The Beatles Are Forever, Absolutely. . . .

Tonight marks a half century since The Beatles made the first of three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, in 1964. A record 73 million viewers saw that broadcast on Feb. 9 fifty years ago. It landed the band its U.S. recording contract with Capitol Records and launched the British Invasion.

I didn’t see the show. (Actually, I’ve never seen it.) I was not quite five years old, and we did not have a television in the house. (My parents were opposed to the technology, and I’m glad they were.) But for me, as for so many millions of others -- not only in the U.S. and UK, but around the world -- the Beatles created the soundtrack for our lives. In the form of their songs, they were an ongoing presence, a consolation and a source of pure joy, not only for the six short years thereafter, but forever after.

It couldn’t have been very long after that Sullivan broadcast that I heard my first tune by the Fab Four. It was “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”, and I heard it on the kitchen radio over the stove. Since my father was a piano teacher and had an extensive collection of vinyl LPs of classical and jazz music, as well as the Living Shakespeare spoken-word excerpts from the plays, I had a sensitive ear for organized sounds. As I remember, I was alone in the kitchen, and the song stopped me cold.

I can remember the first time I heard many other songs later (“My Sweet Lord” in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany; Bread’s “Mother Freedom” as the soundtrack to a cheerleaders’ routine at Marshfield Junior High in Coos Bay; Blue Oyster Cult’s “Stairway to the Stars” and Gentle Giant’s “On Reflection” in my friend Mike Stockman’s room; the Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane” by a cover band in Salem, Oregon during the 1976 boys’ state convention at Willamette University), but this is the earliest. I just stood stock still, all five years of me, listened to the song, and knew I was hearing something unique.

I’m sure I must have heard a lot of Beatles on the RCA Victrola radio my parents let me have in my room the next couple of years. It was a black box on four tall, skinny wooden legs that had a record player under a lift cover as well as a glowing radio band on the side. I often stared at the vacuum tubes inside or the logo of the dog facing the morning-glory horn while listening to Motown on local AM stations in the dark … or looking out my second-story window at the lights of the city as mid Sixties pop music seeped into my pores.

My next vivid Beatles memory is listening to Sgt. Pepper over and over, after my Dad bought the LP in 1967. I remember we had a 45rpm copy of “Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby” as well. We went to see the animated feature Yellow Submarine as a family in early 1969. It became one of my favorite movies. I went out of my way to see it on big and little screens nearly a dozen times thereafter, long before the advent of VHS cassettes and DVDs … on a U.S. Army base in Germany (1970-1971), on network television (1973-1977), in college screenings (1977-1981), and in suburban Boston public libraries.

As a teen, I had a little disposable income, and steadily collected used LPs of the band’s catalog: everything from the 1965 Capitol reissue of the VeeJay Records collection of early Beatles tunes (complete with fan-mag style listings of the boys’ loves and hates -- I remember Paul was said to regard having to shave as mankind’s curse), to John and Yoko’s unbearable Wedding Album and Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions.

All of this was in the mid 1970s, after the Beatles had split up. But the music continued to serve as a quiet, steady underpinning for life … a sort of cultural microwave background radiation in the wake of the Big Bang the group had sparked in the Sixties. My high school American history teacher allowed me to lecture on the Beatles and their influence for the entire period of several of his classes.

When I got to college, my roommate Paul Rosta played guitar and had many of their albums, so we’d sing Beatles songs together. I could identify most of their songs just from the bass line rumbling through the wall, ceiling, or floor from elsewhere in the dorm. Since I had made a reel-to-reel audio recording of the “Yellow Submarine” soundtrack off the TV as a mid teen, I knew most of the dialogue from the movie: one night Paul and I walked around the college grounds while I replayed the movie from memory.

Lennon was shot in the winter of my senior year of college. I remember coming home to my room alone and sitting in stunned silence in the dark, to midnight and beyond, listening to the Boston radio stations play an endless string of Beatles and post-Beatles Lennon compositions. My other roommate’s father, who had been active in the civil rights movement, asked me in great puzzlement why everyone was making such a big deal about the death of a mere pop singer. I think everyone’s mourning the passing of their own youth, I told him -- the most vivid, joyful, and alive moments of our past. We’re realizing it’s all irrevocably gone now.

As my musical interests and primary allegiance shifted over the years from hard pop and rock to progressive rock (Creedence to Deep Purple and Led Zep, then to Yes, ELP, and Gentle Giant), the Beatles remained a fixture. While I was still in Boston in the early Eighties, WAAF-FM had a weekly show called “Beatles Forever,” on which host Steve Minichiello talked about Beatles history and trivia, played obscure cuts, and even let us know about TV ads the former members had shot in Japan. A Spanish girlfriend in 1988 told me her circle had learned much of their English from Beatles songs. I was able to enlighten her about the long, stretched-out word in the bridge to “You Can’t Do That” that they never could figure out: the word is “green.” In 1989 I enjoyed a Beatles sing-along in an Ashland, Oregon pub led by a trio that called itself Vera, Chuck, and Dave.

I went to Seattle several times with my morris dance team in the mid 1990s for the Northwest Folklife Festival. Apart from our performances, my favorite event was the Beatles sing-along. A live band played and a crowd of at least 500 sang Beatles songs, in harmony, for an hour. It was the closest thing to church -- a spiritual experience with hundreds of strangers sharing a commonality and beauty -- this lifelong atheist has ever experienced.

My wife and I watched the “Beatles Anthology” TV documentary series in late 1995 and I felt myself in a strange time warp at multiple levels of history and my life: the in-context era of the footage; the odd appearance of the aged, present-day ex-Beatles; my heavy immersion in the music in the 1970s, especially with Paul in college; the association of particular songs with certain experiences or women in my life; and the many hours simply listening to the albums and staring at the photographs and liner notes. (That last experience just isn’t the same -- or even possible, is it? -- with CDs and digital downloads.)

Connections keep getting made. Maybe half a dozen years ago, I attended a lecture at a photo gallery on First Avenue in Portland by a musicologist named Bob Priest. He dissected the soundscapes and engineering tricks of that pioneering Lennon composition from Revolver that uses lyrics from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, called “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’ve since done several readings with Bob’s Free Marz String Trio in their annual March Music Moderne festival. And the last time I participated in a Beatles sing-along was last July at the Mississippi Pizza Pub, hosted by a band called All Together Now. (I see they’re doing a show tonight.)

And what karaoke aficionado hasn’t done at least one Beatles tune? Over the years I’ve sung “In My Life,” “Paperback Writer,” “You Can’t Do That,” “Getting Better,” “If I Fell,” “Can Buy Me Love,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Revolution,” “Yellow Submarine,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “She’s Leaving Home.”

In 2000, United Artists re-released “A Hard Day’s Night” to movie theaters and we watched it on the big screen at Cinema 21 in Portland. Afterward, I wrote for AllWatchers.com: “…nearly 36 years later, the film found the Beatles once again had the number one bestselling record in the world. Grownups could bring their children -- even grandchildren -- and it was a bittersweet pleasure to realize how we all had aged, and who was no longer with us.... Lennon had only 16 years to live after this film was shot, and has now been gone much longer.”

But the music will go on forever.