The Beatles

(Pg. 147 of That’s Outrageous)

They said they wanted to hold my hand, and I gladly let them. More than Elvis or even Little Richard did in the ’50s, the Beatles led me through the musical landscape of the ’60s and into the new millennium.

I was living in Munich during the winter of ’64, working as a copyboy at Radio Liberty. I shared a fifth-floor walkup apartment on Agnesstrasse with two other North American innocents, in a Bohemian sort of way. 

When those four lads from Liverpool teased us with a low-pitched unison aside, “I think you’ll understand,” then burst out with “I want to hold your hand” at the top of their lungs, breaking into that ringing chord at the end of a seemingly mundane phrase—it was a single climactic musical moment that shook the world.

Little did we know they were proposing not to a teenaged nymphet, but to the world.