The Mystery of Time

I slipped across the border last night to hear the Fab Faux, the crazy-good Beatles cover band (the description does not do them justice) play Let It Be and Abbey Road, note for note, in full.


There are no seats at Terminal 5, on W.56 th St. in Manhattan, so I stood for three-and-a-half hours. When you get to a certain age, which I have reached, you don't go out of your way to stand in place anywhere for more time than it takes to reach the front of a hot dog line. But this was worth it.

In an hour I am heading back to Terminal 5 with my unimpressed 22-year-old son to hear this extraordinary group of musicians reproduce The White Album, note for note, in full, a feat rarely if ever attempted, except by the Fab Faux, and this will be the last time they do it.

I’ll have more to say after Part II, but for now I want to mention just one of the spine-tingling moments from last night’s show. It comes at the end of "All You Need is Love," near the blazing flame-out of their meteoric career, when in the background, under the repeated chant of "All you need is love," you hear one of the Beatles sing that refrain from their early ’60s ascent:
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah."

And there it was, an era encapsulated in a moment—the era of my adolescence, during which all of us of that time went through unimaginable changes, from innocence to something darker, disappointed , faintly poisoned and corrupted, yet with the possibility of joy and exaltation if it could just break free from the rapidly forming carapace of cynicism and irony, soon to be institutionalized as air quotes.

The quality of the Beatles’ music of course transcends generations. But it so happens that my generation came of age listening to it. My first attempt at air guitar, in 1963, before there was such a term, came in my mother’s kitchen, with my friend Ira from across the street, doing karaoke (another unknown term) to "I Want To Hold Your Hand."

Hold the girl’s hand. How quaint. But the world, and the young people in it, were different then. The spirit of that song was a throwback to our parents’ generation, sung with the thrill of the new music fused in the furnace of r&b, blues and electric guitars and Liverpool unemployment.

What we played for my mother, who found it quite amusing, standing there wiping her hands on her apron, was not even air guitar. We were too infatuated and literal-minded for that. It was broom guitar.

We brought the record player into the kitchen. Not the stereo, certainly not the iPod or even the Walkman. But a record player no bigger than a typewriter. Most of you have probably never seen one–record player or typewriter.

And we put on the song and turned up the volume to our level. Then we had to stop, put down our brooms and adjust the level to something my mother could tolerate. Then we picked up our instruments and went at it, deliriously.

I had grown up on my father’s "longhair" music (which has stuck with me in the form of my 30-year infactuation with Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas) and recordings of the occasional Broadway show (My Fair Lady and West Side Story, primarily…nothing like starting at the top).  In junior high, I had been one of geeks (word yet to be reinvented as cool) who championed Midnight in Moscow by Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen over Duke of Earl by I’ve deliberately blocked out the name.

Enlightenment would have been being unable to choose between their very different virtues. But who is enlightened at 12?

Read more From the Editors articles.

By submitting comments you grant permission for all or part of those comments to appear in the print edition of New Jersey Monthly.

Required
Required not shown
Required not shown