Beatles tribute: Send me a postcard, drop me a line

On the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' debut on

The Ed Sullivan Show,

I'm listening (OK, singing along) to the Fab Four at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood.

Sunday's concert, billed as the ultimate tribute, promised "note-for-note renditions" so "uncanny" as to persuade us we were watching "the real thing."

It turns out the talented professional mop-tops on the stage are convincing, at least musically. As for the visuals, the skinny suits are sleek, "Paul" is adorable, and "George" is plausible, but "Ringo" and "John" look about as much like their counterparts as I do. Maybe less.

And why does the actor playing Ed Sullivan seem to be channeling Richard Nixon?

Nevertheless, this well-regarded international touring band - it will be in Washington on Tuesday - rocks the grand old theater with a desert-island-disc hit parade. About 800 people are in the audience, many of whom have gray hair and most of whom appear to know all the words.

"I like the early Beatles," says Dave Dennis, 65, of Lindenwold, retired from the auto-parts business.

"I don't have any one favorite song. There are too many," says Rob Scotten, 59. The tile setter from Mount Ephraim sits with his wife, Kris, a legal assistant, who had "all of my Beatles records stolen" long ago.

"When I hear someone say they don't like the Beatles, I don't understand it," she says.

"I believe the Beatles changed the world," adds her husband.

"When I was a little girl, my aunt had the first Beatles album," recalls massage therapist Theresa Staino. "I've always connected to their music, whenever and wherever it was played."

Staino, of Haddonfield, was just a year old in 1964, "so the math is easy," she says, laughing. She's at the show with Jennifer Konen, a friend and coworker, who also learned of the Beatles via familial osmosis.

"My parents had their albums," says Konen, 35, of Cherry Hill, who likes "country music, '50s music, the Beatles. . . . I do a mixture."

"They're my favorite band," says Carl Rossino, 24, who lives in Moorestown and is studying criminal justice at Burlington County College. He's with his mother, Stephanie, a waitress, who as a girl "heard 'Hey Jude' and it was all over," she says.

"I just like old rock-and-roll," explains Justin Gick, 16, of Cherry Hill, who got interested in the Beatles after listening to LPs of his grandmother, Joyce Stiles. She's at the show, too.

"The Beatles are probably my second-best" band, Gick adds. "My number-one would probably be Fleetwood Mac."

After opening with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Please Please Me," the Fab Four proceed to sing songs I've heard hundreds of times on radio and record, but never live. Which is rather fabulous.

Even as I feel a surge of emotion - music has a way of doing that to me - I'm under no illusion that I'm watching the "real thing."

For me, the real thing will always be what I saw in 1964 on a snowy black-and-white TV screen, and what I heard on the transistor radio that transformed my life.

The real thing is on those 45s (still got 'em somewhere) and LPs (ditto), the ones my brothers and sisters and I played, the ones everyone we knew loved when we were growing up.

Younger readers may detect the onset of a nostalgic paean to boomer exceptionalism - a defense of the domineering tastes of a generation that refuses to pack up its records and leave the party.

So let's get that out of the way: I know as well as any postmodern media consumer that Kanye is Beethoven, or Buddha, or whoever.

But if and when the presumably boomer-free pop culture of 2064 celebrates the 50th anniversary of, say, Beyoncé's "secret" album or One Direction's greatest hit or Justin Bieber's latest arrest, somebody please let me know.