The Beatles
The Beatles 1962-1966

THE REVIEW

Digging through some rusty gears in my memory, I must have been 9 or 10 years old, while I was glued in front of the countless falls of Wile E. Coyote, I was disturbed by a paternal order for a sudden change of plan. I had to record a cartoon being aired on the second channel. And I also had to watch it. No possibility of appeal. The defeat from the start allowed me to exhale the last puff of disapproval. I loaded the expensive TDK 120 cassette into the very slow Philips two-head VCR and awaited the platoon. I would have never imagined being sentenced to a better fate. That cartoon was "Yellow Submarine".

At the end of that wonderful and delirious whirlwind of sounds and colors, the request to learn something about the Beatles, these unknowns, was spontaneous. Calmly, my creator slid his right index finger over the vast collection of 33 records compressed in the old worm-eaten cherry wardrobe. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Platters, Rolling Stones...and from the depths of his youth emerged two double LPs, one red and one blue. These are two monuments! Summarized but monumental. Make peace with it!

The old Lesa, a great navigator, had already plowed thousands of kilometers in vinyl. The only thing missing was my trial run with those four English boys who would enter my family records. The worn needle resumed navigating, producing that lovely sonic jerk upon contact with the anthracite sea of the record. A harmonica plays, sweet, playful, a very simple, jovial verse, naively repeated. A necessary interlude not to nag, and again the verse praising that love which I could not yet have imagined. Short declarations, extremely subtle but of devastating power, against the current. In a year and a half, those four boys raised on pills in the brothels of Hamburg would shake the entire planet from Europe to the United States, where even His Majesty Bob Dylan would bow. That romantic love, maybe even syrupy, managed to enchant the hearts of millions of young people exacerbated by the war-mongering filth of the stars-and-stripes power.

Another side. Yet another year later. Something else is in the air. Nothing to take away from love, but there is also the fatigue after a hard day, the existential problems, the drugs, albeit treated with skillful lightness, the tenderness that a loving heart can unleash and the wonder that, thank God, did not become just a plate of scrambled eggs. They would never have been so indigestible. How many times have I crowned my heart with thorns listening to it over and over, when those frivolous love stories born on school benches ended forever. How much I hurt myself.

And then, those allusions to prostitution in exchange for a diamond ring or a car to drive, those lighter drugs consumed in Norwegian wood rooms devoid of chairs. And only four months have passed. I don't know how to explain it. But how do they change so quickly? To invent, emancipate themselves, break through the sound barrier multiple times between non-existent men and graceful women, memories of a life never forgotten and poor dead souls, pierced by a string quartet, on the plinths of a church with a handful of stolen rice. And that magical, amusing, formidable yellow submarine, amidst the laughter of the drunk founder and the chorus of millions of children calling. And of fans.

Until the next, more wonderful, lightning bolt...