lots of their albums. Maybe all of them--I can't remember at this point. And I listened to their music endlessly.
And then somewhere along the way, I drifted away from their music. I bought an album or two to stream, but other than that? I hadn't been listening much.
Fast forward to a week or so ago. I've been working to catch up on my podcasts--I got backed up when I was on vacation and still have a backlog--and I noticed an episode in my Slate Plus podcast feed about the band. It was called: Hit Parade: The Fab Four Sweep Edition. I'd listened to an earlier episode of Hit Parade and I'd really enjoyed it, so I queued this one up and loved it!
The episode talks about how the Beatles had the top 5 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 list--a feat that hasn't been repeated since then. How the only reason why it happened was because Capital records refused to distribute the band's music and other, smaller labels were doing it.
It was enough to get me to stream Beatles music again on my phone and I headed over to Audible to buy Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield. I'm not very far on this yet, but I'm finding this interesting as well. Enough so that I plan to use my next credit to pick up his Duran Duran audio book which has been sitting on my wish list for a while now.
Between the podcast and the audio book, I sort of wish I had been born in time to see the Beatles come to America and be part of the hysteria. On the other hand, I'm very happy to have missed the turbulent stretch of time that came later. And of course, things are always better looking backward than they actually were at the time. That's why nostalgia is such a big thing--we've forgotten all the negatives and only remember the positive. :-)
