Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 17, 1994 TAG: 9402160068
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"They were of their time."
While that may not completely explain the continued popularity of their music more than a quarter of a century later, it contains a heavy element of truth.
The voices dominating pop music at the time - people like Perry Como and Andy Williams - were singing for "adults."
Rock was there, too. But it's easy to forget that it wasn't the force it is today. Elvis was an established power, but most of rock was slightly unrespectable. Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis.
The Beatles were singing for those of us who were about to become adults in a way even our parents didn't object to so much. And we haven't forgotten it. It's because they sang to us that we can care so much about the reported effort of the remaining three of them to record again.
Oh, they cleaned up good back in 1964, and Paul even crooned "Till There Was You" from "The Music Man" on the first U.S. album. For true rockers, some of that early material was pretty wimpy, almost as bad as Pat Boone singing "Tootie-Frootie."
But we sensed a veiled rebelliousness underneath - rough Liverpool edges their manager, Brian Epstein, couldn't completely hone away.
By the time the Beatles came to the United States in February 1964 - just two months after "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was first heard on radio stations here - we already knew about their self-deprecating senses of humor that "adult" reporters often didn't seem to get.
"How do the Beatles react to criticism that they're really not very good?" "We're not," Paul answered, never losing his smile.
Was the trip some sort of revenge for the American Revolution?
"No, no. We just came for the money," Ringo said.
When are you going to get a haircut?
"I just had one yesterday," George deadpanned.
It was welcomed comic relief following a gloomy fall.
The critics who heard the Beatles' first concert in Washington decided their voices were "a bit thin" and the performance "semihysterical." Lawrence Laurent of The Washington Post called them "imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony."
Typical adult reaction.
Timing, of course, was critical to the Beatles' success. Right place, right time, right chemistry - physical, metaphysical and pharmaceutical.
That is why so few of us who loved them and mourned their break-up have very high expectations for the much touted "reunion" that seems already to be producing recordings in a secret place.
As George Harrison pointed out five years ago, there will be no Beatles reunion "as long as John Lennon remains dead."
Harrison, apparently the last to join the new project and a consistently acidic commentator on the Beatles, points out, "We may not be able to come up with anything. Maybe we can do something called `We Can't Work It Out.'"
But as New York Daily News reporter David Hinckley wrote recently, "even if the reunion produces no music of note, it will still please fans as long as it ends in anything short of a food fight."
The new collaboration is to produce, McCartney says, "incidental" music for a 10-hour video series called "The Beatles Anthology," being produced for use first on British TV then the U.S. home video market. At the same time, the furor over the 30th anniversary of the Beatles' first trip to America - a furor that, incidentally, makes no sense in Britain where they were the hottest group going a year before they came to America - is generating a new release of Beatles recordings.
George Martin is coordinating the production of as many as six CDs of previously unreleased material in coordination with the video series.
There is a lot of material to draw from. The Beatles released about 10 hours' worth of material. EMI, the British record company they recorded for, has about 400 hours of Beatles tapes in the files. And there are the 275 songs the group performed - and which were recorded - on the BBC. There is a rumor those songs could form a set of as many as 33 CDs.
While that material has never been OFFICIALLY released, much of it is widely available on 1,500 bootleg albums and CDs.
Bootlegs are unauthorized recordings for which the artists receive no royalties. Often they are inferior quality - though some Beatles bootlegs apparently are straight from high-quality studio recordings - and their sale is illegal.
A new Italian bootleg set of five CDs, for instance, is said to contain recordings by the Quarry Men (an early Beatles incarnation), alternate takes, live performances such as the Ed Sullivan show and outtakes. Bootleg experts say it will be hard for the "official" EMI compilation to match this one, though it will be easier to find.
And that's going to make a lot of people happy.
by CNB