January 30, 1969

Today is the anniversary of the Beatles last performance. This is one of those moments in time that I have always wanted to witness. It was less than 7 months before I was born, so I lived my whole childhood as a fan of a band that I knew I would never see perform, despite Lorne Michaels' attractive offer.

I got to thinking last night that Let It Be might actually be my favorite Beatles album. I remember listening to it on vinyl in King Me's family room, on his dad's awesome audiophile sound system. It had a looseness and a tightness at the same time. It combined live takes with studio overdubs and Phil Spector sheen.

Despite what it said about the end of the Beatles (I Me Mine), Let It Be was a window into the jovial atmosphere of the Beatles' working process. Long before the Anthology collection inundated us with between-take Beatle chatter and unfinished experiments, Let It Be drew back the curtain on how fun it must have been, at times, to be in this band.

Then there were songs drenched in camaraderie: Two of Us, I've Got a Feeling, Maggie Mae, Dig It -- songs that were not products of individuals working separately (so prevalent on the White Album), but true mic-sharing group efforts, songs that needed each Beatle at his peak powers to forge those infectiously fun and groovy jams.

Let It Be completes a picture of the Beatles that started to form with A Hard Day's Night. I desperately wanted to be part of a band like this.

While I love Sgt. Pepper and Revolver, and regard them as pop masterpieces, it's the elements of reality poking through Spector's production of Let It Be that really endeared the Beatles to me, and gave me a vision of working and playing in the studio and on stage with my best friends.

The more recent remix, Let It Be...Naked, serves to draw back that curtain even further, to reveal what Spector tried to gloss over. While this is a welcome and essential addition to the Beatle catalog, it cannot diminish the deep impact of the original record on kids like me, who knew that the Beatles were gone, but reveled in the dream of a band whose internal struggles did nothing to diminish the fantastic music that swirled and flowed and still endures.