New member here. I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan on Feb 9, 1964, and they set me on the course of my life. "Come Together" made me want to become a professional musician, to see if I could ever capture that sound. I never did, but I learned a lot of other great sounds in the meantime. I have all their albums on vinyl, 8-tracks, open reel, cassettes and CD, many times over, from all over the world, hours of video, and maybe 4000 unauthorized albums, too. I met my wife through a classified ad I had in a Beatles publication. She had watched "Anthology" and was now on that deeper dive. And here we are 29 years later! I've seen Paul three times, twice in Toronto and one in Orlando. I've never written a book on them, but I'm thanked in one Beatles book. I was listening to some of their 1963 material the other day. Know what? It still gives me goosebumps.
I like to watch young people, many of them African-Americans who grew up on hip-hop, discover The Beatles on YouTube. They'd never heard them before, and are continually thwarted trying to pin The Beatles to a genre. Because they are the genre, or any number of them, as none of their songs are alike. They influenced a lot of people in very different ways, who wanted to play with the feeling they had on any one of their songs. And the Top 40 became the most important thing for 30 years for all the people playing what they absorbed from The Beatles, and other musicians on the same path. Now AM radio has declined due to corporate ownership and plays no part in hit music anymore.
en.wikipedia.org
