I Want To Hold Your Mind, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #356 | @MDWorld

February 3, 2014 Mike Gold 3 Comments

There was this record store called Kenmac Records on Devon Avenue in Chicago, back when I was “growing up.” It featured a huge neon sign of a spinning record, constantly undulating from the edge to the center. As a young rock fiend, that sign attracted me to the store as though they were giving out free crack. I acknowledge that, by today’s standards, all record stores are ancient – but this one still had private listening booths were customers could actually listen to records before buying. That used to be commonplace but by the beginning of 1964 such booths were a bit quaint.

At the cash register, near the phonographs (sorry; no Nipper statues), were the usual assortment of promotional inducements: WLS Silver Dollar Surveys, posters, stickers… all kinds of groovy crap. And so one day, either early 1964 or late 1963, there was a sticker with four faceless haircuts and the slogan “The Beatles Is Coming!”

Okay, that was a sentence to give William Strunk a coronary. And it did its job: this piece of obnoxiousness sat in my brainpan until the day the album Meet The Beatles was released.

And then, The Beatles took over.

I can’t honestly say I found their music to be the greatest ever put to wax. I liked it, I found it a refreshing alternative to The Twist, but I was 13 years old and 13 year olds are natural rebellious contrarians. I preferred the blues-roots expressed by The Rolling Stones, and I most certainly was attracted to their carefully crafted bad boy image. But The Beatles were bigger and better promoted, employing more under-assistant promotion men than ever before assigned to a single act. Therefore, white parents who still feared their children’s fascination with jungle music found all that “long hair” to be very threatening.

They were right to be threatened. The Beatles changed our music, our culture, our politics, our world.

The group did something no other music act did before: they continued to grow, to improve, to experiment with each passing album – disallowing the movie tie-ins and the original, out-of-order bastardized release of Let It Be. And as they grew as musicians, I grew as a listener.

So this is the 50th anniversary of The Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. Previously, Ed had featured a lot of rock and, of course, an enormous amount of pop music (Davy Jones of the later-to-be Monkees actually preceded The Beatles on that particular episode), but The Beatles were as threatening in 1964 as Elvis Presley was on that same show back in 1956. Except back then, Ed played it safe: he had his director shoot Elvis from the waist up, burying those offensive hip gyrations.

No such onus was placed on The Beatles or their hair. Ed played it tits to the wind and The Beatles instantly became the biggest phenomenon since Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis played the Paramount Theatre a dozen years before. They eclipsed Elvis, they eclipsed Frank Sinatra, and they inadvertently forced Allan Sherman out of the song parody business.

If, like the majority of humanity, you are younger than me you’ll be hearing a lot of “and these guys changed the world” noise this week. You might take that with a grain of salt: you don’t have to be 13 to be a rebellious contrarian. But this time, keep your salt in its shaker.

More than 9-11, more than the Kennedy Assassination, more than Woodstock or the legalization of same-sex marriage, The Beatles truly changed the world.

For the better.

(Photograph of Kenmac Records courtesy of www.stevehoffman.tv.)

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.