'There's a Place' is one of my favourite Beatles songs. The B-side to 'Twist and Shout' never makes any top-100 lists. But the sounds are unearthly to me. John Lennon's strident harmonica and the transcendent duo lines work in contrast to the moodiness of the words. The emotion still hits me 50 years later.
The song draws on the early '60s idea of a secret place where we can go for solace, but while the Drifters are found 'Up on the Roof' and Brian Wilson goes 'In my Room', John affirms that he is never alone in his own mind. This is not only a breach of the concept, and a revelation about John's centredness as an individual, it is a surprise because the words aren't being crooned softly but literally screamed out. The Beatles were different.
There is a theory that our musical directions begin to be formed by what we listened to at age 16. The dream was 'over' when I turned 16, but to this day I still ponder why so many people are Beatles tragics.
Not only are most of the tunes instantly recognisable and the lyrics easy to pick up but I can rehearse all the most arcane history about this band. Is Brian Epstein 'Mister Moonlight'? Did Paul McCartney die in a car accident to be replaced by someone who played the bass guitar in exactly the same way? Can Ringo Starr sing? Is George Harrison the je ne sais quoi that kept it all together? Why am I still interested in this crazy stuff?
The Beatles reinvented rock and roll music. They took the American '50s form and completely transformed it. Other musicians in the '60s did similar things, but not with the same versatility, variety, playfulness and sheer creative musicianship. That they did all of this while living through unprecedented popular adoration, unimaginable fame, is proof of the their individual level-headedness and of the good taste of the listening public at that time.
And they were English, bringing an entire tradition of pub singing, music hall, vaudeville, and sentimentality unknown to pluralistic America. When they crossed the Atlantic in 1964, the Beatles unwittingly turned rock music into the main international popular form, an inheritance we still live with today, especially in the