The Beatles Influenced the World From a Bus Stop

In June I traveled to England with my siblings and nephews to celebrate our mom’s 80th birthday. We gathered in Yorkshire because this is where my maternal grandfather grew up. He left from the port of Liverpool to move to Oakland, CA when he was 13.

He was a prolific Jazz musician who had played piano for silent movies and wrote a light opera for my mom about good and bad insects in the garden. As a poor kid in Sheffield, England, the cradle of industrial steel production, he romanticised visits to his grandfather’s dairy farm in the countryside and dreamed of having a farm of his own in California. 

None of us kids got a chance to meet him. He volunteered for WWI when he was 17, faking his age, and breathed in mustard gas in the trenches. He survived the war, but got lung cancer and passed away when my mom was still a kid. We went to Northern England to look at the gardens and the countryside, to listen to the accents and wisps of music in the air, and feel the uniqueness of this region. 

Though my grandfather sailed from the port of Liverpool decades before American blues and rock’ n’ roll records started showing up there under the arms of merchant sailors who had traveled to New York City, the close relationship between this city and the United States dates back to the colonies.

Liverpool was the place where the prices of African slaves were set during the transatlantic slave trade, even after England itself had outlawed slavery. Cotton from the American South arrived in Liverpool to be woven in the mills of Manchester, and the last Confederate ship to surrender in the Civil War was docked in Liverpool. 

After WWII, already musical Liverpudlians got obsessed with the American records they heard and started emulating rock’ n’ roll with their own brand of speedy folk music called “skiffle.” The teenagers who would later form the Beatles were no exception.

My older sister and brother were obsessed with the Beatles as hippie kids in the California countryside in the 1970s. My nephews, now in their teens and early twenties, barely knew who they were, but they recognized the tunes. With tourists from around the world, we hopped onto Liverpool’s most popular tourist attraction, the Magical Mystery Tour, a bus ride that takes you to landmarks around the city that influenced the band’s life and work. 

Ringo Starr’s face in a Cappuccino a the Port of Liverpool.

We learned that songs that electrified a global audience were rooted in the most ordinary places in the young Beatles’ lives - a city park, a bus stop, a working class home. They developed as a band by playing hundreds of lunchtime shows for students and working people in central Liverpool’s Cavern Club. Even the psychedelic icon of Strawberry Fields refers to a Salvation Army Children’s home that John Lennon watched from a tree when he needed a place to daydream as a kid.

The Beatles came from a place full of music and they built on those sounds, incorporating American pop, Western and Indian classical music, and listening across contents to California in an ongoing creative competition with the Beach Boys. Their story is a story of the cultural explosion of the mid-twentieth century. It’s the story of youth rebellion, mass media, and the story of globalization. Their songs also speak to the importance of place and how the most humble patches of land can connect to the whole world.

It doesn’t hurt to have collective creative genius and just the right timing to unleash the zeitgeist. But what I found so poignant about the Beatles’ story was their willingness to share their authentic experiences and the way that that willingness somehow tapped directly into the hearts and minds of generations. They weren’t afraid to be who they were - working class kids from a gritty port town who became more worldly and wild over time. 

And in a way, there’s a parallel to my family story, too: our musician grandpa growing up poor in Northern England and moving to California where his daughter and grandchildren would grow wilder dreams.

If you’re ready to tell the story of a unique place or land-based venture, you’re in luck. I'm part of a challenge this summer and I have a goal to help 5 people using my Brand Seed process by the end of August. I have opened up some special slots at a special price this month, and I need two more people to complete it!