Who’s Your Favorite Beatle?

A friend of mine once claimed there exists an entire branch of psychology based on who your favorite Beatle is. While that is very likely not true, it ought to be. What better way to classify one’s personality than to determine whether or not you’re a Ringo-person, a Paul-person, a George-person or a John-person? As a therapist, imagine the thrill of diagnosing a Ringonian with latent Paulistic tendencies, or a Johnoid-Georgophrenic suffering from a Yoko complex? Instead of asking for someone’s astrological sign at a nightclub, why not ask who their favorite Beatle is? Is it John, the smart one? Or is it Paul, the cute one? Or how about Ringo, the funny one? Or George, the shy one? So much information can come from that one choice.

Growing up, my favorite Beatle was John. I thought he was the natural leader of the group; I felt he was clever and witty, his singing style was really cool, and he was the handsomest of all the Beatles. I liked all his transformations, from the fresh-faced mop top as he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show to the brooding, politically-active poet with the funky round glasses. He had an edge. He was the wise kid in your algebra class who never looked at the board and doodled in the margins of his textbook, the one the teacher was a little afraid of, the type your parents would really prefer you not to hang out with.

I’m thinking of the Beatles because last Saturday night I went to a concert performed by a group called Beatlejuice, a band which plays nothing but Beatles songs and does them surpassingly well. The front man is Brad Delp, former lead singer of the rock group Boston, an extremely charismatic guy who can imitate both Paul’s and John’s singing voices. The five-man group also features a keyboard man whose synthesizer can replicate all the studio effects the Beatles did in their later albums, such as Sgt. Pepper’s and the white album. And they don’t even attempt to look like the Beatles, something I appreciate (they’re all in their fifties anyway). Their appeal crosses all demographic lines — indeed, that night there were as many people under twenty as there were over sixty. I was a little disconcerted when the octogenarian sitting next to me whipped her bra onto the stage and yelled, “I love you, Ringo!” but other than that it was a hell of a show. Last Saturday was the third time I saw Beatlejuice.

The next day I found myself in “Beatles-mode” and dug out an old VHS tape the missus bought one time called The Beatles Unauthorized, a 51-minute compilation of old, black and white film clips showing a couple of Beatles concerts, several of their press conferences, and various news and TV show segments. The sound quality was extremely poor and the cinematography was generally on a par with how your great-grandfather might handle a camcorder. It showed the Beatles’ first concert in the U.S. (which was broadcast on closed-circuit TV in theaters) in Washington, DC, on a small, spare stage set in the middle of an auditorium ringed by screaming teenagers. Ringo’s drum set was placed on a tiny, round platform that was designed to rotate, so in between songs the lads could spin it 180 degrees to face that portion of the audience they previously had their backs to. Every time Ringo beat on the drums the platform wobbled like a teacup perched precariously on a bony knee. There were a few boxy amplifiers set to either side of Ringo’s drums like you might expect to see at a high school dance, two microphone stands, their guitars, and that was it. Just the boys in their Beatle suits, Beatle haircuts and Beatle boots. You could tell they couldn’t even hear what they were doing all that well; they more shouted than sung. And meanwhile every screeching adolescent girl in the joint achieved catharsis at a decibel level previously thought unattainable by humans.

You really get the idea from watching that tape that the Beatles were just kids made of flesh and bone, not the gods we thought they were. They seemed so frail and unprotected on that bare stage. When they had poor Ringo nearly throw out his tonsils singing “I wanna be your lover, baby, I wanna be you man” in all that din, I thought of how sore his throat must have been the next day and how hot and uncomfortable he looked in that suit, whacking away at his drums on a fragile, unsteady platform. Being a Beatle must have been completely nuts.

So who is your favorite Beatle? And why? And no claiming you don’t know anything about the Beatles, because that’s like saying you never heard of Mozart.