One Music Lover’s Opinion: Beatles Weren’t That Fab

Got Beatles on the brain. A new biography on the Fab Four is out, and Thursday marked the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

As they did for millions of others, the Beatles changed my life. Do I know what that means? No, but it still feels good to say it. Their time together coincided with my high school and college years, and over the years I’ve wondered whether “you had to be there” to fully appreciate the lads’ music. I’ve thought not -- my baby boomer conceit told me that the Beatles transcend the ages.

The Setup: Find a music-loving college student who knew little or nothing about the Beatles. After 10 or 12 tries, I finally found one who’d never heard a minute of either “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or “Rubber Soul,” two landmark albums from the 1960s that I decided to use for my experiment.

Britney Tyner is a 19-year-old Orange Coast College freshman majoring in criminology. She wants to be a lawyer and likes “all kinds of music except classical” but with a bent toward hip-hop and rap. She cheerfully took on my overnight assignment, knowing of the Beatles but little else about them. We agreed to meet again the next day, and she showed up with multiple notes she’d written while listening to the CDs I gave her.

Britney’s Review: Lyrics are important to her but a song also must “spark something” in her. That’s a pretty universal thought, so how’d the Beatles -- almost exactly 40 years after the release of “Rubber Soul” -- stack up?

She started with “Sgt. Pepper’s.” “It seemed like it had a lot of drug references on it,” she said. “Like on ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’ which kind of ties in to now, because a lot of rappers are singing about drugs. ‘Lucy in the Sky’ had weird instruments on it that sounded like Egyptian music.”

“Getting Better”: “I could not stand the song. I just got annoyed.”

“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”: “I had no idea what the song was about. I couldn’t understand it at all.”

I was getting a bad vibe, which she confirmed. “I couldn’t get into their songs because of the instruments they were using,” she said. “They sounded really weird. I don’t know if that’s the way guitars sounded back then or what.”

She moved on to the George Harrison song “Within You Without You.” “Was that about clowns?” she asked. “They sounded drunk to me. Were these guys on drugs?”

I asked about the Paul McCartney ditty “When I’m 64.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t stand that. They needed to work on their English a little more. Were they from London? I can’t understand why people would like them, because I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”

As she’s destroying my theory, Britney is completely respectful -- if playfully so -- of my admiration for the Beatles. When I noted that they changed the world, she replied, “They changed the world? How?”

Moving on, I asked about “A Day in the Life,” which many consider the best Beatle song ever. “I couldn’t stand the song,” she said. “It was so long.”

Surely, I thought, she’d like “Rubber Soul.” “I really didn’t like ‘Rubber Soul,’ she said. She appreciated that the two CDs sounded totally different and gave the Beatles credit for variety and experimentation, but it became “painful” to get through them a second time, she said. She noted that six of the 14 songs on “Rubber Soul” “are about girls. I don’t know how old they were at the time. Maybe they were getting into girls.”

“Norwegian Wood”: “I couldn’t make out if the song was about sex or not. Again, there was that weird guitar sound.”

“Michelle”: “I didn’t understand the song at all. The French thing, I couldn’t get into it.”

“Girl”: “It sounds like he’s whining in the song, whoever the singer is.”

At that point, she flips the CD over and sees the Lennon/McCartney songwriting credit. “Oh, wait,” she says, “John Lennon? So that’s who John Lennon is. With the Beatles? I did not know that.”

I told her how, back in the day, people her age waited with bated breath for the next Beatles offering. She said she could picture it, but quickly added, “I think you’d have to know what was going on back then, what the politics were, what was so [unique] about them. But I can’t see why people got so hyped up about them.” Searching for clues, she asked, “Were they the first band that came from England?”

She couldn’t make a single meaningful connection with either CD.

So, you had to be there, I suggested.

“In my view, I think you would,” she said. “I don’t think you can introduce hip-hop or rap to an 80-year-old man and expect him to like it. It all depends on where you come from and what you grew up with.”

Sadder but wiser, I said my goodbyes and thanked her for her diligence. Sad that she didn’t get the visceral kick from the music that I always have but wiser about the workings of the human ear and human experience.

“It’s not that they’re horribly bad songs,” she said, politely. “But it’s totally different to me. It’s like when you hear something on the radio and think, ‘What the hell is this?’ and you skip it. Their songs seemed to be about nothing.”

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@ latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.