Lecture shows 'Beatlemania' not over yet

Although the Beatles broke up in 1969, Beatlemania continues to this day.\n"The best of any kind of music lives on," Professor of music Glenn Gass said.\nIt seems that fans of the Beatles also live on, as was evident Sunday at Gass's Beatlemania lecture. The lecture was filled with fans from a variety of generations, reiterating Gass's emphasis that the Beatles appeal to all ages. Professors, students and children were all in attendance. The lecture was a multimedia delight with songs, pictures, videotapes and movie clips shown on three screens in Sweeney Hall.\nIn fact, the release of Beatles 1 in 2000 went to No. 1 on the billboard charts more than 30 years after the mop tops stopped making music together.\n"It was mainly the younger generation discovering the Beatles in a big way," Gass said of the album's success.\nGass took the audience through a timeline of the Beatles' career and creative process.\n"It's breathtaking," he said of the six-year time span. "The sense of time is so elongated because it was such a quick, dense time."\nThe lecture traveled back in time, beginning in 1957 on the day when John Lennon met Paul McCartney.\n"It's like looking into destiny," he said of a picture of Lennon, on stage with his first band, The Quarrymen. \nHe also added that fate was on the side of both the Beatles and their fans, resulting in detailed documentation of the Beatles' lives.\nHe jumped quickly ahead to the Beatles' American invasion. His stories were mixed with historical facts and personal anecdotes. Gass said Mick Jagger once called the Beatles "the four-headed monster," because when they came to America they all looked the same -- the hair, the clothes, the accents.\n"The only one you knew for sure was Ringo," Gass said. "America discovered Ringo."\nIt was on the "Ed Sullivan show" in 1964 that America fell in love with the Beatles.\n"It was the 'that's it' moment for the second generation of rock," Gass explained. "Everything was different now; everything was new."\nGass took the time to explore the structure of a rock-and-roll song and how the Beatles manipulated that structure to create such successful songs. His enthusiasm poured out as he boasted about the way the Beatles used harmony, melody, rhythm, mood, lyrics, song form and instruments to create their masterpieces.\nThe rest of the lecture was a journey through one group's development of rock music to this day. The Beatles' wrap sheet of successes took two hours to explain on even the most minimal of levels. Gass explained the variety of techniques used by the Beatles as a palette to which they continuously added colors.\nThere was the introduction of a string quartet with the song "Yesterday" -- "another color added to the palette," Gass said.\nOther "colors" included feature films, introspective lyrics, the introduction of new instruments and experimental recording techniques.\nTheir last album included \nthe George Harrison song, "Something." Gass showed a short music-video-like film that the Beatles made to go along with the song.\n"It points to new lives, new wives and a new focus," Gass said.\nThe focus of fans, however, has not changed. Beatles music will continue to be popular.\n"It's like Mozart," Gass said. "It's not dated at all"