When Beatlemania was first at its height, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr often said they had no idea whether their popularity would last for another six months or even as much as a year or two.
"It's not worth missin' your sleep for, is it?" Harrison said in 1963. Added McCartney: "We just hope we're gonna have quite a run."
This week, almost 40 years after the band split up, Beatles titles dominate the latest rankings of the nation's bestselling albums, signaling a new, if less hysteria-driven, wave of popularity for the Fab Four. The spike in popularity owes, of course, to the release last week of sonically upgraded CDs of all of the group's studio recordings and the arrival of .
The new and improved Beatles CDs sold 235,000 copies during their first two days in stores, and total first-week sales of the individual CDs and two box sets of the group's recordings were projected to be 500,000 to 600,000 copies, possibly higher.
That's welcome news for a beleaguered music industry, whose last significant uptick in sales came in the wake of Michael Jackson's death in June.
Beatles titles occupy nine spots in the Top 10 of Billboard's Pop Catalog Albums chart, which encompasses albums originally released more than 18 months ago (Jackson's "Number Ones," at No. 6, kept the Fab Four from a clean sweep of the Top 10); of the Top 20, 15 are Beatles albums.
When the tally of current albums is announced today, Jay-Z's "The Blueprint 3" and Miley Cyrus' "The Time of Our Lives" are expected to hold the No. 1 and 2 slots on Billboard's Top 200, with Beatles CDs taking four or five spots on the Top Comprehensive Albums rankings that combine current and catalog releases.
Many experts attribute the group's extraordinary longevity to one thing: the music.
"I would say first and foremost you have to credit the two main guys as songwriters," said "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell, one of today's leading arbiters of what flies and what doesn't in pop music. "That's really where it all stands up. This music has crossed every single generation, and doesn't sound like somebody that was locked in a certain decade. It still feels relevant."
"American Idol" has saluted the Beatles in past seasons, challenging contestants' interpretive abilities with songs that also have become fodder for serious academic exploration.
