On Beatles Time
By Daniel Ferreras Savoye, West Virginia University
11 Years a Decade
The August 1999 issue of Great Britain’s well-known and highly respected music
magazine, Mojo, was dedicated to Queen and featured on the cover a picture of the
group at their most flamboyant, along with a caption that read: “ The second greatest
band of all time?” That is to say, at the dawn of the New Century, no one was even
thinking about questioning the supremacy of the truly number one rock band of all
times, whose name did not even need mentioning – The Beatles, of course.
A decade and a half later, the Beatles remain just as present in our culture as
they were at the turn of the century, and their staying power is starting to appear quite
uncanny. It is a perplexing fact for one that George Martin, the long time producer of the
band, would chose to crown his long and important career with a trip down memory
lane, In My Life (1998), a collection of Beatles covers executed by an array of artists
with very disparate musical talents, as can be Phil Collins, Jeff Beck or Bonnie Pink but
also Sean Connery26, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams or Goldie Hawn27. For a producer who
has worked with musicians of the stature of ground-breaking jazz guitar pioneer John
McLaughlin, this choice is highly significant: when all was said and done, George Martin
opted to celebrate his career going back to the Beatles, as if he acknowledged implicitly
that his tenure with the Fab Four had simply been the most meaningful work he had
ever done – quite a statement.28
When it comes to sheer numbers, Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s well-known
prediction has indeed come true and the Beatles are today more popular than Elvis
Presley, not to mention incomparably more present in our musical landscape. The
album 1, a compilation of 27 Beatles songs released in the year 2000, became the
world best selling record of the first decade of the 21st Century, which, for a band that
had been gone for thirty years was not only unheard of but also a bit disturbing, for it
suggested that nothing better than the Beatles had been created in pop music in the
past three decades, a very sobering observation in regard to the state of the pop music
industry today. On the textual front, the book Anthology, a lavish recompilation of all the
Beatles interviews chronologically organized, adorned with rare photographs from their
26 Sean Connery cannot sing, as demonstrated early on in his career in his first appearance as
James Bond 007 in Dr. No (1962), when he attempts to carry the tune (“Under the Mango Tree”) that
Honey Rider (Ursula Andress) is humming as she emerges from the water, with the same mitigated
results as him from a strictly musical point of view.
27 In all fairness, it should be mentioned that Goldie Hawn’s retro-jazz version of “A Hard Day’s
Night” is probably the most musically convincing of all the actors’ performances on the album, although
lacking the energy and freshness of the original.
28 The title of George Martin’s autobiography, All You Need Is Ears, speaks for itself, just as that
of In My Life.
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