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In My Life: Encounters With the Beatles Edited by Robert Cording, Shelli Jankowski-Smith, and E.J. Miller Laino From International Publishing Corporation In 1964, the Beatles conquered America. For those of us who were born post-Abbey Road, Beatlemania can be a difficult concept to grasp. Sure, many of us go through the "Beatles phase," where we discover the music and the legends for ourselves. We come to like or even love the music, and idolize the people who made it. But there are still a lot of things we don't understand. Why were the girls screaming? Why was that hair cut, tame by today's standards, so rebellious? How could one band possibly have meant so much to so many people for so long? "In My Life: Encounters With the Beatles" - a collection of essays, poetry, and stories - does a great job of answering those questions, or at least telling us why they can never really be answered. Robert Cording, Shelli Jankowski-Smith, and E.J. Miller Laino, the editors of "In My Life," deserve a lot of credit for bringing this wonderful little mess into existence. The book brings together the writings of Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Philip Larkin, and Leonard Bernstein, and many writers, poets, artists, musicians, and doctors, focusing on the individual perspective of each. Most books about the Beatles delve into their history and give you an analysis of everything they did and its immediate impact on society as a whole. They'll show you pictures of the Ed Sullivan Show and the anti-Beatles rallies after John Lennon's infamous remark about the Beatles being "bigger than Jesus Christ." Every date and time of every performance, recording, and appearance is neatly recorded, and captioned with a blurb out its significance in the history of the Beatles. For once, a book has discovered how academic and trivial that approach can be. If you want to understand what the Beatles meant to real, everyday people, read "In My Life." Each work in this compendium, many of them previously published, shows what the Beatles meant to a specific person or small group of people, and how their lives were affected by the phenomenon of Beatlemania. There is really no broad, sweeping brush that paints a complete picture of what the Beatles were. This is a mural, each part adding its shape to a vague but recognizable whole, offering a better understanding of what it was like to grow up with the band. The book follows a rough chronology, starting with David Wojahn's "Fab Four Tour Deutschland: Hamburg, 1961," and ending with Francine Witte's "When the Last Beatle Dies." Fittingly enough, the first poem covers the Beatles' first experience with fame, and the last looks a few decades into the future to close out an era. If Beatlemania seems confusing to my generation, what will it be like a couple of generations ahead of me, when Paul isn't unplugging to sing his silly love songs, and Ringo isn't touring with aging oldies acts? Many of the early essay and stories take one of those screaming girls out of the crowd and show what her life was like, and why she was there screaming in the first place. "Hello, Goodbye" is the story of a girl discovering herself and hoping to catch John's eye at a concert. When she meets him and gets brushed off, it just feeds her fantasy. The Beatles were the vehicle she used to get from girlhood to adolescence, and she was willing to make excuses for their faults. "Not A Second Time," by Nancy Fox, finds another one of these girls in the crowd indulging herself in innocent fantasy about the Beatles. She finds herself even more attracted to the rebellion the Beatles offered after her family and the nuns at school disapprove of her and her friend Carol Ann talking about the band. The later psychedelic era finds the Beatles at the center attention of a whole scene, whether they actually showed up or not. This is where the excerpt from Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and Timothy Leary's loopy essay come in. Leary, always good for a laugh, sees the Beatles as new messiahs, come to Earth in a way we can all understand to teach us a higher consciousness (as if Leary was conscious to begin with.) Wolfe shows Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters crashing a Beatles concert. Ginsberg visits the same scene in "First Party at Ken Kesey's with Hell's Angels," mentioning the Beatles as part of the sounds moving the kids at the party. In most of the poetry, the Beatles are simply mentioned in passing, which automatically defines a place and time, leaving the authors to describe what was happening around them. "In My Life" also doesn't shy away from people who didn't like or understand the Beatles. Norman Paul Hyett's "Waiting on the Beatles" is written from the perspective of a guy working in a diner where the Beatles ate after a concert in Philadelphia. He watches disgusted as his bosses fawn all over the group and their entourage. He's only interested in getting his tip and getting away from the incredibly rude bunch of foreigners forcing him to work late. In a rare politically-charged moment in the book, Larry Neal's "A Different Bag" compares the Beatles to soul and blues artists like Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, expanding it to show the differences between black and white culture. Originally published in 1968, the essay purports to speak from the black perspective of the time, stating, "The Beatles are okay, I guess. I mean, we could care less." According to Neal, the Beatles were interesting in the abstract, but were too boyish for a culture that prized, and even thrived on, manhood. It's strikingly different from everything else in the book, which makes it seem all that much more important that it was included. The end of the book deals with Beatles fans growing up, some still lost in the dream the music once represented, others raising a family and watching their kids discover the music for themselves. Where the band once galvanized the youth of a nation, they now give kids and adults something in common to talk about. Now we get to see the point of view of the older generation as they pass the torch. So after reading "In My Life," I still don't know why so many of the girls were screaming, but I know why some of them were. I don't understand why the hair cut was rebellious, but I know that's not necessarily what the kids were using to rebel. I don't know why one band meant so much to so many, but I know how they could have affected a few, specific people. Maybe the Beatles are still conquering America. |
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