Back in the early 1990s, the oldies musical groups began to make a resurgence.
Let’s face it. The best era of music in world history probably falls between 1950 and 1975.
By 1996, The Beatles Anthology series had been released, along with an ABC documentary, Bob Dylan’s son Jakob had led The Walflowers to the top of the charts, and The Eagles were back on the road again.
VH-1 was showing nightly reruns of The Midnight Special, American Bandstand and The Mike Douglas Show, while producing odes to classics through 8-Track Flashback.
All of the sudden, Dylan, Johnny Cash, John Fogerty and many others were winning Grammy Awards, and not the lousy ones they give out during the commercial breaks either.
These were Album of the Year, Best Rock Album, Best Rock Performance, and so on.
The radio was a good mix of old artists and the current generation at the time those musicians had most influenced.
The new love for the old was big business for anyone who thought they were a has been.
There was one reunion, however, that everyone yearned for but was never going to happen.
Because John Lennon had been shot over a decade before, there was no chance The Beatles would ever share a stage again as the Fab Four.
That did not stop the group from having its own huge resurgence in popularity.
By my freshman year of high school, I had seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help about 20 times each.
I had started buying the albums and had built up quite a collection, although I did make the mistake a time or two by buying some of Paul McCartney’s post 1980 solo albums.
Eventually, the popularity of these artists would begin to wane again, as the 21st Century took hold, but I never stopped loving the songs.
It appears now that the music industry is pushing a new Beatles revival, powered by the release of McCartney’s new solo album.
I must admit that I have not given it a listen, but judging by his appearances on multiple late night shows, promoting the bloody thing, I figure it must be another one in the long list of forgettable post 80s albums.
I say that because he plays about a half hour of Beatles tunes when he does one of these shows.
I will refrain from using my “By the Cover” format in this column, though, because it might be a good one.
Back to the original point, and that is the current try to commercially push the Beatles on younger Millennials will be telling as to how much future generations might care about this classic music.
If this one does not gain traction and also give other oldies recording artists a chance to make few bucks off of it, this music may have seen its last true resurgence in popularity.
