Quotes of the Day

It was 40 years ago today — February 7, 1964 — that the Beatles taught the U.S.A. The four sprightly young Merseysiders landed at New York City's Idlewild Airport (it had yet to be renamed for the assassinated President John F. Kennedy) and emerged from Pan Am flight 101 two days before they were to appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Three thousand fans screamed and, with an urgent group wave toward the Fab Four, effectively brushed off earlier heartthrob vocalists. Frank Sinatra? A fossil in a tux. Elvis Presley? "He's old and ugly," one girl at the airport spat. (The King had just turned 29 — 116 in pop-idol years.) A gaggle of fans sang "She Loves You" into the impassive faces of Irish cops, and some carried signs: "Beatles are Starving the Barbers," "Beatles Unfair to Bald Men" and, in an early clue to the protest generation, "England Get Out of Ireland."

Not all those present were unabashed admirers of the new blokes on the block. "It's phenomenal that people would come to see this and yet they wouldn't come to see the President," one young man observed to the Maysles brothers, who were filming a documentary called "The Beatles First U.S. Visit," now on DVD with extra footage. "President Johnson came a few days ago, and there was practically nobody here." But, as Babe Ruth said in 1930 when asked why he made more money than President Herbert Hoover: "I had a better year."

Actually, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and a landslide election that November, Lyndon Johnson had a pretty good year. But nobody, possibly including Jesus, ever had a better one than John, Paul, George and Ringo enjoyed in 1964. Or a busier one. In the first month they became instant idols in America. In ten February days they came, were seen, and conquered; the whole invasion took less time than the U.S. assault on Iraq last year, and with far more beneficent consequences. Later that month they returned to Britain and spent six weeks in London, Surrey and Middlesex shooting a little promo feature called "A Hard Day's Night," whose blend of documentary and surrealism, localized comedy and universal appeal revolutionized film for a while. Their songs monopolized the pop charts for most of the year; one week, the Beatles had the top five songs. And during the dozens of concerts, the hundreds of press conferences, they found time to write some of the perkiest, most vigorous pop around. For starters.

Back then, this was the week that was. The Anglo-Irish quartet had been pop sensations in Britain for the previous year, but now they faced America: world's most powerful nation, commandant of international pop culture, cauldron of rock 'n roll. If they could make it here, they could make it everywhere. And what they made, it soon became clear, was history — musical, cinematic, social and showbizzical. The wonder was that they did it with such blithe, unflappable grace and good humor.

This point is pellucid in "The Beatles' First U.S. Visit," a brisk rough sketch of "A Hard Day's Night." Same dashing from train to limo to photo op to TV stage. Same release of tension on a dance-club floor. Same use of wit as armor against imprisonment and ennui. And the same amazing display of nimble geniality by four blithe Liverpudlians, ages 20 to 24. (The Maysles brothers — Albert on camera and David on sound — show the same gift for improv; they got the assignment to hang with the lads just two hours before the plane landed.) Leaving their hotel room to go to the Peppermint Lounge, the lads wave a sweet goodbye to the two-man camera crew. Did celebrity ever take such innocent pleasure in its own good fortune? Was the world ever this young?

BEATLE ENNUI, BEATLEPHOBIA

Fresh (or exhausted) off the plane that Friday afternoon, the Beatles faced U.S. reporters, many of whom wanted to hang their cojones around the necks of these British invaders. So often in that wild weekend the questions were rude and ignorant, focusing as they did on the Fab Four's coiffure. And without fail, the lads replied with witty equanimity. Q. "Are you gonna get a haircut while you're here?" George (in all seriousness): "I had one yesterday." Q. "Which do you consider the greatest danger to your careers: nuclear bombs or dandruff?" Ringo: "Bombs. We've already got dandruff." Q: "How many are bald that you have to wear wigs?" Paul: "I am. I'm bald." John: "Oh, we're all bald, yeah ... And deaf and dumb too."

Hair. That's nearly all the American press knew of the "moptops," who "look like shaggy Peter Pans, with their mushroom haircuts? (TIME, Nov. 15, 1963) and "sheep-dog bangs" (Newsweek, Nov. 18, 1963). Our cultural custodians didn't hear much artistry from under the din of their caterwauling acolytes. "Americans might find the Beatles achingly familiar," TIME opined. "Their songs consist mainly of "Yeh!' screamed the accompaniment of three guitars and a thunderous drum." The other newsweekly was every bit as dismissive: "Beatle music is high-pitched, loud beyond reason and stupefyingly repetitive." One wonders if the writers of these stories had listened to a Beatles record; a couple of singles ("Please Please Me" and "She Loves You") had already been issued in the States, to tepid response.

As Beatle records were released here and scampered up the charts, the mainstream press still had trouble understanding the group's appeal and acknowledging the music's value. Often, Olympian disdain masked simple ignorance. After Jack Paar's January 3, 1964, show, on which he aired a clip of the boys performing "She Loves You," Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times that they had "offered a number apparently titled "With a Love Like That, You Know You Should Be Bad'." (The lyric is, of course, the much more congenial "With a love like that, you know you should be glad"; and since the song features the phrase "she loves you" 12 times in just over two minutes, it shouldn't have been hard to deduce the title.) Gould predicted no duplication of Beatlemania in America: "On this side of the Atlantic it is dated stuff. Hysterical squeals emanating from developing femininity really went out with the payola scandal and Presley's military service."

Disinterested grownups weren't the only ones who rook a while to "get" the Beatles. In September 63, when "She Loves You" was played on the Rate-a-Record segment of the teen dance party "American Bandstand" — remember, kids gave a score of from 35 to 98 for a song, which should "have a great beat" and "you could dance to" — it pulled a tepid 73. That's a D+ where I come from. (Why was the song even submitted for consideration by the kids from South Philly? Perhaps because Dick Clark had been a part-owner of Swan Records, which distributed the song.) And when Vee-Jay Records released the group's first American single, "Please Please Me' b/w "Ask Me Why," the artists' name was misspelled as the Beattles.

All this is chronicled in a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous, fabulous — fab-four, for short — book called "The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America." Bruce Spizer, author of three other Beatle books, documents the shortsightedness, missed opportunities and plain dumb decisions that delayed the British invasion by a full year. Capitol Records, whose connection with the Brit label EMI-Parlophone gave them first dibs on the Beatles, turned down the group four times before finally signing them in November 63. Capitol then chopped the 14-song British LPs down to 11 cuts for the American releases, thus squeezing an extra album out of the Beatles' first three. The U.K. LPs for the Beatles films "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" each featured seven songs from the movie and another six or seven new songs; Capitol released each with the movie songs only and instrumental filler. The company that had first been myopic now graduated to greedy.

THE WHATTLES? — PART ONE

To get the Beatles, from the beginning, maybe you had to be a teenager, as I was, in Philadelphia, in a state we renamed Beatlevania. These guys were smart, funny, good singers, excellent songwriters. And talk about gentlemen: at the end of a song, they bowed deeply, almost to a right angle. Sullivan, calling them "four of the nicest young kids we've ever had on our stage," passed along salutations from Elvis Presley and commendations from Richard Rodgers. The group's influence was, in every way, salutary. Couldn't even a grownup tell they were not just the next big thing but The Big Thing?

To appreciate the Beatles, you also may have needed a taste for (not a prejudice against) rock 'n roll in its primitive or prime years — the songs of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and early Motown, which the Beatles covered in their Cavern period and on their first albums. It helped to know the three-chord structure the Beatles used, then expanded, in their own music. I liked "She Loves You" as soon as I heard it (on that September 63 "Bandstand" show), in part because the musical strategy of its chorus — a melodic line whose notes are repeated twice while the chords change underneath — was the same as two of my favorite hits of that year: the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and Leslie Gore's "It's My Party." Beatle music was the next stop on a road that led from Broadway, Nashville, Memphis and Detroit. But a big stop. Everything before was Kansas, in black-and-white. The Beatles were, musically, a Technicolor Oz.

And if you were a true fan, you had to know where they came from geographically. To a Beatle-lover, Liverpool seemed about the hippest place on earth. Adoptive kid brothers of Lennon and McCartney made pilgrimages to the Cavern, to Brian Epstein's record store, to the holy homes of the Fab Four. Teenagers from Connecticut studied the accent and vocabulary like the most fervent Berlitz grind, and recited lines from "A Hard Day's Night" with the fervor of mimic acolytes.

It was not only the Beatles' music that inspired this love for all things Liverpudlian. It was the discovery of an English city — working class and influenced by Irish and American adventurers — that had seen it all and was not easily impressed. A thick lilt, a fond parodic cynicism rode the crest of every inflection; a suspicion of all things posh lurked in the slurs and slang. This was the perfect voice to carry pop culture through the mid-60s, till things went tragic and the Beatles turned into eminences cloistered enough to be their own parodies. But for that luscious moment, the Merseyside moptops were the divine Other: different, hence better. Stateside, we gulped down that Liverpudding.

I remember seeing "A Hard Day's Night" at a movie house in suburban Philadelphia the summer of 64. I say seeing; hearing was out of the question, due to the shrieks of the band's bobbysoxer brigade. (The volume level was even higher at a Beatles concert I attended that September. The boys used to say they literally couldn't hear themselves playing. Well, we couldn't hear themselves either.) The movie theater, I swear, was informally divided into quadrants, each inhabited by the attendant sisters of one band member: John in the lower left, Paul in the lower right, etc. A closeup of one Beatle would cue the muezzin wail (I borrow here from S.J. Perelman) from his quadrant.

The girls, consciously nor not, were imitating the film's climactic sequence, which intercuts shots of the band performing "She Loves You" with reaction shots from the young audience, and returns occasionally to girls mouthing the names of their particular heroes. The unforgettable one is a pretty blond undergoing a kind of anguished ecstasy. She is seen four times: first clutching her hair, then crying into her hand, then sobbing hand to head and finally, at the song's last break ("You know you shou-ou-ou-ould...") silently keening a desperate "George." Over the decades, she's remained for me the indelible icon of feminine fandom: a girl who is close enough to her idol to realize she will never reach him, and so luxuriates in the sweet misery of a vivid dream, where the harder one runs toward one's beloved, the farther and faster he recedes.

THE FAB FOUR, AND HOW THEY GREW ON US

What a consuming fever first love is. Americans thought they were in on the initial explosion of Beatlemania. But John and Paul first met on July 6, 1957, and were playing together soon after. By the time the Beatles hit the U.S., their career together was already half over.

On a BBC radio show in 1962 (the group made 52 appearance on the Beeb in three years, and were radio stars before they were record stars), the lads politely introduce themselves: "I'm George, and I play a guitar," that sort of thing. Then the Beatles' leader speaks. "I'm John, and I too play a guitar. Sometimes I play the fool." From the beginning, Lennon was the group's brain and wit, its Elvis and its Groucho. But unlike Elvis, the early Beatles had the quick, larky humor of kids assured enough to make fun of themselves and everyone else. And unlike the movie Marxes, these were no anarchists — they were many a mother's daydream of the pop star her daughter might bring home.

Except, possibly, for John. From the start he had a spooky, modernist poise. His taut mouth, his appraising eyes made him the group's soul and wit as surely as McCartney became its prime musical mover. (Shown running down a hotel corridor in the Maysles film, George mimics the mob outside — "Ban the bomb!" — and John ad-libs, "Ban the Pope.") Cynical, cool, Lennon was the eye of sanity in the Beatlemania hurricane. Asked, during the first U.S. tour, when the Beatles found time to rehearse their songs, he replied, "We wrote 'em; we recorded 'em; we play 'em every day [in their shows]]. What do you rehearse? Smilin' — that's all we rehearse." To the art-college student with radical ideas, good nature was not second nature.

His voice was plaintive but supple; he could sell a pensive ballad ("In My Life," "I'll Be Back") and go orgasmic on "Twist and Shout" (recorded at the end of a day-night in which the group recorded 10 songs; John blew his voice out with the Isley Brothers song, and was spitting blood into his milk). More important, he embodied the group's snap and sass. TIME magazine's own reigning Liverpudlian, Michael Elliottt, O.B.E., tells me that if the February 9, 1964, Sullivan show was the defining moment for the Beatles in the U.S., the Royal Variety Performance before the Queen Mother on November 4, 1963, did the same in the U.K.; and it was John who made the famous crack, "Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry." The leader's edginess suggested a roiling interior life; you could write a novel about what you imagined to be inside John Lennon. And then he had the rock star's karma to die violently. He was inducted into the Rock "n' Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 1994, five long years before McCartney was.

Paul, 20 months younger than John, was treated like the cute kid brother for whom ambition would be unseemly. Certainly, he had ambitions, and certainly he acceded them. He composed the group's top-selling single ("Hey Jude"), its most widely covered tune ("Yesterday") and much of its most enduring music. He was the Beatles' most versatile singer, and not just as a balladeer; attend his scorched-throat renditions of "I'm Down" and "Helter Skelter." Yet Paul always shivered in John's shadow. Partly it was his looks. He was cute, coquettish — almost the girl of the group — so how could he be smart? He was the favorite of the girls at the early Beatles concerts, but he was not a guy's guy. No way could he satisfy the male coterie of rock critics. He just tried too hard. Paul wanted to be loved, and that is the essence of the pop star. John didn't care; that is the essence of the rock star.

The odd revelation of "The Beatles First U.S. Visit" is that Paul, not John, is the comedy star (just as, on the Sullivan appearances, Paul, not John, was the band's spokesman). In a crowded elevator ride, Paul lightens the mood by announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen, on your right you'll see the Washington Memorial." He shows the most interest in the process of filming, as when he tells Al Maysles, "Get the camera down on this mike [held by David], it'd be a big laugh. Go on! Defy convention." Al finally pans down to the mike, and Paul chirps, "Take 29!" Late that night, when he and Ringo have left the Peppermint Lounge, Paul notices Al behind him and in a posh accent says, "I get the impression your filming. Is this true? This man, carrying this lethal weapon on his shoulder... Pretend you can't see him. He'll go away." A moment before, he had bade goodnight to Murray (the K) Kaufman, the WINS DJ who latched or leeched onto the group and called himself the fifth Beatle. Paul does some ribbing banter in a tough New York accent, then adds, "No really, seriously, thanks very much."

Every comedy foursome needs a quiet one — Harpo Marx, Boomhauer on "King of the Hill, Kenny on "South Park." The Quiet Beatle was George (assuming you don't count Pete Best, who was also the Fired Beatle). But Statesiders treasured George, who had the thickest Liverpool accent, as a special font of Liverpatois. "A Hard Day's Night" has a scene in which George accidentally wanders into the office of a TV fashion consultant (the great Kenneth Haigh), a snooty type who dismisses George's Northern accent as "all that old adenoidal glottal-stop and carry-on" and imperiously instructs him that "the new thing is to care passionately and be right wing." In the course of the three-minute scene, George says: "Oh, by all means, I'd be quite prepared for that eventuality"; "It's dead grotty"; "And who's this Susan when she's at home?"; "She's a drag, a well-known drag"; and "Have I said something amiss?" Some of these phrases were the merest clichés to Brits of a certain latitude. But every Mersey cadence as enunciated by George was music, Beatle music, to American ears. The dialogue of that sketch instantly became as familiar to Beatle fans as 1 Corinthians 13 is to a Baptist preacher.

To the American press, 40 years ago this weekend, Ringo was the Beatle everyone recognized, with the four rings on each hand, the readiest grin and the prominent hooter. (In "A Hard Day's Night," the meddling old man played by Wilfred Brambell tries to stir mischief by saying the other Beatles mock his proboscis: "They'll pick on a nose." Ringo replies, "Oh, go pick on your own nose.") It was Ringo who most easily keyed the American reporters' notion of the Beatles as a blithe comedy act on the order of the Goons or the Beyond the Fringers — a deep-fried British tradition, though not in rock 'n roll. Beatle boys with cheek and taunts. If they couldn't persuade U.S. reporters to listen closely to their music, they make 'em laugh at their jokes.

But even the lads' quick wits could cue the itch of suspicion — perhaps we're all being guyed. In the Maysles documentary, Chris Porterfield, TIME's ever-genial keeper of Standards and Practices, then a cherub-faced 26, is seen chatting with Ringo: "I was going to ask you this yesterday but I thought you might think I was being hostile. I was going to say: Are you kidding us?" For once, a Beatle looks flummoxed by a reporter's question. Ringo stammers, "We're not kidding. We just answer how we feel, y' know, what we think." Chris explained that the lads gave every indication of "enjoying a game that has its aspects of silliness." And Ringo was saying: the act is not an act. They were four young men who had a good time playing music.

AH YES, THE MUSIC

As Kurt Loder insisted in his TIME 100 essay on the group, the Beatles didn't emerge from, or atone for, a stagnant caesura in the age of rock. The years between Elvis' Army service (during which, like a good American, he never went AWOL) and February 64 overflowed with a sophisticated form of pop-rock, from the Brill Building on Broadway to Brian Wilson's house in Hawthorne, Cal. At first sound, the Beatles seemed a throwback to the rockabilly 50s. Their name was a punning riff on Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. Harrison's and Lennon's thrashing guitars yanked rock 'n roll back to its primal instrument after a few years of piano, horns and strings (and it's stayed that way for four decades). The matching leather outfits of their Cavern days lent them the attitude of rock's first outlaws. "We looked like four Gene Vincents," Lennon said, "or tried to."

In the broad democracy of Top 40 radio of the day, the Beatles rubbed sounds with Martha and the Vandellas, Steve and Eydie. They'd borrow, then improve; scavenging gave way to alchemy. It was always a fight to be the best. "We'd try to beat what we were doing," Paul says. The Beatles beat everybody — which is why, when the mania has faded and the little scandals raise a yawn, the music lives.

Believers in the sanctity of the single, the Beatles made classics in miniature. A melody simple enough to leech onto the brain and fresh enough to bear repeated airplay. The bending of a cliché, musical or verbal. High harmonies so close that John, Paul and George could be Siamese triplets. In and out in no time. Two minutes, two and a half tops — leave 'em wanting to hear it again. And to hear others just as good. That's how the Beatles created the pop album. Before them, an album was a couple of hits and 10 cuts of filler. With the Beatles, every album was an event.

This inventiveness was evident from their earlier songs, and from the first moments of each song. They often dispensed with the standard four-bar instrumental intro. Five rapid base-drum beats ("She Loves You"); or a single, startling guitar chord ("A Hard Day's Night") or door-slamming rim shot ("Any Time at All"); sometimes just the voice, attacking without warning on an uptempo number ("All My Loving," "Can't Buy Me Love") or a ballad ("P.S. I Love You," "If I Fell," "No Reply") — announced that they couldn't wait to get to the song, and didn't want disc jockeys chattering over their lead-ins. Lotta content, little filler.

The closings were a switch, too: not so many fade-outs, which had become the rule in Brill Building and Phil Spector pop. The Beatles, who played in clubs long before they released their first single, knew that songs with a climax, a point, a socko finish, were guaranteed audience-goosers. Listeners may smile at the fade-out ending of, say, "Save the Last Dance for Me"; they cheer as "She Loves You" soars into its final yeah-yeah-yeahs, with the last chord a minor-key sixth — daringly dangling.

And in between was the song. The typical verse and chorus of a Beatle tune from 63 and 64 was beguiling enough — usually some variation on a 12-bar blues ("A Hard Day's Night") or "26 Miles" ballad format ("Do You Want to Know a Secret") — but it was in the bridge, or middle section, that Lennon and McCartney first raised the bar for pop-rock songwriting. They explored new chord patterns, prettier melodies in so many bridges (where to start?): "And when I touch you..." from "I Want to Hold your Hand," "Since you left me..." from "It Won't Be Long," "If you need somebody to love..." from "Any Time at All," "Me I'm just a lucky kind..." from "Things We Said Today," "When I'm home..." from "A Hard Day's Night," "I'm so glad..." from "I Feel Fine" (where to stop?). "I'll Be Back" has two plaintive bridges, expressing two shades of unease, each running a half-measure longer than expected, without jarring the ear. It sounded fresh and natural; the strain never showed.

JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE AND RICHARD

It spooks me to realize I've been writing about the Beatles almost from the time I first heard them, and that I've done at least one piece about them in every decade since. To give you an idea of how a budding writer approached a burgeoning art form, I'll pull a few yellowed clippings from the files. In late 1964 or early 65, when I did a piece for my college newspaper on the group's gift for pop poetry. I remember citing the bridge from "Things We Said Today" — Me I'm just a lucky kind Love to hear you say That love is love And though we may be blind Love is here to stay And that's enough... — and noting the triple-rhyme scheme, the unforced mimesis in "Love to hear you say" and "Love is here to stay," and the ease with which the bridge ends and blends into the verse ("And that's enough / To make you mine, girl"). I still think that's pretty impressive musicianship.

In 1967 I was writing about films for National Review and thought to introduce conservative opinion-makers to the new rock criticism in all its pretentiousness. I made my pitch for the artistic reach and rigor of Brian Wilson, the Mamas & the Papas, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector (was I the first critic to commit to print his enthusiasm for "River Deep Mountain High"") and worked my way up to the Fab Four: "I am strongly tempted to write, "The Beatles are great, Their most recent album is "Revolver." Buy it,' and leave it at that. But as a critic is never simply to effuse, I will attempt to bridle my awe at the group's genius for invention and elaboration. ... They have constantly enlarged their musical scope by use of varied instrumentation ("Revolver" features harpsichord, harmonium, sitar, tabla, French horn, double string quartet and a flock of birds), sophisticated lyric forms (like the madrigal and mantra), modal scales ("And I Love Her" is in the Dorian mode) ... The album even has integrity. It's a beautiful accomplishment. The Beatles are great."

At the onslaught of the British Invasion, there was virtually no serious or sympathetic consideration of pop music. In TIME, rock was often covered under the Show Business logo; Music was Joan Sutherland and Leonard Bernstein. By 1967, thanks in part to Bernstein's prime-time anointing of the Beatles, the mainstream press had cottoned to the notion of pop music as serious stuff, and as a reader magnet. I figured I was a guy to pick that cotton. A month after the National Review piece I did an essay for Commonweal on double-domed rock writing (R. Meltzer, that crowd), all of which was an excuse to review a new 45: the Beatles single "Penny Lane" b/w/ "Strawberry Fields Forever." Here's some of that gargle:

"Penny Lane' melds the terse, insightful observations of "Eleanor Rigby,' sound effects à la "Yellow Submarine,' the strong scuffle beat of "Good Day Sunshine,' the poignant trumpet featured on "For No One' and the cheerfully strident brass background of "Got to Get You into My Life' (all songs from "Revolver') into a Brueghelesque word-portrait of English suburban life. In addition, Paul McCartney has given each character on Penny Lane a leitmotif: a rolling piano phrase for the village barber, a horn riff for the banker, a clanging bell for the fireman. There's not much excitement in the town: the song's muted climax comes when the fireman rushes into the barbershop to tell the townspeople that the rain has ruined his fire-engine's polish. "Very strange,' the narrator comments, but also melancholy and haunting. "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes' — and, because of McCartney's artistry, it will stay in mine."

In 1974 I wrote my first Beatles nostalgia piece, for Film Comment, on the tenth anniversary of the group's first movie: "You probably have to be about my age — turning 30, and none too pleased about it — to look back nostalgically on a period as recent as 1964, and to smile crookedly when you think of "A Hard Day's Night.' Most of us were the last stragglers of the 50s... all we had were the private passions of movies and rock 'n roll, which our teachers considered occasions of sin and not yet adventures in scholarship. With the Beatles, and specifically with "A Hard Day's Night,' the unspeakable became acceptable. ... "A Hard Day's Night' today retains its vigor, its good humor, its Lancashire courtliness and easy grace,,,, We can also find in the film what we responded to then: its perfect distillation of a moment when, for a lot of us, it felt good to be young. The loss of that moment, and that youth, may make us melancholy when we watch "A Hard Day's Night,' especially alone. We've aged, and it hasn't."

Jeez. Pretty morose for a guy turning 30. How despondent will he be when he hits 60?

THE WHATTLES? — PART II

Yesterday, I showed the clip of Chris Porterfield and Ringo Starr to a young TIME staffer. He correctly guessed that the young reporter had aged, ever so gracefully, into Chris, then asked, "But who's the other guy?"

It's not fair to either of us. The young staffer shouldn't be expected to recognize the drummer from a group that had an eight-year recording career that ended 34 years ago; and I shouldn't have to know that he doesn't know. Chris might be chagrined if I couldn't distinguish among Patty, Maxene and LaVerne (the Andrews Sisters) or, in opera, John, Charles and Thomas. Most young people today are as fuzzy on Beatle IDs as reporters were that February 64 weekend. ("Which one are you?" "I'm Paul.") The difference is that, 40 years ago, it mattered.

I'll bet most people in their 20s can tell Mick Jagger from Keith Richard. That's partly because the Rolling Stones have kept performing into their 60s — the Open Coffin Tour hits the road every few years. But mostly because, in lingering musical influence, the Stones are it. The Beatles are out.

I remember seeing the Stones in the American TV debut, in March 64, on an ABC variety show, "The Hollywood Palace."They were to sing two songs. But Dean Martin, the host, lavished so much air time on insulting the quintet — introducing a trampolinist, he gibed, "That's the father of the Rolling Stones. He's been trying to kill himself ever since? — that the Stones never got to do their second number.

Having defied conventions, the Beatles had quickly become their own convention: uniform clothes and haircuts, light banter, sweet songs, no leering or posturing. The Stones broke those rules, and wrote new ones that have held ever since: a blues-based musical scheme, a strutting, sexually aggressive lead singer, the exaltation of rhythm over melody, of energy over craft. If those early Beatles were perceived as endearing, the Stones were seen as dangerous. The lure of the lurid would lead pop-rock away from the Liverpudlians and into the grip of the Londoners. Everyone stopped smiling and started glowering. Rock became an expression not of joy but of pain and anger.

In the ten-part 1996 documentary "Anthology," George tells how bored the Beatles became with concerts; sometimes they'd run through their 30-minute set in 25, by playing every song faster. For the audience, the concert experience was wholly votive — unintelligible and incandescent, like Mass in Latin. But the band no longer wanted to do it on the road. They stopped touring in 1966 and holed up in a recording studio with their maestro, George Martin, to make pop songs art songs.

Meanwhile, and ever since, the Stones perfected the rock act as traveling circus, high-wire act and freak show included. That was another crucial component of late-century rock: a live, spontaneous feel rather than the perfectionist, studio sound of the Beatles. Playing huge stadiums meant performing the assaultive, theatrical music that would fill and rock those stadiums. That practically killed ballads, which were nearly half the Beatles repertoire. Lennon and McCartney, pushing the limits off pop songwriting, had little to do with today's rock, which pushes the limits of content but is musically conservative. You get three chords, tops. And the pure vocal harmony of John, Paul and George — that's for wimps.

Beatlemania II might amount to little more than a geriatric palpitation for a Boomer Brigade that has no Lawrence Welk to usher them into their twilight years. What is a Beatle to today's kids? Some guy standing next to Chris Porterfield.

Musical fecundity, vocal virtuosity, a shapely melody — these may be antique standards. But I'll apply them, here, and say that the Beatles achieved something nobody else in pop music did: they made each album of higher quality than the one before (if you acknowledge that "Let It Be" was the chronological predecessor to their eloquent farewell, "Abbey Road"). Their lives inevitably became more complex, but their music retains a lustrous purity and verve. Though it's a shame that nobody wants to be the Beatles any more ... well the Beatles were, and that's enough. They made music, and its listeners, feel good. And that's still true today, 40 years on.

• Richard Corliss on the Fab Four, 40 years ago and today