“I fell in love with the Beatles' music (and simultaneously, of course, with their four faces-cum-personae) along with my children, two girls and a boy, in whom I discovered the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like flow of musical invention and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse, on the Ed Sullivan Show of 1964. Together we saw it, The Vision, in our inevitably different ways (I was forty-six!), but we saw the same Vision, and heard the same Dawn-Bird, Elephant-Trump, Fanfare of the Future . . .
“The notes healed, the words teased; or perhaps it was vice versa. But something teased, and something healed, year after year, Rigby after Rigby, Paperback after Norwegian . . .
"Meanwhile, there was a slim volume of pure verbal genius by a new author called John Lennon: In His Own Write. If this weren’t enough to rhapsodize upon, there were the notes (and the sylph-siren voice) of one McCartney. These two made a pair embodying creativity mostly unmatched during that fateful decade . . . John and Paul, Saints John and Paul, were, and made, and aureoled and beatified and eternalized the concept that shall always be known, remembered and deeply loved as The Beatles. To me, they were the best songwriters since Gershwin.
“And yet, the two were merely something, the four were It. The interdependence was astonishing, and in some ways appalling; do we really need all this to sustain us When We’re 64? Well, today I am almost 64, and three bars of 'A Day In The Life' still sustain me, rejuvenate me, inflame my senses and sensibilities.
“The Beatles are no more. But this week I am still jumping, weeping, remembering a good epoch, a golden decade, a fine time, a fine time . . .”
--#LeonardBernstein
#Maestro #Conductor #Composer #ClassicalMusic #Genius #Polymath #Grammys #Tonys #Emmys
#Influence #HallsOfFame #TheBeatles #GOATs
Sources: The Beatles, Geoffrey Stokes; interview with Jonathan Cott, 1989
“The notes healed, the words teased; or perhaps it was vice versa. But something teased, and something healed, year after year, Rigby after Rigby, Paperback after Norwegian . . .
"Meanwhile, there was a slim volume of pure verbal genius by a new author called John Lennon: In His Own Write. If this weren’t enough to rhapsodize upon, there were the notes (and the sylph-siren voice) of one McCartney. These two made a pair embodying creativity mostly unmatched during that fateful decade . . . John and Paul, Saints John and Paul, were, and made, and aureoled and beatified and eternalized the concept that shall always be known, remembered and deeply loved as The Beatles. To me, they were the best songwriters since Gershwin.
“And yet, the two were merely something, the four were It. The interdependence was astonishing, and in some ways appalling; do we really need all this to sustain us When We’re 64? Well, today I am almost 64, and three bars of 'A Day In The Life' still sustain me, rejuvenate me, inflame my senses and sensibilities.
“The Beatles are no more. But this week I am still jumping, weeping, remembering a good epoch, a golden decade, a fine time, a fine time . . .”
--#LeonardBernstein
#Maestro #Conductor #Composer #ClassicalMusic #Genius #Polymath #Grammys #Tonys #Emmys
#Influence #HallsOfFame #TheBeatles #GOATs
Sources: The Beatles, Geoffrey Stokes; interview with Jonathan Cott, 1989
