Mayor among many Beatles fans

LYNN – Count Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy as a full-fledged Beatle-ologist.That may seem odd, as she wasn?t even 2 years old when the Beatles first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” And all through her youth, her parents never tried to hide their revulsion to rock ?n? roll ? especially the Fab Four from Liverpool.Her first real exposure to the genre came in the 1970s, with groups such as the Who.?I?ll tell you when I first started getting interested in the Beatles,” she said. “It?s when I read about the ?Paul is dead? thing, and all the clues that were supposed to be in the songs. I grew to like them through listening to the songs.”The hoax began in 1969 when college students in the United States pulled apart a few songs and concluded they contained clues about the death of Paul McCartney three years earlier.Kennedy grew to first like, then love, their music. And as she was unencumbered by any memories of screaming, and of the whole Beatlemania phenomenon, her love of them has always been strictly about the music.?In fact,” she says, “I take the ending of ?Abbey Road? – “and in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make” – as a personal philosophy.”Even though she didn?t live through it, Kennedy has her own views on what made them the phenomenon they were – especially in the mid 1960s.?I think at the time,” she says, “they were something upbeat to embrace (after President John F. Kennedy?s assassination). They were the loveable moptops. And they had a combination of virtues. Ringo Starr was the clown, Paul was handsome, John Lennon was witty ? they were just the right combination.”Musically, she said, their particular styles never worked better than when they truly collaborated – something they did often before they splintered apart as individuals and pretty much wrote on their own.?I think the best example of that is ?A Day in the Life? (the final song on “Sgt. Pepper?s Lonely Hearts Club Band”). They took two separate songs that John and Paul had been working on and put them together as one. And look at the results.”