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Beatles News Extra

 

Sgt. Pepper's Band is Still Recruiting

Two Canadians are at the centre of the expanding interest in all things Beatle.

It has been exactly 30 years since Paul McCartney officially announced the breakup of your band, the 20th century's most important and culturally significant musical entourage, The Beatles.

 

And while the names of such contemporaries as The Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer recede into the dust, their memories kept alive only in the heads of a few anal compulsives (you know who you are!), Beatlemania, it seems, is still alive and well.

 

In fact, not only does Beatlemania endure, in some ways it actually seems to be growing again. Just a short while ago the remaining Beatles themselves announced they'd be getting together to, no, not perform, but write the band's official memoirs and publish them in October for $115 a copy. And the man responsible for the famous cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Peter Blake, has organized a exhibition of collages concocted by Paul McCartney and John Lennon for an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. Meanwhile, the demand for back-catalogue Beatles CDs is a happy and consistent fact of nature for the people at EMI Canada, who distribute the band's music. Beatle conventions draw hordes of fans young and old, all hoping to add to their collections of vintage Beatles-era paraphernalia; Beatles Web sites jam the Internet; and the value of legitimate Beatles collectibles is appreciating nicely. It's all so, well, Fab!

 

And interestingly, Toronto seems to be becoming one of the prime centers of the Beatle universe, thanks largely to the work of a pair of Toronto-based Beatles enthusiasts, Andrew Croft and Peter Miniaci, who are the driving force behind the slick bi-monthly collector's magazine Beatlology.

 

Beatlology bills itself as The Magazine for Collectors of Beatles memorabilia, which it certainly is. But even for those of us who don't wish to part with hundreds of dollars for a used copy of the Flip Your Wig game, or indeed even $12,000 beans for a 1965 Shea Stadium Beatles Press Pass, Beatlology is a fascinating read.

 

Past features have included such arcane but fascinating minutiae as the collecting of Beatles bubble-gum cards, the discovery of a John Lennon hand-written set list from a 1964 Washington concert, and perhaps best of all, the discovery of a bunch of sealed "butcher" album covers. (The butcher album is so-named because the original cover for The Beatles' Yesterday and Today compilation featured a butchered-meat and baby-doll-parts motif. The cover was considered in bad taste, and was subsequently withdrawn. Owning a copy today is considered something of a Holy Grail for Beatle collectors.) Flipping through the beautifully illustrated and produced Beatlology is like a trip down Penny Lane and a romp through Strawberry Fields all rolled into one.  

 

The idea for Beatlology evolved from a concept for a catalogue that Croft and Miniaci were putting together for Miniaci's Beatlemania Shoppe, a Toronto retail outlet that specializes in both modern-day licensed Beatles' material (and believe it, there's a ton of it out there) and vintage Beatles memorabilia.

 

"Peter and I were sitting in my studio where we were doing the graphic design and production on this, when we just looked at each other, and basically said, we should be producing a magazine specifically on collecting Beatles' memorabilia. We spent about a year, maybe 15 months, working on the prototype, took it to a Beatlefest, and it just kind of exploded from there," Croft said.

 

Added Miniaci, "We're just scratching the surface here right now. The first two or three years for a magazine are the hardest. We're paying our dues. I like to think," he says with a perfectly straight face, "that right now we're at the Meet The Beatles stage of development. Last year was Please Please Me, and now we're breaking into the second stage."

 

Now obviously, we're not talking about People magazine-type circulation numbers here. The magazine currently puts out about 4,000 copies every two months, but, Croft notes, the circulation is growing in leaps and bounds, and the subscriptions are rolling in at a very steady rate. The bottom line is that where the magazine does manage to get displayed, it sells out quickly.

 

"We know there are a lot of untapped markets out there," Croft says. "Like, when we got a few copies placed into the souvenir store at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, they sold out immediately. Now they want 30, and by the time the summer comes, it'll probably be up to 50."

 

The pair also knows that their biggest potential market is as yet totally untapped. "We're making small in-roads into Europe," Miniaci notes, "but the biggest market for Beatles' paraphernalia is Asia. So therefore Asia is potentially the biggest market for this magazine."

 

What's particularly interesting about this whole affair is that, logic aside, the market for Beatle-related items continues to grow. And it's not just because of the wealthy Baby Boomers trying to grab a little bit of nostalgia by taking their sandwich to work in a Beatles lunchbox.

 

"It's a constantly expanding market," Miniaci insists. "For instance, you get some kid coming across Paul McCartney's last solo album [1998's Flaming Pie], and thinking it's fantastic. Then they want to know what other albums I might recommend. And you suddenly realize that this kid has been turned on to McCartney, doesn't know about any previous McCartney albums, and may not even know that Paul was in a band before Wings."

 

"And," he adds, "with all those magazines coming out with their Best of the Millennium polls and lists, and with The Beatles typically notching four or five releases in the top 20, the word gets revived. Plus, the kids read about The Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead being influenced by The Beatles, and it arouses their curiosity. Soon, they find out what I've known for a long time, that dollar for dollar, The Beatles offer the greatest bang for the buck. They just don't let you down."

 

One of the most fascinating experiences for any sort of collector is the joy and excitement of unearthing a previously unknown, forgotten or undiscovered piece of memorabilia. Croft and Miniaci proudly note that Beatlology has become the forum of choice for collectors to crow about their finds.

 

"When we started out," Miniaci recalls, "all of my relatives said 'What could you possibly write about The Beatles that hasn't been written before?' Well, in our very first issue we ran a story about a British e.p. [extended-play 45 r.p.m. record] that a collector had found the acetate for. It was supposed to have been released, but it never was. So there was actually a British e.p. out there with a catalogue number that never saw the light of day. It's amazing to discover these nuances."

 

Added Croft: "It's true. Every once in a while you'll hear about stuff that's never been seen or heard before. Even after The [surviving] Beatles themselves thought that Anthology was the most perfect combination of all their unreleased tracks ever, just two or three months before that someone found an acetate that they'd recorded in one of their home studios in Liverpool, and they couldn't get it out on the anthology in time.

"It just shows that you can find this kind of stuff any time."

 

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