Imagine a new excuse to listen to the Beatles again

The Beatles are back, thanks to the re-mastering of their studio albums. Suddenly, everywhere you turn you see the familiar album covers of Abbey Road and Revolver and Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, all shrunk down from epic LP size to little napkin-sized CDs. People tell me the cool thing about these chart-topping reissues is the superior production elements, how you can hear things you never heard before and how the special effects are vivid and fresh.

I don’t believe it for a second. The reissue of Beatles albums is just an excuse to hear Beatles songs again as if they were new. Production isn’t the point – production is never the point. The songs are the point. To say you’re listening to an artist because of re-mastering is like saying you’re drinking a vintage pinot because the vintner has a new bottle design. The new design may be a handy justification to remind yourself of the glories of your favorite grape, but it’s not the reason.

We grab at excuses to hear the Beatles because their songs represent something special. (Yes, they were good, but why were they good? Or more directly, how were they good?) One of the most distinct memories of my middle-school years was sitting around with classmates at a friend’s house, listening to Sgt. Pepper the week of its release. The strange thing about the memory is, while I don’t remember what we all had to say, I do remember the urgency with which we said it.

The songs had meaning for us. Music and lyrics collided like oxygen and hydrogen to water our souls. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” didn’t need to be about LSD to be a bright collage of color and imagery, worthy of spiriting our thoughts away to some secret, private place. We didn’t need to be on the verge of running away in order to appreciate the girl’s plight in “She’s Leaving Home.” And no knowledge of East Indian music was required in order to experience the freshness of “Within You, Without You.”

Imagination was key. “Imagination” is almost as overused and as misused as “genius,” but I mean it in this plainly defined way: “the formation of mental images not present to the senses.” What we heard in “Sgt. Pepper” was imagination unadulterated. Imagination characterized the album and it even characterized an important aspect of the entire era. “Pure Imagination” was, in fact, the title of one of the songs from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the first film made of the classic children’s book, from around the same time. John Lennon, with Paul McCartney the principle songwriter of the Beatles, would, on his own, one day write the song that summarized the importance of this ability to envision things other than they seem to be: “Imagine.”

And that, I think, is what draws people back to the Beatles at the onset of any available pretext. Imagination is not at present a mainstream commodity. When you find it in popular music, it’s hidden among small bands you probably never heard of before, such as those presented at Modified Arts in downtown Phoenix, or thriving sub-mainstream in the hands of certain musical theater writers like Adam Guettel and Jason Robert Brown.

I expected popular music to keep growing back when Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. I assumed it would get more and more imaginative as the years went by. “What a time to be alive!” I thought. “Songs will be written that break down borders and set up new standards, songs to coax the mind into thinking new thoughts and the soul into feeling strange new things.”

It didn’t exactly work out that way. But when a CD-buying public expresses its preference for decades-old imaginative artistry over new-release obviousness, there’s hope.