My sweetheart, soon after I met her, the second week of rehearsal, I think, after one of our first conversations, once she knew I liked the Beatles, brought me the entire Beatles Anthology (in a plastic Andronico's carrier bag, I believe) the next day on indefinite lend. If you only saw The Anthology on US TV, you have not seen it at all. In the same way that Capitol fucked up their first 5 records by editing and re-sequencing them, ABC cut, edited and jammed it all into 3 "episodes". The Anthology, as conceived and created by George, Paul, Ringo, Yoko and Neil Aspinall, is a series of 8 perfect hourish-long short films covering a specific period of the band's career. The first time I saw it in my modest Magic Theatre-subsidized basement apartment in Bernal Heights it was a revelation.
So, anyway... last week I decided to splurge and buy myself a copy. It arrived yesterday and I'm watching the first disc again now. It reminds me so much of Summer and our earliest days together, falling in love. It's all great. But a moment passed just now that I had to write about. It's at the end of Part 2. The band is in Paris for the first time. The gigs are not going over well. They stump back to the hotel, decamping grumpily to the bar. Then news comes via telegram that "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" has just topped the charts in the US. The film cuts back and forth between people's memories of that moment. They come to lovely, lovely George Martin and he says:
" ... And Brian rang me about half-past one in the morning. He said "I know you won't mind being woken up". I said, well I wasn't asleep, anyway. He said, Well, we've just heard from America... we're number one!" (leaning back in his studio chair, huge intake of breath, the guileless smile of an 8 year old child coming over the face of a kindly 70 year old man, remembering) Fantastic! He said, "Do you want to come round?". Not 'alf! So, I came round and we had a great... drink up. It was lovely. Super. We never went to bed that night..."
