Rolling Stone: The Beatles 100 Greatest Hits

[Mike Gange]

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/194557

 

The BEAT-les: In my life, I loved them all

By Mike Gange

The first time I heard The Beatles I was seven years old. In 1963, my family moved to continental Europe and the band was already a presence.  We heard the four mop tops from Liverpool on any of the International radio stations we could pull in….French, Dutch, German, Italian.  The next year The Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show and suddenly they had the attention of the whole western world.  Later on, as a teen-ager working on a radio station for military personnel, I played the heck out of their albums. It seemed that at least one of their songs could fit into nearly every radio category: easy listening, soft rock, rock and roll, and maybe even country. (I rest my case with “Act Naturally.”)  

My encounters with The Beatles’ music were mostly acts of solitary listening, but it was likely a universal experience. If you were of my generation, you would have to be living under a rock not to know about The Beatles. In the days before the Internet, we devoured everything we could about The Beatles by reading album liner notes, Billboard magazine and Rolling Stone, when it came onto the newsstands. Forty one years after The Beatles last album, Rolling Stone has released a special interest magazine called “The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs.”

The magazine is on the newsstands until late November. Its 122 pages of background info you might not have known about The Beatles, their lyrics, their creativity and their musical creations.  And of course the songs are rated according to the importance of the songs, as assigned by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine. “Oh Darling” is number 67. “Taxman” is number 55. “Eight Days a Week” is number 34. “Yesterday” is number 4.

Each of the write ups about the songs contains some tid-bit long-time fans might have forgotten, or possibly never knew. Nearly every page has a photo of the band, at the point in their recording careers that relates to the songs. In many of these photos they look so young, so innocent, maybe even too young to be the band that had 20 number one hits on pop charts. Of the more than 200 songs The Beatles recorded, more than 40 were top hits, and 14 of their albums reached number one.   

This magazine will help to settle arguments. It will help teachers teach about The Beatles and their music. It will help refresh memories of songs long forgotten or seldom heard. And for those of us who grew up with The Beatles, it will be a walk down memory lane, mixing nostalgia and life’s lessons. Here’s yet another plus: not one advertisement in the whole magazine, not even on the cover.

And what did the editors of Rolling Stone magazine rank as the number one song by The Beatles? Ahhh, for this you have to get your hands on the magazine…..and it isn’t one you would have guessed.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism courses at Fredericton High.