Beatlemania Redux

This LA Times story is the latest to remind us that it was 40 years ago this week that the Beatles arrived in the U.S.

The real story is why we still care, a matter eloquently answered by Reason's Charles Paul Freund in our June 2001 cover story, "Still Fab: Why we keep listening to the Beatles," which is online here. Earlier in 2001, over at the late, lamented Suck, I offered up a contrarian view of the Fab Four's fabness–or more accurately, the way baby boomers use the Beatles as a sort of generational Maxwell's Silver Hammer–in the wake of the world-wide success of the anthology record, 1.