During the winter of 1963-64 I worked as a bartender/pizza cook at the Sun Valley’s employees bar in the Quonset hut behind the Challenger Inn that later became the laundry. Called the Holiday Hut, it had a full service bar, pizza, ping pong tables, sofas and a television and was in business to discourage off duty Sun Valley employees from hanging around the guest bars in the lodge and inn. My old friend and boss, the wonderful Ned Bell, had set me up with this job that included room and board, a lift pass, some spending money and enough time to ski and train at the gentle levels required to recover from recent surgery and sickness.
Thanks in part to Ned it was an enjoyable, unusually relaxed winter and period in my personal life, a vacation from the concentration of competitive skiing, allowing room and energy for the contemplation of larger issues. And it was a strange and unsettling time in American culture when such issues encouraged contemplation, reassessment and personal connection to and responsibility for them. Just a few months before, President John Kennedy had been assassinated. A year earlier, George Wallace’s inaugural address as Governor of Alabama included, “…segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” Six months after Wallace’s shameful (and shameless) racist polemic, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And the obscene disaster that a few months later would become known as the Viet Nam War was already underway under the radar but being felt and heard like the distant thunder of an imminent shift in and expansion of the consciousness of the unsettled American culture.
A milestone in my own awareness of and participation in that shift and expansion happened in the Holiday Hut one February 1964 night, the 9^th to be precise.
Usually the Holiday Hut had about 10—15 customers doing the things young people do in such places after work, but early that evening the place unexpectedly filled up. I had never been so busy making pizzas, serving drinks and trying to keep customers happy. I asked someone what was going on and was properly chastised for being clueless. The Beatles were appearing on the Ed Sullivan show that night and the Holiday Hut had the available TV. Since I had been out of the country for most of the previous year I didn’t even know who the Beatles were.
I, along with 73 million other people who watched Ed’s show that night, soon found out.
And the Beatles were more than fine musicians and pop stars. They embodied, inspired and gave literal voice to both shift and expansion in the culture’s consciousness, at least for those not too mired to shift or/and too tight to expand. The Beatles were the right people in the right place in the right time to be the literal and musical voice of an era. It was an era of change for many, but even many of those who couldn’t embrace, for instance, peace and love as a mantra for social organization or getting America out of Viet Nam as a political goal, incorporated the Beatles music into their lives. The Beatles’ personal and professional lives were part of the cultural fabric, not because they were celebrities but because they were the public face of shifts in perspective and thinking of a significant part of the culture. The lyrics of their songs were studied and oft repeated. “All You Need is Love,” “Good Day, Sunshine, “Let It Be” and, later, “Imagine” made far more sense for all people than, say the systems analysis thinking of people like Robert McNamara who orchestrated the Viet Nam War and for whom some people were more disposable than others. I mean, anyone with half or less a brain knows that Gandhi is a better role model than Attila.
So, even though life moved on and the Beatles broke up and went separate ways the music and the message lived on. Even when John Lennon joined Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and thousands of lesser known oblations to the gods of America’s gun culture the music of the Beatles endures with lyrics like:

“But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait”
And then just the other day a book called “Acorn” by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, showed up. She calls it a book of ‘conceptual instructions’ and notes, “I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the good old ways. Great!”
Among Yoko’s instructions:

“Mend an object
When you go through the process of mending
You mend something inside your soul as well.”

and
“Take your pants off

before you fight.”
The beat goes on.