Patrimonialiser les musi The Spectre haunting Rock Music β The wallpaper, furniture, posters, and sound track were all of the right vintage β everything matched up, except for one detail: the music was being played on a stereo sound system with loudspeakers. Then, in September , back in the footsteps of the Beatles, the group that has haunted me since childhood.
I was invited to speak at Liverpool University. I took advantage of the occasion to walk around the town, as it was my first visit. Museums devoted to the Beatles had sprung up almost like mushrooms along the docks. Together with emeritus musicologist Philip Tagg, I decided to take a ride in one of the many taxis offering tourists a motorised pilgrimage in the footsteps of the most famous group of the town, the United Kingdom, and the whole world.
The driver-cum-guide, with his hard-core skinhead look, really went to town for us, offering a route that would have found favour with historian Carlo Ginzburg, with his evidential paradigm. The dominant note, however, was the disturbing feeling that never quite went away, despite the traces, signs, clues and symptoms of variable kinds: from the interpretation of an inscription on a gravestone that echoed the coded lyrics of songs to an official plaque authenticating the house where John Lennon grew up β it was difficult to tell for sure whether the reference was to something that had actually existed or merely to an artefact.
Our taxi stopped in front of a wrought iron gate behind which stretched some kind of wasteland. The driver invited me to get out of the taxi and showed me what he thought was the best place for taking a photograph. We took it in turns β I had to wait while other pilgrim tourists got out of taxis owned by the same company to take the photo. What I was looking at was Strawberry Field, and I was torn between the emotion of the moment and the impression that I was taking part in a masquerade: am I really standing where the Beatles really once stood, or in a place given importance subsequently, drawn out of the imaginary world of the Fab Four?
Was this the Liverpool of the Beatles, or the Liverpool of their imagination? Walls of wooden planks inset with lit windows β instead of votive tablets there were keyboards, guitars, photographs, posters. It was a successful exhibition: a real lesson in local history. And yet it said nothing to the musician I was in the Eighties and Nineties. It seemed to me that it concealed a part of the truth, and that my truth was no less true that that experienced by other musicians.
