My friend Michael is a musicologist whose speciality is Johann Sebastian Bach. An author and lecturer, he speaks to erudite groups in many countries about, for example, Bach’s Mass in B minor.
Michael doesn’t think much of most popular music.
But last weekend he walked into a Manhattan dinner party where the early Beatles played on the sound system. As Can’t Buy Me Love began, Michael was nodding along.
“It’s just,” he said with a smile, “so good.”
That same weekend, across New York state in a Buffalo suburb, my friend Lauri overheard some kids of middle-school age chattering about music they were discovering on TikTok: “Did you hear that one, ‘I heard some news today oh boy’?”
The Beatles endure. They transcend time, geography, demographics and personal taste.
That will be proven once again on Friday, yet another anniversary of John Lennon’s murder outside his home at the Dakota apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Forty-three years have passed, but that won’t discourage the crowd that I am certain will be gathering about a quarter of a mile away in Central Park.
As they do every year on Lennon’s birthday in October and the anniversary of his death, hundreds of singers and dozens of musicians will circle the Imagine mosaic. They’ll make their way through nearly the entire Beatles catalog, from obscure tunes like Hey Bulldog to the seamless second side of Abbey Road.
If you stand on a park bench and look west, you can see the Dakota spooky in the moonlight, as the songs unfurl. Hour after hour, deep into the night, the faithful – tourists, professional musicians or regular New Yorkers – keep their strange vigil.
And what never fails to move me is their complete familiarity with the music. Whether the song is Love Me Do or Come Together or Revolution, everybody – young, old, American or from a dozen other countries – will know every word and quirk. If there’s a harmony part (and isn’t there always?) somebody will take a stab at it.
This year, so soon after the heralded release of Now and Then, billed as the last Beatles song, I found myself wondering anew why the Beatles’ magic never disappears.
I explored the question with Geoff Edgers, arts reporter for the Washington Post who is writing Double Fantasy, a graphic novel about the last days together of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Edgers also wrote a Beatles book for children, Who Were the Beatles?
“They were the perfect merging of musical excellence and commercial success,” Edgers told me. The exceptional quality is consistent, “with maybe only three songs that aren’t good”.
What’s more, their musical legacy remains undiluted. They broke up, never reunited, and, as a band, never put out any mediocre or bad albums.
Yet it’s hard to pin down. Is it that they were together for such a short time, a brilliant burst of music and celebrity and growth in the 1960s and broken up forever by 1970? Is it the songs themselves, seared in our memories and life experiences? Is it the sadness of having lost half of the Fab Four too soon – Lennon in 1980 at 40; George Harrison in 2001 at 58?
As Edgers noted, artists who die before their time, from Buddy Holly to Janis Joplin to Amy Winehouse, get defined differently. Something mystical attaches itself to their legacies.
“The Beatles,” Edgers said, “are like a snapshot of a particular period of time that never fades.” Additionally, given Paul McCartney’s savvy handling, “the Beatles brand has been incredibly well-protected.”
Of course, they aren’t alone in the longevity of their music’s appeal. Bob Dylan, at 82, just finished another major tour. The Rolling Stones, who formed in 1962, released another album just weeks ago and will tour behind it.
I love Dylan and the Stones, and my pop-music taste ranges from Chris Stapleton to the Pogues to SZA. But somehow, for me, the Beatles are untouchable. On a higher plane.
A week or so ago, I happened to hear a song I wouldn’t even have put in my Beatles Top 20: A Hard Day’s Night.
Listening, I found myself awestruck by that opening chord for the ages, by the spiny Lennon vocal on the verses, by the creamy McCartney vocal on the bridge, by Ringo’s addition of a muted cowbell, by the filigree of George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker guitar.
Almost six decades after its release, A Hard Day’s Night sounds even more exuberant, more joyful – more perfect – than ever.
So I guess I’ll go over to Central Park on Friday and pay my respects. I’ll be the one singing along.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist
