MIAMI.- I started thinking about this text when I read that in Miami there would be a symphony concert in honor of The Beatles. Not only for me, who grew up listening to them in the form of lullabies, but for my father, who sang me, on the hot nights without electricity in Cuba, melodies as sweet as Michelle y Yesterday.
My father is 73 years old and spends his days listening “the music of yesterday”, because in this way he travels in time and perhaps recovers lost stories. When I told him I was taking him to see the concert that filled the James L. Knight Center this April 13, his eyes watered and he opened the closet to look for which of his British band t-shirts he would wear tonight.
60 years of the Beatles in Miami
1964: February 16th. The Beatles perform in Miami. This concert is part of their first tour of the United States and occurs during the height of Beatlemania in the country. The performance takes place at the Deauville Hotel and is broadcast live on television (on The Ed Sullivan Show), reaching a massive audience of 70 million viewers.
2024: April 13th. Royal Symphony Orchestra and The Jukebox Beatles Tribute They perform in the city of the sun. A long line of cars surrounds the James L. Knight Center for The Beatles Experience, a show featuring songs by the Fantastic Four and orchestra.
Among the audience there are people of different ages, and something special happens, that natural community atmosphere that leads us to greet each other and even hug each other or celebrate our clothes, all united by songs that never go out of style.
The concert starts. It couldn’t be another song She Loves You. Many shout and stand up. And “they look like the Beatles”, as they say from behind, the band sings I Want to Hold Your Hand and two ladies next to me get up, cast aside their shyness and dance, possessed by nostalgia.
They follow him Roll Over Beethoven, Help!, A Day in the Life, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, With a Little Help from My Friends, I Am the Walrus, Strawberry Fields Forever, Yesterday…
Armando Luis Ramírez, director of the Royal Symphony Orchestra, manages to make the audience travel through those unforgettable melodies. Arlemar Méndez, Juan Carlos del Valle, Francisco Cairol and Alejandro Rodríguez, members of The Jukebox Beatles Tribute, perform for the first time in Miami and are greeted with applause.
The public is happy. Some cry with joy, those with gray hair return to their adolescence. Many can say, in their own way, “I already went to a Beatles concert.”
One song, a thousand stories
For many, The Beatles represent the best of their adolescence, that moment when they dared to dream, the first kiss on a rooftop, the song they listened to in the car the day they escaped from a city, the lyrics of that song that It seemed written for you and only you, or refuge in the middle of a strange society.
Well, along with her friends, comes to meet music. “Since I was 5 years old I loved the music of the Beatles,” she confessed. One of her favorite songs is I Want to Hold Your Handwhich they played tonight.
Hector He is proud to be the father of Arlemar Méndez, who takes on the role of Lennon in the band The Jukebox Beatles Tribute. “It was the summer of ’63 when I first heard them. From that day on, I said I wasn’t interested in another group,” he noted. “The first song I heard was Please Please Me. The Beatles are geniuses, what they wrote is poetry; That’s why they are a classic,” he recalled.
As reported Diego“the first time I heard the Beatles I must have been 6 years old. I lived in Colombia. There is an anecdote that I remember and it is that my mother took me to get a haircut, and she told the hairdresser: ‘cut his hair like the Beatles’. It was the time when they wore short hair,” he noted with a laugh.
Mi padre He first met the Beatles at the age of 13, in a terrible 1963 in Havana, where music in English was prohibited. Together with several friends, they saw how the Beatles’ acetate record came out of an Orquesta Aragón case, and the music made magic in an apartment in front of what is now John Lennon Park, in Vedado.
Cuban censorship was similar to that of the former USSR. As Heberto Padilla recalls in bad memoryin the 1960s, in Moscow, the Soviets listened to the Beatles “on the strangest records I have ever seen: plastic plates used for X-rays.”
Before being known as The Beatles (in 1960), the band had names like The Quarrymen and Johnny and the Moondogs. The final name came thanks to an idea from a former member of the group, Stuart Sutcliffe, and plays with words beetle (beetle) and beat (rhythm).
Their success was due not only to the quality of their songs, but also to the fact that they were pioneers in musical experimentation, and added electronic and classical music to their songs, in addition to including psychedelia.
But let’s return to Miami, to an unforgettable night for many. Attendees left the theater pleased, as The Jukebox Beatles Tribute and the Royal Symphony Orchestra added voices and melodies to the soundtrack of their own lives.
