I grew up with the Beatles - born 1952 (today is my 58th birthday), I was e.g. 10 years younger than Paul. Luckily, my whole family adored almost all music. When Paul said he thought of John and himself as another Rodgers and Hammerstein, I understood - R&H musicals were, are, my all-time favourite musicals. Also luckily, not only did my brother, like me, love music and wanted to hear everything he could, he was four years older than me. So when the Beatles’ (and any other 60s) music emerged, he was, with his friends, in effect scouting for me - so I was way ahead of my contemporaries in hearing and exploring the Beatles at a substantive (not fan) level.
I first heard the Beatles from a transistor radio in our suburban Brisbane backyard when I was 10 years old. The song was "Twist and Shout” - it was a live broadcast, broadcast (?January 1963) before the release of the Please Please Me album. THIS IS THE SPECIAL MOMENT I WANT TO HIGHLIGHT (and which cannot possibly be fully communicated to someone who didn’t hear the Beatles at the time - without having heard anything that came after them). To me, though I’d heard a lot of music (of course only mainstream music - I was only ten), the first few seconds was the strangest sound I had ever heard. By the end of the song, I knew this was the start of the next era of music. I’m reminded of Louis Armstrong’s words on first hearing Charlie Parker - he described it, deprecatingly, as Chinese music. Well, the first bars of Beatles music to reach my little ears was equally strange to me - but unlike Louis’s repulsion, I was, within seconds, entranced. I remain so to this day.
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I grew up with the Beatles - born 1952 (today is my 58th birthday), I was e.g. 10 years younger than Paul. Luckily, my whole family adored almost all music. When Paul said he thought of John and himself as another Rodgers and Hammerstein, I understood - R&H musicals were, are, my all-time favourite musicals. Also luckily, not only did my brother, like me, love music and wanted to hear everything he could, he was four years older than me. So when the Beatles’ (and any other 60s) music emerged, he was, with his friends, in effect scouting for me - so I was way ahead of my contemporaries in hearing and exploring the Beatles at a substantive (not fan) level.
I first heard the Beatles from a transistor radio in our suburban Brisbane backyard when I was 10 years old. The song was "Twist and Shout” - it was a live broadcast, broadcast (?January 1963) before the release of the Please Please Me album. THIS IS THE SPECIAL MOMENT I WANT TO HIGHLIGHT (and which cannot possibly be fully communicated to someone who didn’t hear the Beatles at the time - without having heard anything that came after them). To me, though I’d heard a lot of music (of course only mainstream music - I was only ten), the first few seconds was the strangest sound I had ever heard. By the end of the song, I knew this was the start of the next era of music. I’m reminded of Louis Armstrong’s words on first hearing Charlie Parker - he described it, deprecatingly, as Chinese music. Well, the first bars of Beatles music to reach my little ears was equally strange to me - but unlike Louis’s repulsion, I was, within seconds, entranced. I remain so to this day.