Back in the days before I was Xuladad, when I was just Xuladude, I once went on a date with a woman from China, a couple of dates actually. The first was a tennis date. Her communist upbringing had instilled in her strong tennis fundamentals. She hit topspin off both wings, and had a good kick serve that would’ve made her an excellent mixed doubles partner. On the second date we sat down for an afternoon coffee, and it was then that I learned that she’d never heard of the Beatles. Her communist upbringing had failed her!
For a minute I entertained the thought. Could be fun in a way, a complete pop culture tabula rasa. We could go through it all together, she experiencing the wonder and amazement of the first time, and I excitedly reliving it all vicariously. But then I thought better of it. That might not have been the best ever reason not to date someone, but it surely wasn’t the worst. I was looking for something new, but not that new. You need to be able to start somewhere with someone, and topspin wasn’t going to do it. Besides, in the back of my mind I knew that turning someone on to the Beatles from scratch wasn’t what having a girlfriend was for. It was what having kids was for.
Even if we don’t actively try to turn our kids on to the Beatles, (and really who doesn’t?) it just seeps in. When it comes on in the car, we turn it up. They notice how we know all the words. And so much of the lyrics, particularly later-era, are so whimsical and child-like that the songs must seem to kids like they’re explicitly for kids. What kid isn’t going to naturally tune in to “Octopus’s Garden” or “Bungalow Bill” or “Here Comes the Sun”? Kids discover the Beatles organically, whether or not an adult tries.
Sometimes parents do it accidentally. My father is, along with Deke Dickerson, one person I know for sure who could not give a “rat’s ass” about the Beatles (Deke’s words, not dad’s). But I know damn well that Deke knows way more of the lyrics than he wishes he did, and even dad would likely surprise himself on identifying Beatles songs and lyrics. So it was probably in this spirit of knowing there must be something there, even if he didn’t get it, that he took me as a kid of around seven years old to see a screening of A Hard Day’s Night, I believe at the Tulane student center. He may have figured that if the whole thing was basically for screaming teenage girls, then it must’ve been juvenile enough for a curious, pre-adolescent boy to get something out of.
Whatever the thinking, it worked. The movie is so damn good, and the music so amazing, that it kickstarted a lifelong love right then and there. And as many of you know, when you start young with the Beatles, their growth and evolution is there waiting for you as you grow and get older, so that each time you go back over the years, it keeps giving in new ways. I remember not being able to tell them apart, then not being able to tell the voices apart, then at some point by the time I was grown being able to instantly identify the voices. (The same thing happened to me with the Beach Boys, which I really never thought would happen, but now when I hear Carl, it’s Carl.)
When the time came to try my boys on one of the movies, I should’ve gone straight to Hard Day’s but instead I tried Yellow Submarine, thinking since it was a cartoon and all. Well, that didn’t work for shit. For one, my kids weren’t on acid. But the whole thing is just too strange and dated, and when the Blue Meanies start turning people into stone with their arrows, my boys had seen enough.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964) is of course a completely different bag, with the silly, farcical elements baked right in from the start, and nothing remotely like the Blue Meanies. From about the scene when the Fab Four are seated in a train car one minute, then running alongside the train outside the window the next, the boys were mostly in. Not quite in like with openings of modern Disney movies, like Moana, where the backstory is laid out in tight, animated narrative. But that’s formula, and Disney has an army of evil product-testing suit-bots to make sure their movies work from frame one. The Beatles had Richard Lester, who was just a director, albeit one with excellent comedic pacing and shot-framing instincts, but one who definitely didn’t specialize in kids’ fare, and one who despite farcical instincts, such as displayed in his The Three Musketeers (1973), could be said to have been most comfortable with adult and bawdy themes, such as in that same film.
If one had to guess which individual Beatle most resonated with the kids, then I imagine it wouldn’t take any Beatles fan long to figure out that it had to be John. John was truly the child heart of the group, the overgrown kid whose instincts for pranks and whimsical foolishness really drove much of the band ethos, especially early on, but even later, although with darker overtones. And sure enough, John’s bathtub scene elicited the most open laughter from my kids. The scene begins as the group is preparing to leave the hotel for the night’s meet-and-greets. George gets a bit of a laugh by lathering up the mirror in the shape of a beard, then shaving the mirror instead of his face. But John is in the tub, filled with bubbles, playing an imagination game of HMS Royal Navy with some toy boats. He does voices, sound effects, explosions, and sinkings, just like a kid, all while wearing his trademark fisherman hat. My boys cracked up. As their manager comes in to hurry him along, John goes under, and the manager watches the bubble bath drain until empty, with no John inside. John then comes in wearing a robe and tells the manager to quit fooling around and come on.
It’s a wonderful scene, but as the film goes on such scenes become less frequent, as the focus shifts to the music, and also to the insane dynamic between the group and the fans. Beatlemania, as it was known, makes perfect sense to us, even if we didn’t live through it, but not so much to a kid, and playing off it in the film didn’t have quite the same effect for them as the more straight comedic elements. As for the music, every single note of it is absolutely great, and there’s nothing not to love about scenes of them dancing to their own tunes, or the self-contained sequence in the field for “Can’t Buy Me Love”, or the “rehearsal” take of “And I Love Her.” But the whole thing is leading up to a “live” performance as a climax, where some of the tunes are repeated. If you love the tunes, you don’t mind one bit. But my boys aren’t quite there yet with the music. Their playlist is more in the Imagine Dragons, Michael Jackson, “Ghostbusters” realm for the moment, and although it probably won’t stay there, that’s a perfectly fine place for it to be.
They liked the movie well enough, but after all, it’s hard to argue with what Archie told me afterwards: “We don’t live in the past, dad.”
XulaDad 