Most regular readers of the Barris Beat have recognized from the vintage of some of my memories that I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. During most of those formative years, I lived either in or around Toronto. So, whatever was going on in the Big Smoke culturally, either I was in the middle of it, or I missed it by accident.
Of course, there is that famous quote attributed to one of Robin Williams, Pete Townsend (of The Who) or Timothy Leary:
“If you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.”
The implication, of course, is that youth culture of the 1960s meant its participants wasted themselves 24/7 on drugs, alcohol, sex, love-ins, rock ’n’ roll, revolutionary literature and/or anti-war demonstrations. Well, I admit – with one or two exceptions on that list – that I was there. And I can remember it. I got drunk for the first time in my senior year of high school while celebrating Canada’s 1967 Centennial. I tried a few joints with university friends. I read political philosophies from the right (Mein Kampf) and left (Communist Manifesto).
And in May 1970 (at age 20), I joined the demonstration against the war in Vietnam in front of the American embassy on University Avenue (the resulting riot scared the hell out of most of us). But by far the most intoxicating stimulant of the 1960s was its music. And at the top of my stack of vinyl were the Beatles.
I have to admit, I discovered the Beatles thanks to my younger sister. She attended one of those frenzied concerts in the early 1960s at Maple Leaf Gardens. Yes, she screamed to see Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr live on stage.
But when our dad managed to snag one of their British LP releases, an album entitled Beatles For Sale, for my sister’s birthday in 1965, I was hooked. It’s the album (released in the U.S. as Beatles ’65). Among other original experimental techniques, the album featured fade-ins, feedback from a guitar, timpani and African hand drums, and it included a hint of country and western.
“It was our stage show, with some new songs,” Paul McCartney said later.
Nobody had produced anything like their 1964 album A Hard Day’s Night, probably the first internationally successful music video. The mid-1960s saw them produce an album a year – Rubber Soul in 1965, Revolver in 1966, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.
My closest friend, Ross Perigoe, and I stood in line at Sam the Record Man in 1968 to buy the famous White Album (it sold 250,000 copies in the first week). And within hours I was spinning the disc on our university radio station, and Ross had memorized all the lyrics from Back in the USSR to Blackbird to Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? (a song that McCartney biographer Barry Miles says Paul wrote after witnessing two monkeys copulating on the street in India – remember, it was the 1960s).
Not a single weekend passed in the Barris household in the 1960s without catching the hottest program on Sunday night TV – The Ed Sullivan Show. And no performers, with perhaps the one exception of Canada’s Wayne and Shuster (who made more Sullivan appearances than any other act), had the impact that the Beatles did.
For their first appearance on Feb. 9, 1964, CBS apparently received 50,000 ticket requests for the 728-seat Ed Sullivan Theatre. TV ratings for that broadcast showed that 73 million people tuned in that night. Tickets were so scarce Sullivan admitted during an earlier show: “If anyone has a ticket for the Beatles on our show next Sunday, could I please borrow it? We need it very badly.”
According to Wikipedia, the Fab Four produced a dozen studio albums, five live albums, 51 compilation albums, 36 extended plays, 63 singles, 17 box sets, 22 video albums and 53 music videos. I’ve been intrigued by the so-called “last Beatles song” Now and Then, which employs AI technology to include John Lennon’s voice.
But of all the Beatles’ songs, the one that has most affected me was the 1966 Lennon and McCartney composition, Yesterday. It’s a nostalgic song about the break-up of a relationship – something everyone I knew experienced back then. Its melancholy tune and its simple lyrics said a lot about life and times in the 1960s. The fact that it’s been covered by no fewer than 2,200 artists, proves its longevity and relevance.
“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,” McCartney sang. “Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday.”