Andrew Ferguson, Beatlemaniac
Get Back Like a lot of you, I wasn't able to make it to Liverpool for International Beatles Week this August, though I hear it was fab; indeed, gear. In consolation I bought myself a pass to the...
...You'd also have to be bored by human psychology and by the workings of time itself...
...Stairwells had been repositioned, the bar relocated, the check-in desk rearranged, meeting rooms reconfigured—disorienting the Beatles fans and upsetting the Fest's natural rhythms...
...Celebrity, of course, is a relative term...
...They are too lighthearted a group to succumb to the sticky, downward pull of morbid nostalgia...
...I grew up only 20 miles away and I remembered the Hyatt from my childhood...
...I attended so many of these that my uncertain memories of the place are crowded with the dim figures of high school boys, gawky in their bad skin and long seventies hair and lavender tuxes with deep purple trim, vomiting in the backseat of rented white limousines...
...But that's perfectly understandable...
...Unfortunately, the album was of very recent vintage, long past the Golden Age of Beatle solo works (if you believe there was such a Golden Age), and had been bought by nobody...
...Not that there's anything wrong with that...
...But of course the Beatles are now so deeply woven into the popular culture of the last 40 years that it's not too much to say that to be bored by the Beatles is to be bored by the popular culture...
...The only exception was an elderly fellow I met one afternoon...
...Whether this testifies to their own resilience or to the intrinsic merits of the music the Beatles have left behind, I can't say...
...Somehow for them the Beatles are still a source of pleasure, still fresh, a bubbly presence in their lives...
...How interesting you will find all these activities depends, I suppose, on how interesting you find the Beatles...
...They are a conservative bunch, Beatles fans, and set in their ways, as you might expect of people who have been listening to the same 200 three-minute songs for 40 years and have yet to get bored...
...Just to give you an idea: One celebrity who appeared this year, Mark Hudson, owed his Fest fame to having actually served as producer of a solo album by a former Beatle...
...Back in the seventies the Hyatt was the preferred venue for high school proms and wedding receptions for kids who couldn't afford the pricier digs in the Loop...
...He had gathered his long, thin hair into a pony tail, and his T-shirt read: "Still Pissed at Yoko...
...Many of them have been coming to the same place for the same event since it was begun in 1975...
...Hudson got a big ovation anyway...
...It was, as I say, a creepy feeling—but a feeling that most of the older Fest-goers evidently relish...
...Andrew Ferguson...
...Walking through the Giant Beatles Marketplace, held in a vast ballroom in the Hyatt basement, I had the creepy sensation of seeing the detritus of my childhood suddenly set apart and poly-bagged into highly priced collectors' items: not only the mint-condition Beatles LPs but also a full set of Beatles cards ($200), a Beatles thermos and lunchbox ($150), Beatles bobble heads ($250), a plastic Beatles guitar with nylon strings ($125), and every issue of Time, Look, Life, and Newsweek that featured the Fab Four on the cover...
...That was a long time ago, however, when we were younger so much younger than today, and now the Hyatt is showing its age, despite an expensive renovation undertaken in the last year...
...This renovation was unpopular with Fest goers...
...It was once the grandest hotel in the Chicago suburbs, marked by towers of reflective glass giving off mirrored images of the surrounding tract houses and off-ramps...
...and even more unfortunately, the Beatle was Ringo...
...The homey, year-in-year-out rhythms of the Fest rise from a steady 4/4 drumbeat of activities: lectures, author Q&As, musicales, look-alike contests, seminars, break-out sessions, and celebrity appearances...
...at the Fest it generally means someone—an old roadie or toady or hanger-on—who somehow once found himself in the orbit of real celebrities, meaning the Beatles, and is now cashing in...
...In consolation I bought myself a pass to the annual Fest for Beatles Fans held outside Chicago, at the O'Hare Hyatt, in Rosemont, Illinois—a site less evocative than Liverpool, of course, but still prized by fans for being very near an airport that the Beatles once flew out of in 1965...
...As on a Beatles record, there was scarcely a discordant note, not a trace of unpleasantness or remorse or acrimony...
...I once owned all those magazines too—kept carelessly in a cardboard box, now lost to the ages...
...It was as though someone had rifled the bedroom closet of my 13-year-old self and put everything up for sale...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 3
