The first time I witnessed just how angry old people get when young people don’t respect the Beatles enough was at a Billy Crystal stand-up show in the early ’80s.
My dad took me, even though I’d never heard of Billy Crystal and had little to no interest in seeing him in concert. (I was in the midst of a deep Richard Pryor obsession, and I suspect this father-son outing was his attempt to deprogram me.) I only remember one joke from Crystal’s act. Not because it was funny, but because of the audience’s reaction.
Crystal was talking about how teenyboppers are idiots (I’m paraphrasing), and to prove it, he recounted an awkward exchange with his daughter. “Daddy,” she asked him. “Is it true Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”
The audience howled, not with amusem*nt but with unmitigated rage. Their faces went red, the veins on their foreheads throbbing like cartoon exclamation points. With just a little encouragement, they would’ve happily chased Crystal’s daughter into the countryside with pitchforks and torches, cornering her in a windmill and burning it to the ground.
I was only 12, and though I was well aware of McCartney’s pre-Wings creative period, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the crowd’s fury. Yes, Crystal’s daughter was a moron. Not being aware of the Beatles is like not being aware of Mozart or Lincoln or Jesus. You don’t have to be a fan, but you can’t exist in the world and not have at least heard those names once or twice.
But judging by the violent grumble coming from Crystal’s audience, you’d think they were South Carolinians being told about Muslims performing abortions at gay weddings. The old guy sitting next to me—he was probably no older than 50, but he seemed ancient at the time—kicked the seat in front of him and literally harrumphed, like a Dickens character.
It’s a dance that I’ve seen play out every decade or so since. Young people publicly flaunt their Paul McCartney ignorance, and Boomers respond with white-knuckled outrage.
When Sir Paul performed at the Grammys in 2012, Twitter was awash with confused Gen Zers asking, “Wait who the f— is this Paul McCartney dude??” Back in 2015, the not-yet-fully-insane Kanye West released “Only One,” a collaboration with McCartney, and some of Yeezy’s fans responded with stroke-inducing tweets like, “I love Kanye for shining light on unknown artists” and “I don't know who Paul McCartney is, but Kanye is going to give this man a career w/ this new song.”
Just a few weeks ago, a writer friend and fellow music snob sent me this TikTok video of some kid reminiscing about the time he sold lemonade to Macca and had no f*cking clue who he was dealing with.
It’s not debatable that a failure to recognize Paul McCartney makes you stupid. (Yes, even that kid.) But getting angry about that stupidity is like going to the Olympics and slapping every athlete who finishes last. At least they’re trying. At least they’re asking about Paul McCartney.
And they’re definitely not the only ones asking stupid questions about popular artists. I recently asked my 13-year-old son, with all sincerity, if Ice Spice was the Pete Best of the Spice Girls. I own Give My Regards to Broad Street in several media formats, but I’m only just now hearing about Ice Spice.
But this isn’t really about whether Paul McCartney should or shouldn’t be recognized by kids who only communicate in memes and variations on “skibidi toilet!” It’s about how Boomers are essentially bullies about their musical memories.
As a kid, I was only almost slapped by an adult once, and it was for claiming that “Come Together” was an Aerosmith song.
I came of age musically in the ’90s, and if somebody who’d just gotten pubic hair said to me, “Kurt Cobain? Never heard of him,” I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t haunt me for the rest of the year. But tell somebody of a certain age demographic that you thought Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” was maybe seven hours too long, and they’ll glare at you like you just called their mother a whor*.
Speaking of mothers, I once saw a guy in my high school get publicly humiliated because of his mother’s Beatles fandom. It was in a creative writing class, and the teacher, in a last-ditch attempt to connect with students who didn’t give a sh*t about creative writing or school in general, asked us to share our favorite pop songs with compelling narratives.
Everything we mentioned was on heavy rotation on MTV at the time. The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance” (but just for the video with the dancing little person).
And then this guy—I forget this name, so let’s call him Curt—shouted out, “The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’.” The entire class erupted in laughter. It was like he just walked into the room wearing nothing but tighty-whiteys.
“The Beatles?” One of the popular girls with enormous hair exclaimed. “They’re so old!”
Curt tried to backtrack, claiming that he only knew about the band because of his mother, who forced him to listen to her “stupid hippie records.” But it was too late, the damage had been done.
A few months later, he killed his mom.
I’m not kidding. He seriously killed his mom.
He shot her during an argument at their home, and then dragged her body into the trunk of his car, intending to bury it in a nearby forest preserve. He almost made it, but a cop pulled him over for having a busted taillight and noticed the stench of death.
It was a huge scandal at my high school, something that friends and I from back in the day still talk about whenever we get together.
“Remember that guy who killed his mom?” one of us will say. And then we’ll all solemnly nod our heads, like we grew up in the ghetto and matricide was just a normal part of our day-to-day lives.
I’m convinced that Curt killed his mom because of Paul McCartney.
I have no evidence whatsoever to back up this theory. I never knew the guy, and my only memory of him, besides hearing that he was in jail for involuntary manslaughter, is that classroom full of teenage girls mocking him for knowing a Beatles song, and his desperate attempts to shift the blame to his mother. I’m no criminal lawyer, but that seems like a reasonable enough motive to me.
It’s been almost forty years since it happened, but I still feel like I need answers. Is Curt still in prison? Or because he was a minor, maybe he’s a free man today, trying to forge an adult life and forget his sh*tty high school experience like the rest of us. Would he be willing to let him interview him?
I asked a few high school friends, and nobody has any clue where Curt ended up, or if Curt is even his real name.
“Are you sure it’s Curt?” One of them asked. “I’m pretty sure it was Craig. He always wore that ratty Member’s Only jacket, remember? Yeah, weird guy. Not ‘clearly going to murder his mom’ weird, but, you know, ‘whippets in the parking lot behind the gym’ weird.”
It’s probably for the best that I didn’t find him. Because Curt, or whatever his name is, obviously wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.
If I actually had the balls to ask him the big question—“Why’d you kill your mom?”—which seems unlikely, given that we never exchanged more than two words when he was easy to find, I’m almost positive he’d tell me that his relationship with his late mom was complicated and sad and involved years of emotional and physical abuse that had nothing to do with forcing him to listen to Beatles albums.
But in my imagination, our conversation would go something like this:
ME: You killed your mom because she made you listen to the Beatles, right?
CURT: Totally!
ME: Was it a specific album, or just the Beatles in general?
CURT: I hated all of it, but Abbey Road pushed me over the edge. There are maybe two or three good songs on that record. The rest of it’s sh*t like “Oh! Darling” and “Octopus’s Garden.” Oh god, it’s just terrible. Try listening to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” twice a day during your early teens and tell me you wouldn’t shoot somebody in the face.
ME: You couldn’t just tell her you weren’t a fan?
CURT: Not a fan of the Beatles? You ever try telling somebody in our parents’ generation that the Beatles aren’t the greatest band in the history of the world? It’s like telling ‘em Dylan can’t carry a tune.
ME: They can be thin-skinned about their icons.
CURT: I never hated the band. But the constant reverence is exhausting. And for a 16-year-old boy, to be surrounded with nothing but Beatles songs, forced to repeat the lyrics to “Norwegian Wood” every night as a bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I once had a girl or should I say she once had me,” it doesn’t prepare a guy for the outside world. You don’t feel comfortable having any kind of musical discovery of your own. And it ostracizes you from your peer group.
ME: I guess that’s true.
CURT: I don’t feel good about murdering my mom. But what choice did I have? Some days, I wish I didn’t have any idea who the f*ck Paul McCartney is.
I don’t know if there’s a moral in all this. It’s hard to impose meaning on a tragedy that happened four decades ago and didn’t involve me in any direct way. But history, as they say, is written by the winners, and I seem to be the sole graduate from my suburban Chicago high school who remembers Curt and his murderous rampage, when he cast off the shackles of musical oppression and cried to the heavens “I don’t need to hear ‘Hey Jude’ ever again for the rest of my life!”
The next time you read about some snarky moppet dissing a Beatle, maybe you just shut up about it. Because one of these days, you’re going to push too far and end up in the trunk of a teenager’s car with busted taillights.
Paul McCartney is and always will be a legend. We all get that. Even those of us who’ve never heard of him are well aware that the old fart was a big deal to you. But we don’t all need to like what you like. Just let the kids enjoy their Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas and you go play “Dig a Pony” for the zillionth time and nobody needs to get hurt.
