Filmed on a sound stage in Queens

There are two possible answers to the question “Do you like the Beatles?”

Some people say “Yes, of course.”

Others will say “No, I don’t really get it, they’re not that great. Their music is kind of boring. Plus, they’re just for white dads.” The latter camp may have some points, but they are just as likely riding an anti-authority streak as they are listening to music with the intention of determining its objective worth.

The first group, however, is an unsteady coalition of two types of people.

There should be no right or wrong way to enjoy anything. Gatekeepers love to say that somebody who buys a $.79 iced coffee from 7/11 does not have a real zest for coffee, even if the 7/11 patron’s favorite part of the day is the first sip of coffee-flavored water.

When people say they like what I like, more often than not, I get defensive. I’ve already determined that I don’t care for this person I’m talking with, so therefore we cannot have anything in common. If they’re to tell me that we have the same favorite book, it must be true that they are missing part of it and they enjoy it in a less informed, full way than I do. They can’t do what I do, and if they say they do, they’re wrong.

So the people who say “Yes, of course” when asked whether they enjoy John, Paul, George, and Ringo fall into two groups.

First, there is the apple pie and coca cola camp. The Beatles are as British as they come, but they are so woven into the fabric of popular culture that most of these people probably never realized they had a choice but to like them. I’ve been accosted before for not liking coca cola, and I once implied that I didn’t like a particular slice of apple pie and almost got beat up.

These people grew up with the Beatles. They made yellow submarine models out of milk cartons and markers, and they have always known “Eight Days a Week.” The idea that the Beatles ever were transgressive barely makes sense, and of course they like the Beatles. What else is there to do?

For most of my life, I swum along happily as one of these people. I would have passed any polygraph test that asked whether I liked the Beatles, but informed I was not. Around eight years old, my family was at a friend’s house for dinner. I was trotted out like a character in The Sound of Music, presumably to settle some sort of argument or other. They asked me a series of questions:

Who’s on the 20? Andrew Jackson.

Who are the four Beatles? John, Paul, George, Ringo.

Who’s running for president? George Bush and John Kerry.

At the time, I even knew that John and George had died, though I’d thought George fell into a “Spider Hole,” presumably a hole full of a lot of spiders. A pre-school friend had told me this, and I’d been living the intervening five years horrified at the prospect that I was one foul step away from this ghoulish fate. And that even before my seminal triple album and world’s first benefit concert!

As a ten year old, I went to dinner with my family and another family my parents knew. An aspiring musician with an acoustic guitar played on a tiny stage.

“I’ll give you $1 if you give him this $5 and make a request,” my dad offered.

“What should I ask for?” I countered.

At this point in time, when I thought about making a request, all I knew about was “Brandy” a song about a fine girl all the sailors love that a New Jersey 101.5 listener, likely an audience plant and/or recording, requested without fail every time my family drove to or from the Garden State.

“Should I ask for ‘Brandy’?”

“No, maybe umm” my mom mulled other options.

“You should request ‘Yesterday,’” one of my parents’ friends told their older son.

A more fearless type, he made his way over during the next break. He came back, still holding his bill. His face showed a combination of confusion and irritation.

“He said he doesn’t know it.”

“Who doesn’t know ‘Yesterday’?” the younger son chimed in.

“I know, that’s one of the best Beatles songs” the older concurred.

“Ahh,” I thought to myself, “So it’s a Beatles song. Crap. I’ve never heard of that one. What does that make me? Am I an idiot?” I looked around the table and decided I’d be better served by not informing everybody that I, an idiot, had no idea what “Yesterday” was.

So we are introduced to the second camp, the gatekeepers, the "true" fans. These people are out there driving up the price of vinyl copies of Sgt Pepper's and watching hours-long documentaries on Disney+.

Nevertheless, I swore silently, I like the Beatles. Who doesn’t like “Hey Jude”!

In high school, the thing to do was to worship Kanye West, an imperfect idol. We also discovered Soundcloud and the fact that people would peddle free remixes and mashups on the internet. Such was the age of the White Panda, 3Lau, and others. Hours on the internet revealed a mixtape that would revolt many of the so-called proper Beatles fans, mashups of Kanye verses over Beatles music.

I loved this so much that my friends from college still mock me for it. The mixtape skipped the vanilla “Day Tripper” and “Paperback Writer,” two of my favorites by that point in time, in favor of “A Day in the Life,” “Lovely Rita,” and “Because,” among others that I hadn’t known.

Luckily for me, in addition to avoiding implausible spider holes, I also avoided the altogether more likely conversation:

Me: “I like classic rock.”

Them: “Do you like the Beatles?”

Me: “Of course.”

Them: “Same.”

Me: “What’s your favorite song?”

Them: “A Day in the Life.”

Me: “What’s that?”

Them: *cocks shotgun*

Around this time, I first listened to the White Album in earnest. This was not the right place to start, because it makes no sense. The album is long, and it is deliberately disjointed. Plus, we are told that they hated each other the whole time. You should start with Rubber Soul, if you ask me. I updated my favorite song to “Dear Prudence,” and I also had “Back in the USSR” and “Helter Skelter” in my back pocket. Did I know what to make of “Rocky Raccoon”? No. Did I listen long enough to even get to “Savoy Truffle”? Perhaps not. Did I “get” it? Who’s to say.

Last September, I made my second drive from the East Coast to Chicago. The aux in my parents’ car was inconsistent at best, so I decided it would be fun to rediscover the compact disc. I raided a few drawers in the house, and I emerged with several albums from my childhood including, among others, the Beatles 1.

Listening to “Love Me Do” and later “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” I couldn’t resist the urge to take both hands off the wheel and clap along. The album, a compilation of the Liverpudlians’ chart-topping singles in the U.K. and U.S., favors the candy pop Beatles over the acid trip Beatles, and so only by the time I made it to “Something” toward the back end of the disc did I realize that this had long been the sum total of my exposure to these lads.

In 2009 we got the box set The Beatles in Stereo. I’d been told that there had been a long-simmering beef with Macca and Apple Corps loathing Jobs and Apple, Inc. For this reason, the Beatles hadn’t been on iTunes before then, it was alleged. Some larger thing was going on, though, as there hadn’t been any remasters of Beatles albums since they were released on CD in 1987, so this was a monumental event. Cursory research indicates this re-release was intended to promote the Beatles version of the video game Rock Band, more of a penny pinch than a cash grab in retrospect.

They once recorded everything in stereo but flattened it to mono before releasing records. For the earliest singles, they even wiped the stereo tapes to save money, so certain original stereo recordings will never be heard again.

As I ransacked drawers that summer, around the 50th anniversary of the breakup and approaching the 50th anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and the 40th anniversary of Lennon’s murder, I searched in vain for this box set. Who loses a box set?

It was with a certain degree of disdain, then, that I put on 1 in this trip. What I had wanted really was to start with Please Please Me and watch them grow up through Abbey Road over the course of my 12 hour drive. I’m firmly in the anti-Let it Be camp. I have no beef with the music, but the fact that they all appear in separate little quadrangles on the album cover doesn’t smell right. 50 years on, and it’s evident that Phil Spector (cancelled!) shouldn’t be who you think of when you listen to the last album ever released by the Beatles. Even Rick Rubin had the good sense to take the back seat on Johnny Cash’s The American Recordings.

Plus, I’ve figured out my gate-keeping answer to the favorite song question. It’s “The Long One,” the colloquial title assigned to the medley on side two of Abbey Road, from “You Never Give Me Your Money” on to “Her Majesty.”

This February, by the time I moved out of my first apartment, I had still not moved on from my first serious Beatles phase. My roommate owned all the furniture, and I wound up spending a final night alone in an empty apartment. This was not good for morale. I turned to the fab four for some camaraderie, and I barely made it into “With a Little Help from My Friends” without welling up.

The following morning, I got into the car, and I jostled around my phone for 15 minutes until the aux connection caught. This was a waste of time, as it became clear that even “Octopus’s Garden” made me just a bit too sentimental to drive. Say what you will about a Ringo composition, but a) he’s cooler than you, and b) the guitars in this one really hit.

Despondent, fearing change, unsure of what to do, I went back to the CD changer and started out with 1 again. The repurposed blues harmonica and the upbeat tempo and the clapping. They were new, they were excited, the world couldn’t wait, and they didn’t yet have to bear the burden of changing music, pushing their own art, and trying to remain civil, let alone pillow-fighting mates.

My favorite food isn’t chocolate chip cookies or Swedish fish. These can’t be eaten every day. They are delicious, but to like them implies a lack of thought, a simple acceptance that whatever is most glaringly sweet in an instant is the best, regardless of the craft that has gone into it or the health effects that will come out of it.

After a certain age, too much of this kind of thing started to hurt my teeth. I found each bite grating because I couldn’t take my eye off an imagined diabetic future enough to enjoy the saccharine present. Once in a blue moon, though, you need a rush of sugar to kick you out of the dumps. Who am I to say there’s anything wrong with “Eight Days a Week.”

Few people who move past child-level sugar consumption can get back to it. I was curious what it looked like when they realized they couldn’t get back, when the fab four realized their pillow fight had turned acrimonious. I badgered the same furniture-owning roommate for his Disney+ password this Thanksgiving. A year and change after my great Beatles awakening, I wanted to see them alive and in color, thanks to Peter Jackson. Due to the demands of excuses, I’ve only seen the first half of the first episode. It’s really cool, though.

The people who don’t like the Beatles will not enjoy the new Beatles documentary. The “Eight Days a Week” fans as well may not like it either. It’s kind of boring, in that 1970s documentary style where they just show you stuff and you have to watch it, without much of an arc, and certainly without talking heads. There's more empty space than we're used to now. Before now, however, all I’d seen of them as a group was the grainy live footage and the press conferences, culminating in the infamous “we’re more popular than Jesus” and the Shea Stadium performance.

While I’d seen Ringo live and Paul in a restaurant, the documentary was what made it click that they’re real people. Sure they smoke cigarettes and the rest of it, but they also eat sandwiches! They wear not only cool stupid clothes but also uncool stupid clothes! They also need haircuts! Paul's face is looking a little, er, round. They’re just like us!

They were a candy pop boy band, then they were the cutting edge, and now they were  stuck in a soundstage as part of a harebrained scheme. Seeing the Beatles come up with a half-baked idea, one that would arguably never be completed, that’s what people like us do.

The other reviews of the doc have mentioned how, up against a wall, they started pulling up fragments of songs from their earliest days, desperate for new content. Had they succeeded, the "Eight Days a Week" types might have been thrilled, and the gatekeepers might have hemmed and hawed about how they never disdained the simpler stuff, and how maybe backward is the new forward.

Regardless of which direction is best, I like the Stones more.