'I Wanna Hold Your Hand-Again'

"The Beatles are unforgettable," says Carol Singer, music director of WRKO in Boston. That remark may become the platitude of the half-century. It is seven years since the group's final album was issued, eleven years since they last performed together in public. Yet WRKO is only one of hundreds of radio stations across the U.S. scheduling Beatles marathons and playing such old faithfuls as Hey Jude and Get Back regularly. In record shops last week, three of the bestselling albums were by the Beatles--including a newly issued "live" recording made at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and '65 and a double-LP set taped in a Hamburg joint in 1962 before the Beatles even were the Beatles.

Panting Philosophy. In the beginning it was called Beatlemania. Today it is called Beatlemania. The phenomenon, moreover, now laced with wistful nostalgia and what passes for a sort of panting social philosophy, far transcends the domain of disk jockeydom and bedroom stereo. Would anyone in his right mind pay $17.50 for a ballpoint pen bearing the emblem of Grand Funk Railroad? In Atlanta, Beatles' pens are fetching that much--and even a kid with only 25-c-can acquire a Beatles bubble-gum card. Not to mention the lapel buttons, rings, mirrors, metal trays, T shirts and posters that variously clutter the landscape.

At the monthly record swap held in the parking lot at the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood, an original Beatles 45 r.p.m. single can get you $100 or more. Later this month Chicago's Palmer House hotel will be the site of "Come Together--Beatle Fest '77," a convention to which hordes of Beatles fans will swarm to discuss the meaning of it all.

Much of the meaning is simply that die-hards over 25 like to mourn their lost youth, and the new generation of pre-and post-pubes want to get some idea of what the thrill was all about. Right now nothing caters to the twin needs of Beatlemaniacs quite as emphatically or successfully as a hot new show on Broadway called, with roaring show-business logic, Beatlemania. Two months after-it began, bereft of plot and without benefit of an official opening night, Beatlemania is playing nightly to packed houses. The stars of the show are four Beatles look-and sound-alikes, who during the evening play and sing 29 Beatles songs. Meanwhile, on a series of scrims and screens, with help from running printout headlines, newsreel clips and still blowups, Beatlemania fleetingly invokes some turbulent events and fateful people from the 1960s.

As the lights dim, a suggestive voice booms forth: "We ask your cooperation by not smoking ... anything ... in the theater." Then, amidst the tumble effaces on the various screens, can be seen Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day, Peter Lawford, Marlon Brando and John F. Kennedy as President. The gloom of Kennedy's assassination breaks the mood, but not for long, as Ed Sullivan can be seen in 1964 announcing, with a wave of the arm: "Ladies and gentlemen ..."

From the stage comes the joyful wallop of She Loves You (yeh, yeh, yeh). Behind the footlights, the four young New York musicians recruited for the venture--and rehearsed daily for nine months to master the music--play and sing about as well as mere Beatleoids might be expected to.

But they give a good approximation of what the Beatles looked like. As Ringo Starr, Justin McNeill bobs his nose up and down convincingly. Leslie Fradkin as Harrison and Joe Pecorino as Lennon rely pretty much on their costumes and gestures for verisimilitude. But Mitch Weissman is a dead ringer for McCartney, not just in his stance and round face, but in the way he captures the pleasantly boyish manner in which Paul went about his stage business. Seated alone at the apron, accompanying himself on guitar, he sings Yesterday in a way that is totally unpretentious and touching.

Psychedelic Statement. If this were all, Beatlemania might be dismissed as an ingenious multimedia ripoff. But Producer Steven Leber, 34, who thought the whole thing up, and his partner David Krebs, 37, both successful rock impresarios, have tried to make some sort of psychedelic statement. "What this show really is," says Krebs, "is a panorama of changing forces within American society. In the '60s, what Bob Dylan said, what the Beatles said, really set the tone for kids in terms of drugs, obedience to authority, war, parental guidance. Not that everything they said was right. But that's not the point."

Given the audience, the quality of the nostalgia stirred is something less than an exercise in historic imagination. Said one 26-year-old, looking back on the golden age of Beatledom, "I just remember everybody screaming in the seventh grade." Or as Charles McGinnis, 24, put it with some awe, "This is the closest you are ever going to get to seeing the Beatles. It's the one chance."

Yet the shifting pictorial backgrounds--sometimes raw and powerful, sometimes peaceful--are remarkably varied: newsreels of the Chicago riots, the Selma civil rights march, Charles Manson, the flower children putting daisies into rifle barrels, the death of Bobby Kennedy.

Some of the resulting contrasts with Beatles songs work better than others. Strawberry Fields Forever, a drug song, is backed by masses of huge, drowsy faces, ballooning up over the stage as they smoke pot, looking as passive as numbed denizens of an opium parlor. Revolution, in which the Beatles dissociate themselves from violence, shows hooded Klansmen burning a cross, and a monk in self-immolation to protest the Viet Nam War, serenely praying as delicate traceries of flame sweep over him. The words of a famous Lennon love song about the need to make up after a spat: "Try to see it my way, only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong," also get a resonance from war, in this case some slow newsreel footage of a U.S. warplane being wheeled toward the flight line in Viet Nam.

New Audience. As the show builds, the satire does not seem as heavy-handed as it might sound, especially to the young audience that know the music and lyrics by heart, and know too that frivolous or not, both are profoundly linked to their whole memory of a time when the times were out of joint --and the young were into joints.

Whatever Beatlemania is, a concert with visuals or a "rockumentary," as one Boston critic described it, its techniques seem tailor-made for a new audience --people from twelve to 20. When it comes to live dramatic spectacles, the vast majority of these go only to rock concerts and would not know "Doc" Simon from Simon Gray. Bernard B. Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, which owns the Winter Garden, where the show is playing in New York, likes to think of Beatlemania as something that could help revitalize the Broadway audience rather than change the theater itself. "All of us in the last several years have been trying to attract this audience," he says. "The kind of audience that will see this show will then go to Annie or A Chorus Line or The Wiz." Asks Producer Krebs: "Who is to say that Beatlemania is not what a significant portion of the theater will turn out to be in 1987?" (yeh, yeh, yeh.)

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