By Dennis O’Neil
Missourian Staff Writer
Dim the house lights. Let the ritual begin.
The
screen flickers, there are a few lines of dialog, a few titters from
the assembled worshipers, then the ear-splitting shriek of a hundred
young female voices raised in simultaneous adoration.
A great, natural phenomenon is present.
On the movie screen four young men – The Beatles, the pop-songsters
supreme, the Twentieth Century’s equivalent of minor deities – are
singing “Help, I need sumbodah” and every girl in the audience would
like to be that sumbodah.
Grandmothers and spinsters, too, would
like to help these shaggy performers. Because, astonishingly, their’s is
not sex appeal. Other pop singers raised to the stars on heaps of
adolescent dollars – Elvis, the young Frank Sinatra, and going way back,
Rudy Valle – made a strong appeal to the three-lettered feeling. Not
the Beatles.
They are funny, these Beatles, they
generate giggles, not sighs. they are cuddly, like teddy bears. And they
are genuinely talented. Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the New York
Philharmonic Orchestra, composer and conductor of the classics, calls
their home-brewed music a “small art form.”
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