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# The Beatles and Reality
- URL: https://tombeaverbooks.ghost.io/the-beatles-and-reality/
- Published: 2026-10-06T02:38:08.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T02:56:26.000Z
- Author: Tom Beaver
- Tags: Book: Movies And TV, #Import 2026-10-09 17:51

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STORYCONTEXT: *Author’s Note: Replying to childhood friend Jim Carroll about his boyhood discovery of The Beatles*

And I was there with you! There was music before the Beatles that made me happy, but suddenly I was hearing music that made me excited. And made me feel included in where the culture was heading. The music of the Beatles caused a lot of other music to seem corny and phony. Those were heady days for young people. The Beatles seemed to be affecting everything: music, hairstyles, fashion. Even some of the “old” people started becoming more hip (growing their hair out, wearing bell bottoms and big necklaces), and culture generally became more “real” because of them. It was our music, our band, that was behind it all. We were just grade school kids, and we “got it” before the adults of the world. 

As I watched the world change during the rest of the 60s and the early 70s, it seemed that much of the change grew directly out of that excitement and realness of 1964 and 1965\. I don’t know how true that is, I’m just saying it’s what I thought at the time—didn’t even think it, just believed it. Rock and roll becoming almost everyone’s preferred music, the political activism, the general shift of culture from “Ozzie and Harriet” to “All in the Family,” the way magazines and TV got sexier, the way newscasters reduced how deep and round their voices had to be, the way our generation was automatically cool with black people having full rights: many, many changes like that. It all seemed to be just the next logical thing to snowball out of the joyful realness that took fire when The Beatles arrived. 

For me there was a simple dichotomy. Old-fashioned, polite, phony, uninteresting music and values on the one hand, or exciting, raw, mentally alive, guilt-free openness to new things on the other: Andy Williams and crewcuts, or The Beatles and letting it all hang out. I wonder if every generation of kids feels a little like this about the music they first loved, about the changes they witness as they grow up. Anyhow, illusion or not, when I listen to those early songs, it reminds me that it was somehow those chords and riffs, those screams and harmonies, that feeling of new freedom, that first made me think the world was going to be a lot of fun, that our turn as adults was going to be so much better than anyone a few years before could have guessed. Was it really The Beatles who gave us all that? Or were they just the spark to a continent full of very dry kindling? Either way, it started when they started. *\~ Feb. 9 2013 / Text to Jim Carroll*