POPPING OFF : Get Back! Ads With Beatles’ Music Are His Ticket to Ride

So “Revolution” is being used to hawk Nikes. Big deal. Why is everybody getting upset just because a 19-year-old Lennon-McCartney song is being used to sell sneakers on TV? How important is this?

About $15 million worth of important, says the attorney who represents the interests of the Fab Four. That’s how much the Beatles are asking in damages from Nike and Capitol-EMI Records in a lawsuit filed last week in New York.

“They’re outraged,” lawyer Leonard Marks said of his clients. “That’s not why they wrote or recorded music. They didn’t do it to promote or endorse products with their artistic creations.”

The suit climaxes months of critical newspaper and TV fulminations about the use of Beatles music in commercials. It also validates diehard Beatle fans who found it tough to ignore the desecration. To hear some fans tell it, the shoe manufacturer might as well have printed the Bible on toilet paper rolls.

But middle-aged Fab Four freaks who yammer and beat their breasts about selling the Collected Works to the highest bidder miss the point. Did John Lennon really turn over in his grave? Did the ghost of Brian Epstein go moaning like Jacob Marley through the halls of the Capitol Tower after midnight?

Its unlikely.

As for the living Beatles, Paul and George both seem preoccupied these days with making bad motion pictures and Ringo has shown his own flair for TV commercialization by teaming up with a couple of penguins to hawk Sun Country wine cooler.

The marketing strategy behind the match-up of the song and a $7-million campaign to sell the new Nike line seems pretty clear: Who but aging New Lefties nurtured by the revolutionary ‘60s and brought to full yuppie flower in the ‘80s would actually pay $75 for a pair of canvas and rubber shoes?

Ironically, it’s members of this same target audience who are the most aghast at the selling of the Beatles. Baby Boomers indignantly reel off the tasteless possibilities:

“Eleanor Rigby” as the new Forest Lawn theme song.

A new line of Barbara Cartland romances sold to the tune of “Paperback Writer.”

The California Egg Advisory Board hyping hen fruit to the strains of “I Am the Walrus.”

Various 1988 Presidential hopefuls borrowing “Fool on the Hill” for a campaign song.

In a recent issue of Advertising Age, the editors even went so far as to announce a contest, asking its trendy upscale professional audience to submit answers to the burning question: “What will be the next Beatles’ song turned into a jingle?”

To spur on its readers, the magazine offered up these lyrics as an example of a typical contest entry:

Michelle, Ma Bell

These are words that go together well:

Phone call, Ma Bell.

I ring you, I ring you, I rinnnnnng you,

You should pick up by now.

I’ll call to you some how.

And until I do I’m hoping you won’t buy MCI. . . .

Using a McCartney ballad to sell long-distance phone service may seem absurd, but it’s no more a sin than employing Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” to sell raisins.

Mating name brands with the Beatles isn’t a felony.

Selling consumer goods with the music and musicians of an era has a semi-honorable history dating back 20 years to Frank Sinatra’s commercial urging that airline customers “Come Fly With Me.”

If there is any dishonor in the jingle-ization of the Beatles, it doesn’t lie with Nike or Michael Jackson or Capitol-EMI. It lies with those who believe they can buy back a little piece of their revolutionary youth at Thom McAn.

The cost-effective, anything-for-a-buck 1980s allow more than ever for an unrestricted free market in just about everything, including culture, poetry, music, even religion. How else do we explain the selling of PTL, Pope-sicles and Oral Roberts’ Prayer Tower?

By comparison, this Beatlific method of selling running shoes is small potatoes. In 1987, laissez faire America has put up everything from human blood to cheeseburgers to inspirational tape cassettes for sale. Everything has its price and, more often than not, there is a whole slew of willing buyers. The only thing the advertisers of Nike shoes are guilty of is accurately exploiting the affluence and discontent of the Big Chill generation.

Let those without Nikes on their closet floor cast the first stone.

The rest of us will get by with a little help from our friends.