Phil Reisman: 50 years later, Beatles still rocking boomers’ world

Age and a half-century of amplified music have ruined the eardrums of those of us who are demographically classified as baby boomers.

So for the hard of hearing I will simulate a raised voice by pressing down on the caps key: BEATLEMANIA IS BACK.

What was that? What did you say?

BEATLEMANIA IS… Oh, forget it.

A short 50-year anniversary Beatles quiz was tucked into the latest AARP bulletin, the how-to magazine for the geriatric set. One of the questions asks how much a front row ticket cost during the Beatles American tour in 1964. The answer was $4. ($30 in today’s money.)

Half the band is gone, and we can only guess how much the scalpers would get for a reunion concert today. The reunion that never happened has always been a big part of the post-Beatles mystique — a speculative fantasy, a what-if. Of one thing I’m certain: The audience would not include legions of 12-year-old girls caterwauling over a quartet of septuagenarians singing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

That was the way it was back then, when Paul Was All. Never to return.

I remember going to the Mamaroneck movie theater with my sister and some of her hysterical girlfriends to see “A Hard Day’s Night.” What a mistake that was. They screamed through the entire movie. Years later, when I saw the movie again and could actually hear the dialogue, I realized I hadn’t missed anything the first time around.

In those early days, the Beatles were really a girl thing. They were uniformly dressed like bellboys but each was marketed as a boyfriend type. My wife once explained this to me. Most girls liked Paul the most, but some wouldn’t admit it so they pretended to like George, the so-called quiet Beatle. The coolest girls liked John, the intellectual Beatle. (“Sorry girls, he’s married,” said the TV caption under his name at their historic Feb. 9, 1964, appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”)

The minority of girls who liked the homely and seemingly forlorn Ringo were to be avoided.

A set of Beatles photo trading cards included phony “Dear Diary” entries. One attributed to Ringo refers to the Fab Four’s visit to Paris where they presented a humorless Charles de Gaulle with a Beatle wig. “I think every well-groomed president should own a Beatle wig,” Ringo allegedly wrote. Cheeky!

That de Gaulle was still in power reveals how close in time the Beatles phenomenon actually was to World War II. When they “invaded” the U.S., the 20th anniversary of the Normandy invasion was four months off.

But if the Beatles were carefully packaged and specially branded as cheerful, fun-loving and sexually unthreatening mop-tops for prepubescent children of prosperous post-war America, then the Rolling Stones were the opposite.

They were all spawn of a ruined island empire, but unlike the Beatles, the Rolling Stones didn’t hide the fact. The Stones were the byproduct of V-1 rocket rubble and food rationing — and their raw music was unsettling to many adults. Sullen, unkempt and evidently malnourished, they were the anti-Beatles.

Eight months after the Beatles were on Sullivan, the Stones showed up on “The Mike Douglas Show,” which was produced in Philadelphia and can be seen on YouTube. What’s fascinating about it is that the straitlaced host comes off as a relic, while Mick Jagger and the other band members seem like time travelers from the future transported to a planet that is not only foreign to them but also to us.

In between numbers, Douglas asked them if they knew the Beatles.

“Yeah,” one of them mumbles.

“You sure caught them in the hair department,” Douglas chortled. “What are the barbers doing over there now?”

“Starving,” replied Brian Jones, who would be dead of a drug overdose within five years.

The Beatles dissolved as a band in 1969 while the Stones keep on rolling.

But it was the Beatles who came first, at a time when young Americans were transitioning out of innocence. They changed everything. Their story hasn’t ended. And it likely won’t end until an entire generation passes from the scene.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah ….YEAH.

Age and a half-century of amplified music have ruined the eardrums of those of us who are demographically classified as baby boomers.

So for the hard of hearing I will simulate a raised voice by pressing down on the caps key: BEATLEMANIA IS BACK.

What was that? What did you say?

BEATLEMANIA IS… Oh, forget it.

A short 50-year anniversary Beatles quiz was tucked into the latest AARP bulletin, the how-to magazine for the geriatric set. One of the questions asks how much a front row ticket cost during the Beatles American tour in 1964. The answer was $4. ($30 in today’s money.)

Half the band is gone, and we can only guess how much the scalpers would get for a reunion concert today. The reunion that never happened has always been a big part of the post-Beatles mystique — a speculative fantasy, a what-if. Of one thing I’m certain: The audience would not include legions of 12-year-old girls caterwauling over a quartet of septuagenarians singing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

That was the way it was back then, when Paul Was All. Never to return.

I remember going to the Mamaroneck movie theater with my sister and some of her hysterical girlfriends to see “A Hard Day’s Night.” What a mistake that was. They screamed through the entire movie. Years later, when I saw the movie again and could actually hear the dialogue, I realized I hadn’t missed anything the first time around.

In those early days, the Beatles were really a girl thing. They were uniformly dressed like bellboys but each was marketed as a boyfriend type. My wife once explained this to me. Most girls liked Paul the most, but some wouldn’t admit it so they pretended to like George, the so-called quiet Beatle. The coolest girls liked John, the intellectual Beatle. (“Sorry girls, he’s married,” said the TV caption under his name at their historic Feb. 9, 1964, appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”)

The minority of girls who liked the homely and seemingly forlorn Ringo were to be avoided.

A set of Beatles photo trading cards included phony “Dear Diary” entries. One attributed to Ringo refers to the Fab Four’s visit to Paris where they presented a humorless Charles de Gaulle with a Beatle wig. “I think every well-groomed president should own a Beatle wig,” Ringo allegedly wrote. Cheeky!