Robert Cording
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 0
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"These 56 essays, excerpts, short stories and poems, collected and reprinted by the three poet-editors from diverse sources, reflect how their authors -- music critic Greil Marcus, poets David Wojan and Donald Hall, early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe and many others -- have loved and internalized the Beatles and their music ... In his poem 'Portland Coliseum, ' Allen Ginsberg, for example, exultantly recounts attending an early Beatles concert. Indeed, the Beatles' very public February 9, 1964, appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show comes up again and again in these pages as a sort of mantra for a generation's coming of age (though Leonard Bernstein writes of how the four moptops overwhelmed a 46-year-old conductor on that winter night). Not all of the writers flatter the band -- witness Larry Neal's attempt to explain the Beatles' failure to capture the hearts of some African Americans, or Eric Gamalinda's wonderful yarn about the band's disastrous trip to the Philippines. For sheer fun and creativity, Timothy Leary's essay 'Thank God for the Beatles' alone justifies the price of admission. 'John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr are mutants ... Revolutionary agents sent by God, endowed by mysterious powers to create a new human species.' Yeah, yeah, yeah!"