It’s still Christmas, folks — will be until Twelfth Night, January 5th.  In case you’re sick of it already, here’s a melancholy Christmas song just for you.

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It’s very hard to process what The Beatles accomplished.  In 1963 they dominated British show business.  In 1964 they dominated American show business and show business in many other countries around the world.

They went, in the course of a year, from being a premiere local Liverpool band to being a top international act.  They made more money in that year than any of them could possibly have imagined making in a lifetime.  They undoubtedly got more pussy in a shorter amount of time than any four young men have ever gotten in the history of the world.

They were all in their early twenties.  Yet they kept their good humor and their good sense through it all, they remained amazingly productive, they continued to grow as artists.

They had the kind of character you don’t often find in artists, or in people of any profession — some sort of grounding in practical realities that kept them sane on a lunatic ride through life.  The group bonding must have been at the center of it — when they broke up they got more distracted, less mature as people.

Their music was great, but perhaps their greatest gift to the world was the idea that wild worldly success could be achieved with grace and joy, and a minimum of personal presumption.

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You’d think that a Julie Andrews Christmas album couldn’t help but be a classic but this one isn’t.  Andrews’s interpretations have a a prim and prissy quality that robs them of warmth.  I have the same feeling about Joan Baez’s Christmas album.

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