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opening shots of Northern Ireland’s later bloodbath. Being a sixties teenager had sunburst moments, certainly, but also involved long stretches of workaday dullness, unrelieved by modern diversions like mobile phones, text messaging, personal stereos, video games, or the Internet.
    If we are honest we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the sixties paved the way for the frightening, ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cozy hallucinations of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural communities, turns once bright and happy children into black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampules and needles. From the sexual freedom granted to sixties boys and girls by the contraceptive pill came the long breakdown in the age-old, civilizing influence of the family, the freedom of sixties children’s children in their turn to thieve and vandalize without the slightest fear of parental retribution.
    From the great discovery of sixties youth through the example of the Beatles—that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything—evolved the whole ghastly panoply of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket “shopping cart rage” at the other. Just as John Lennon realized he could get away with teasing his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA realized they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; so successive governments realized they could get away with allowing the national infrastructure to fall into decay; so the police found they could get away with abandoning whole communities; so hospitals found they could get away with ceasing to accord patients basic human dignity; so the legions of murderers, child molesters, muggers, and celebrity stalkers found they could become ever more arrogantly audacious in their predatory activities;so egotism, viciousness, and disregard for others grew to the point where bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of September 11, 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilization ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the sixties.
    Yet, at the same time, one cannot gainsay the decade’s many positive, if illusory and short-lived, qualities: its vigor and optimism; its belief that idealism could move the grimmest, rockiest old mountains; its abounding creativity; its ready assimilation of the wildest originality and eccentricity; its childlike sense of discovering the whole world anew. Such are the echoes that sixties nostalgics, with or without memory, seek most avidly and find most abundantly in the music of the Beatles.
    Weary though I may be of discussing the subject, heartsick as I am at the prospect of writing anything further about it (including this prologue), I cannot pretend that my interest has waned over two decades. For this is the greatest show business story ever told; one whose fascination only deepens as our collective obsession with the joys and horrors of celebrity grows. As a moral tale it is both utterly emblematic (be careful what you wish for lest your wish come true) and utterly unique. If it were presented as fiction, with its web of extraordinary accidents, conjunctions, and coincidences, no one would believe it. A modern Dickens or Tolstoy would be needed to create such a cast of characters, such a cavalcade of mold-shattering events, such a shading of comedy into tragedy, such a sweeping panorama of social evolution and transformation—though not even Dickens or Tolstoy had the nerve to make any of their heroes actually change the world.
    From the moment the Beatles realized they need not