Holy mother of God.

You know, you read about the Beatles, you try to get a sense of what it was like - but the screaming here, the mania, it’s just indescribable.

What must it have been like to be up on that stage, waves of adulation - screams - flowing over you. And you think, OK, this was the product of a specific point in time; much has been made of the explosion of the Beatles in the wake of JFK’s assassination, of the coincidence of the band and the coming-of-age of the Boomer generation. The right band at the right time. But I just can’t help but think there’s something more to it. Pop sensibility, marketing, mass media, youth. Sex. Freedom and abandon in a button-down world. An excuse to go crazy. The Beatles were the culmination of it all, the crossroads where it all met.

There is nothing, nothing at all, akin to this today. And there never will be again.