There will always be a magical element in music, something that evades scientific explanation. And the Beatles, as massive icons of 20th century pop music, contained and conveyed a large dose of magic in the music they made in those years 1963 through 1970. Of course, this says as much about those of us who listen to it as it does about the Beatles themselves.
The WannaBeatles
I was a 14-year-old high school student when I first heard encountered that magic spark: “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” erupting from a plastic clock-radio in my parents’ bedroom at our home in Atlanta. The song had a certain energy that I couldn’t understand or deny, and it stayed with me. The radio station played it repeatedly over the next few weeks, and I never tired of it.
Naturally, other kids at school were catching the fever, sharing news and views about this new group from England that had appeared on the Ed Sullivan show one memorable Sunday night in February 1964. That spring, Beatles songs like a predatory virus had infested over half of the top ten being played on our teen radio station, and we loved them all. The spark became a flame. For many of us, it was a love affair that lasted through the sixties, and beyond.
I had no idea back then what that magic spark would produce, how far it would go, and how much it would mean to me, and apparently to millions of others who constitute this ongoing crazy entity called popular culture.
Bryan Cumming (left) with brothers Walter and Doug, and friends Dennis Keefe and Dino Donald.
Other images of that love affair include my parents taking us in the family station wagon to a movie theater in Marietta to watch “A Hard Day’s Night.” There they were, in black and white, those magnificently charming and clever lads, singing their infectious songs, jumping around in creative playfulness. It didn’t occur to me that my parents’ enjoyment of the Beatles should have made me suspicious. My ears were already musical enough to catch the beauty of the harmony that John and Paul sang on “If I Fell.”
In August 1965, my brothers and I took the bus downtown to see the Beatles play at Atlanta Stadium. By this time, their second movie “Help” was already out. The song “Help” has a peculiar guitar lick that sounded impossible to play. They actually did the song that night at the Stadium, with me and my brothers sitting somewhere over near first base. I was watching carefully to see what George was doing during that part of the song, but he was too far away.
That was one of those musical nuggets that eluded me for many years. That tricky key change at the beginning of “If I Fell” was another mystery beyond my grasp during those early months. Later on, I was equally baffled by McCartney’s intricate acoustic part for “Blackbird.” It seemed enormously complex, especially compared to some of their earlier material like “Love Me Do.”
By this time, I was playing guitar. I had formed a band with my brothers, and we were doing Beatles songs (among Beach Boys, Stones, etc.) singing the parts we learned from singing along with the Beatles second album, the one that includes “She Loves You.”
The WannaBeatles
Perhaps partly inspired by the Beatles, we began writing, arranging, performing and recording our own songs, half expecting a label deal to materialize out of nothing more than our dreams. It didn’t get very far, but we had tons of fun and it was a great experience.
Meanwhile, the Beatles were continuing to produce amazing music. I can remember puzzling over the lyrics to “Strawberry Fields” in the closest thing a public high school in Atlanta would have had to a philosophical inquiry club. Basically that was me and Sue Cobble. She was the fearless intellectual bohemian type. I was the middle-class wannabe who at least listened and didn’t turn up his nose at poetry. So when John sang “But it’s all right…that is I think it’s not too bad” we enjoyed believing we knew what he was talking about, and passed notes back and forth expressing our admiration for this adventurous musical poetry.
The sixties are by now a cliché, a password for an era of cultural upheaval, loaded with assassinations, radical politics, flower power, psychedelic clothes, new language, and new music, all the ramifications still being felt down through the decades. The Beatles, in John Lennon’s image, were flags flying on the ship of change… not necessarily the cause of it, but surely riding along near the top of the massive tsunami that assaulted us all. Being a fan, loving their music lingered dangerously close to idol worship. When they decided to grow mustaches, the look was instantly validated, and we wanted to do the same. Never mind that we were too young. We were ready to commit, and follow through as soon as hormones did their biological job.
Bryan "Jorge" Cumming
The musical output of the Beatles ranged from ’64 to ’70, neatly ending with the decade. What began as a tight little rock band from the sweaty pubs of Liverpool and Hamburg, was nurtured in the studio by their sophisticated producer George Martin, as they gradually morphed into pioneers of orchestrated multi-track pop music concepts, led often by Paul McCartney’s relentless musical appetites.
The story has been told many times, and part of the story is how the passage of time brings the original fans to middle age, where they now can deliberately remember what turned them on when they were young, sparking again that inexplicable joy that the music first produced over forty years ago.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying music. It seems to happen more dramatically, almost dangerously so, during teenage years. But growing older doesn’t mean that joy disappears, and Beatles music seems to be one of the most effective ways to be reminded that joy is eternal.
None of that was any more than a theory until the WannaBeatles came along. This is a group of middle-aged guys, of which I am one, performing Beatles songs, enjoying it, and apparently helping other people enjoy listening to us (really to them), as they watch us enjoy performing the songs.
Dennis "Juan" Scott
The group was not a planned idea, but a serendipitous falling together of the right guys at the right time. Dennis Scott can be credited with first identifying the group and leading it. I’ve worked with Dennis steadily since my first years in Nashville, usually on Saturday nights, wearing a tuxedo with a red bowtie, and usually playing wedding receptions. It’s always with good musicians, and always a decent paying job, and it’s been easy for me to become fond of Dennis through the years.
One of our many bonds of friendship was a lingering affection for the Beatles. As musicians, we could express it as admiration for this or that chord progression, or some inventive melody or harmony part…. There’s lots to choose from, which is really what makes being a Beatles fan so rewarding.
But in the case of Dennis and me, working wedding receptions on Saturday nights, the way it came out was by his adding “Here Comes The Sun” into the list of the songs we played for the evening.
After several years, Dennis discovered that I played guitar, and after slowly exploring that area of musical possibility, we added “Eight Days A Week” and “I Saw Her Standing There” to the song list, sprinkled among other wedding classics like “Meditation” and “Brown Eyed Girl.” We enjoyed doing Beatles songs, and people enjoyed hearing them, but we had no illusions about doing more than a few of them, even though there were plenty we knew and loved.
Jim "Pablo" Hayden
What kicked the idea into high gear was the appearance of keyboard whiz Jim Hayden, who had just moved to town in 2005. He played a few wedding gigs with us, proving himself as a very versatile player and singer. One night, after a gig where we had played a few Beatles songs, we were already packing up, but Jim started playing other favorites, including some more challenging ones like “Strawberry Fields” and “Day In the Life.” His enthusiasm and vast performing chops sparked the idea of taking it further, and his keyboard opened up the sonic palette that brought a wide range of songs within reach. We realized that with Jim’s voice and keyboard we could easily cover a dozen or more Beatles songs without even rehearsing. The songs were already installed in our hearts and minds, and fingers too, for that matter.
Our other secret weapon was David Toledo, Cuban-born drummer, U. of Miami trained arranger, and experienced choral director. David had been regular on Dennis’s gigs for a year or so; he was a great asset, a naturally enthusiastic personality, with a fine tenor voice, and, for what it’s worth, a genuine Latin heritage, which would provide a recurring joke later in the game.
Dennis had booked the four of us at a Mexican restaurant in Cool Springs, and suggested to the owner trying out a night of all Beatles material. Dennis assembled the set list and checked with us to see what we remembered. As we played the songs, we kept remembering others we knew and loved, so it felt like a treasure hunt to dive into that body of material.
David "Gringo" Toledo
The audience liked it, too, and the owner. We became a regular Monday night fixture during the fall of 2006. Jim introduced us from the stage of the Mexicali Grill as if the lads from Liverpool had been translated into Spanish: he was Pablo, Dennis was Juan, I was Jorge, and our cute loveable drummer was….Gringo. The built in joke with Gringo meaning non-hispanic is that David, our drummer, is the only member of the group who actually is Hispanic. And yet, being the drummer in a band that does Beatles songs leads inevitably to a variation on the name Ringo, so there we were, both victims and beneficiaries of a hidden cosmic joke.
Pretty soon we realized that we were swimming in the deep end without much practice and decided to start rehearsing. David was the first to suggest it, but we all agreed. And so, we began assigning vocal parts, figuring out whose voice was best for what part, and exploring the original records with more attentive ears to unlock their secrets.
There were four of us, like the original lads from Liverpool. We didn’t have a bass player per se, but Jim covered bass parts on the keyboard. There are advantages and disadvantages to this system. With someone as good as Jim, the disadvantages almost disappear altogether. And he is very diligent about learning and practicing his parts, getting them right, at the right tempo, etc. in addition to finding the right sound.
During the spring of 2007 we were enlarging our repertoire and gaining confidence. Dennis launched a campaign to find us a name. It turned out that an actress friend of his who had never heard us suggested the name WannaBeatles, and it felt like a winner. We continued to play the Mexicali and rehearse, and Dennis upgraded his marketing efforts, planning one brief photo session in our black turtlenecks at Shuff’s Music in Franklin, where Jim worked during the day. We were interviewed by Peter Cooper of the Tennessean, and several articles and photos appeared in local papers last fall.
Then we got booked at Puckett’s, the former country store turned intimate hip music venue in Lieper’s Fork (names like Michael McDonald and Larry Carlton, icons of musical quality I learned to admire during my years in L.A. had performed there), and we went over well, selling out the place. Things were looking up.
The WannaBeatles
David had another idea: writing our own songs, in the style of Beatles songs, and introducing them to the public as songs “from the vault,” i.e. songs the Beatles had recorded but never released. If we had enough original songs, we could make a CD of our own. It could be a gradual process of adding them to the songlist and seeing how they go over. It was a little risky, since our basic foundation was the familiarity of the songs we were playing. But were we gaining momentum as a group that worked well together, knew each other’s strengths, and demonstrated a willingness to carry a career through its early steps.
We started a website and MySpace page. For the website, Dennis took the original sound of Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles amidst the sound of screaming fans, and through careful audio editing, inserted the phrase “wanna” so that our visitors to the website hear Ed Sullivan introducing “The WannaBeatles.” David meanwhile was handling the MySpace page, where he managed to secure Ringo among our “friends.”
In January 2008, we appeared on WPLN radio’s “Live In Studio C,” which produced some nervous anticipation of how well we might do if we rehearsed enough, or perhaps how poorly we might do if we didn’t rehearse enough. That was a humbling experience, the worst part being the last song, when we decided to do “Here Comes the Sun” in the remaining 3 minutes, without having time to tune the guitars, facing the reality that putting a capo on a guitar neck can send the strings just sharp enough to register a distinct sensation of sourness in the ears. It’s a practical reality that we adjust the guitars before playing that song (and readjust after playing it), but there was no time, so we launched in unprepared, and now we have a record of our moment of collective embarrassment. The absolutely worst note in the whole song was the very last note of the entire show, a guitar part that reaches down to the lowest string (imitating George Harrison’s original part), which happens to be the string that goes the sharpest when it’s under a capo.
The technical side of my brain looks at the problem seeking a practical solution: take the time to tune the guitar before playing the song, and, as a further solution, explore how the neck of the guitar might be adjusted to minimize or prevent the problem altogether. But then there’s the emotional side of my brain: this is embarrassing, but the show must go on… even if we think we don’t sound good, we have to act like we think we sound good, so people who can’t really hear our mistakes will still enjoy hearing us. It’s a big show business principle: entertainment is a process between performer and audience, and what is perceived is what counts: not what a tuning meter registers.
Meanwhile, Dennis, as our resident Brian Epstein, was continuing to cook up good performing opportunities. We became regulars at Puckett’s (which has a second venue in downtown Franklin as well as their original in Lieper’s Fork), playing once a month and selling out. Dennis also scored us a bunch of high profile gigs, like Clarksville’s Rivers and Spires Festival, Metro Parks Concert Series (Crockett Park in Brentwood June 29), an appearance at Riverfront Park on July 4, and a show at TPAC with a dance school that’s staging a full-scale rendition of the Ed Sullivan Show. Our first “downtown” appearance was last week playing Sambuca, the upscale jazz club in the trendy Gulch area.
Things were moving along. We decided to invest in tee shirts to sell at gigs, black with white lettering. Soon after that came the bumper stickers. This was a big thrill for a bunch of middle aged guys: being in a band that finally reached a level of togetherness and visibility that warranted investing in our own tee shirts.
Just this week, we’re discussing a possible gig at the Rutledge and noticing that we’re mentioned on several websites for upcoming shows. Here are some links:
http://www.visitmusiccity.com/visitors/july4th
http://www.guitarboomer.com/2008/01/meet-wannabeatles.html
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080514/COUNTY0903/805140318/1181
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080422/COUNTY0903/804220399/1181/COUNTY0903
http://www.nashville.gov/Parks/events_calendar.htm
We’re still cultivating the original song ideas, rehearsing on a regular basis, and seeing where it all goes.
– BC June 08
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