For Mexico’s ‘Beatlemaniacos,’ All You Need Is Nostalgia
TNYT
Los Beatlemaniacos
The Beatles broke up in 1970, but the spirit of the band still thrives in Mexico City.
By SHANE O’NEILL on Publish Date December 2, 2016. Photo by Brett Gundlock for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
MEXICO CITY — When it comes to the Beatles, Mexicans just can’t seem to let it be.
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Los Beatlemaniacos
The Beatles broke up in 1970, but the spirit of the band still thrives in Mexico City.
By SHANE O’NEILL on Publish Date December 2, 2016. Photo by Brett Gundlock for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
MEXICO CITY — When it comes to the Beatles, Mexicans just can’t seem to let it be.
The group split up in 1970, but it might as well have been yesterday for the masses of fans who come together whenever they can to celebrate John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Mexico City’s top classic-rock radio station dedicates two hours every weekday to Los Beatles. The second of two lengthy museum exhibits here of Beatles memorabilia closed recently. Small towns have named streets after the band’s members.
Beatles tribute bands tour the country’s concert halls; five of them played in the capital’s giant central square on Nov. 20. No fewer than 50 of the groups are booked for a four-day festival here this month.
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There are Beatles fans all over the world, but there seems to be something special about Mexicans who love the group.
Victor Rosas of Grupo Morsa, a tribute band he helped to start in 1984, believes that Mexicans are inherently nostalgic, even for a musical moment many of them never knew, and for songs in a language that few of them speak.
(Morsa, by the way, is Spanish for walrus, a reference to the 1967 Beatles song “I Am the Walrus.” Mr. Rosas said his band started out calling itself Walrus, but it was too hard for Spanish speakers, who roll their R’s, to pronounce.)
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Ricardo Calderón, 65, is the president of Mexico’s Beatles fan club and the guiding spirit of the country’s Beatlemaniacos. He recalls the day in 1964 when he first heard a Beatles song — “I Saw Her Standing There” — playing at a lunch counter in Acapulco, where he grew up.
The first album he bought was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The melodies entranced him, and his appreciation only deepened when he picked up a dictionary and learned what the lyrics meant.
Standing behind the counter of the shop where he now sells Beatles records and every imaginable Fab Four souvenir, he said, “It’s the language of pure love.”
And of course, love is all you need.
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