The Beatles and The Stones
Somebody in the world said or wrote a smart, funny and inherently logical quip. Maybe more than one person thought of it. Maybe it was some genius, a journo, a TV personality or a nobody on social media, either way no one particularly cared at the time who came up with it. Only later did people clamour for and argue about attribution.
The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had just died and for many years The Rolling Stones had used a hired gun as their touring and recording bass player, not that new recordings were pouring out of the octogenarians. They were averaging a new record every fifteen years. Each record had the mixed blessing of sounding just like what it was, another Rolling Stones record. The last one had the whiff of A.I. about it if you asked me. The money was in the never going to stop world tours. Although, to be fair, Mick and Keith were musicians, so what else were they going to do?
The Beatles, the other seminal band of the 60s, had two members still alive - Sir Paul McCartney, a bass player and Ringo Starr the drummer.
So somebody somewhere made the comment, as a joke, that the four should get together and form the ultimate super group: Mick, Keith, Paul, and Ringo. It was witty, and of course, on a basic level made sense. It was possible, if very unlikely and it would solve the Rolling Stones drummer and bass player problem and since all four, even if they were over the age of 80, still played live, why not get together?
It was good for a laugh, and after a day or two the news cycle and the world moved on.
**
Late one night, a few weeks later, my friend, colleague and fellow visionary Joshua Byers and I were in our office high above the Austin streets when he said to me over beers,
‘That story about merging the Beatles and The Stones, I wonder who came up with that.’ Then a pause before he added with a laugh, ‘Probably Ringo’s manager. He’d need the money compared to the others.’
And a fully formed thought flashed into my brain like a graphic on a screen, huge and sharp. I said to Josh, ‘Yes, but what if?’
What ifs had filled our lives together since high school. Once we each discovered discovered that only the other could answer those questions, we became inseparable, insufferable and, in computer science, unstoppable. We were paper millionaires by nineteen off our answers to the what ifs. When we started our company, it reached a valuation of three billion dollars in eight months and now we had another product to launch, our biggest ever, and I just had the idea of how, even though they didn’t know yet, Mick, Keith, Paul and Ringo were going to help us do it.
Eventually, after six months of planning, meetings, legal arguments, government approvals, graft and corruption, it was decided. We announced that for three nights only, near London, Shanghai and finally Las Vegas, Mick, Keith Paul and Ringo, the biggest supergroup ever, would play both Beatles and Rolling Stones songs in three-hour events. The payday for Mick, Keith, Paul and Ringo was two hundred million US dollars each, with lodgement in their nominated bank accounts confirmed the day before the first concert.
Our new 3D AV headset, Stardream, would bring this once in history event to the world. As part of the launch, Stardream would stream the entire last show in surround sound and 3D for the cost of one dollar as a special introductory offer.
After the announcement, Stardream’s headset, rushed into production for the tour, became the fastest selling piece of technology in history. Over 80% of the world’s population would be able to see the show with ads running during the intermission only. The twenty-minute intermission would allow the four stars and additional musicians time to recover and be checked out by doctors, while everyone else either made or spent billions. It would be the biggest entertainment event in history and a climax to the whole baby boom phenomena of rock and roll itself.
**
Oh, how the money rolled in and rolled out. A month from the first concert, it was somehow determined that 98% of the world’s population had at least heard of the upcoming extravaganza. Ad space was selling by the tens of millions of dollars per second.
For the first night’s show near London, anyone who was anyone in Europe and Africa was there. Incapacitated baby boomer billionaires and tin pot dictators came in their medipods, ferried by helicopters to a custom-built viewing platform for those needing special care. Each ticket for that area was $425,000.
Thirty songs, half each from the two bands back catalogues, climaxing in a blazing rendition of The Beatles’ song “Revolution” featuring cameos from Rod Stewart, Bono and Eric Clapton and zero irony. The world went nuts. 200,000 people saw it live on a balmy, starry night in a slightly boggy Essex meadow. Billions watched curated snippets on news channels around the world. Despite our best efforts, shit quality bootleg sound and video recordings made their way to the internet within seconds of the show ending. But our special disruptive frequency technology so reduced their quality the songs sounded like scratched 45s played at 33 1/3 RPM.
A week later it was Shanghai’s turn. This time with a fresh set of guest stars including Taylor Swift, who duetted with Mick on Wild Horses, and then with Paul on Let It Be, Pete Townshend and K Rock Popstars XXXXYZ, who looked uncomfortable and ridiculously young during the whole thing. Different songs were swapped in and out and the show climaxed with, it must be said, a barn burning version of “Its Only Rock and Roll But I Like It.” There was a slight interruption as Keith had to take some oxygen during Start Me up but that just added to the event. The world went wild again. Somebody calculated that while the whole extravaganza was running, it was the fifth biggest economy on Earth.
Then the next Saturday night, the final night, in the desert outside of Las Vegas, 300,000 people were in the crowd. Only one in a thousand who applied received tickets, VIP passes were a million dollars each, packages including six-star resort accommodation, helicopter transport etc. were going for two million. The special guests were Neil Young, Lady Gaga, Dave Grohl and Gary Clark Jnr.
It really did feel like the end of an era and perhaps a new beginning for the whole world. The sales of the Stardream Headset just kept increasing in the days between the first concert and the final event. Literally hundreds of millions shipped every day and every one, every single one of them was flawed, or a better word might be special. Very special in a very unique way.
They were all accessible to different programming during the broadcast by someone with the right password code and that person was me.
It really doesn’t matter why I want to, maybe because I can. I guess I have had enough. The important thing is that I am going to finish the baby boomers off for good. Like unwelcome guests, the lot of them have been hanging around for far too long. Poisoning the world’s culture with TV shows that never stopped, the endless reruns, the music that never fades away, the classic rock stations, the endless tours, the reboots and remakes. Piano Man, Stairway to Heaven, You’re the Voice, MASH, Rocky, Grease, Star Wars etc. over and over and over again.
It had to stop and I will make it stop by using the Mariah Carey progression. What is the Mariah Carey progression? A special series of notes or frequencies that we discovered whilst testing and developing the Stardream headset and operating system. Basically played at the right volume, in conjunction with the correct accompanying notes in counterpoint, the Mariah Carey Progression will, to the older, developed or indeed failing human brain, trigger an event akin to an instant and never-ending epileptic fit. A fit that should result in death by system collapse within 90 seconds.
And during the final song of the encore at the last concert I’m going to trigger the Progression and put the baby boomer generation down once and for all. Younger users under thirty will only feel a slight anxiety or a quickly passing headache with the symptoms gradually worsening the closer the listener is to sixty years of age.
**
For the encore of Satisfaction there were no guest stars, just Mick, Keith from the Stones and Paul and Ringo on the stage. What can I say? Keith kicked off the riff, Paul came in on the bass, Ringo on drums. The world went crazy. I opened my penthouse windows and I could hear people in other apartments and on the street singing along. My wall of TVs, tuned to a variety of the world’s news channels, were showing people mouthing words and dancing, all with their Stardream sets on their heads. On the beach in Rio, a footy oval in Melbourne, in a nursing home in Liverpool and a market in Penang, all over the world, people were joyful together. Just for a moment, I was unsure about what I was about to do. Nothing had brought the world together like this before, and I was about to ruin it. But it was just for a second. When Mick sang “When I’m riding around the world,” I scrolled to the skull and crossbones image on my laptop, opened the app and pushed the enable button.
There was no immediate difference to the sound and vision. The crowd continued to go wild, the musicians continued to play and smile with joy. Then, after five seconds, I started to feel queasy. Others were feeling it too. You could see it in the older faces in the crowd and on the TV feeds. Older people stopped smiling and singing and dancing. Their faces changed from joy to surprise to concern. The older they were, the quicker and stronger were the reactions. In the retirement village in Liverpool, the vision showed an old woman grabbing her stomach, then moaning and vomiting. The two men beside her started spasming in their wheelchairs.
After about fifteen seconds, all hell broke loose around the globe. Younger victims sweated, moaned and rushed to toilets. Anyone under the age of thirty just looked bemused and for a while kept having a good time until Ringo collapsed over his drum kit and with a crash of cymbals started fitting, his foot hammering the kick drum quadruple time. Then Paul and Mick fell to the floor, both convulsing and frothing at the mouth. Somehow Keith kept playing. On the TVs, all the feeds showed baby boomers around the world vomiting and violently convulsing. You could see bones breaking as their brain twisted fingers, limbs and necks into unachievable positions, only to snap them immediately the other way. Outside my window the screams increased. Before the telecast was cut, I saw Keith Richards standing still, almost unaffected, while tens of thousands died violently around him. The only hint of something wrong with him was a violent shaking in his hands. He was gazing at his bandmates in horror, oblivious to the worldwide extermination occurring around and unknowingly through him.
Most of the TV channels cut to unprepared reporters sitting with stunned looks on their faces behind desks or standing in streets or clubs or fields surrounded by thrashing bodies on the ground while younger members in the crowd fled screaming. In Houston there was sudden gunfire and the reporter dived for cover behind bodies. I programmed up a music feed through the Stardream system to replace the concert. It was the Stones classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I kept the Carey progression through it though and by the choir fadeout all the baby boomers were dead.
Well, I guess not all. Not everyone in the world had a Stardream, not everyone watched the snippets, but when it all dies down the progression is still going to be embedded in the soundtrack of any footage. Plus, I think I have worked out a way to piggyback the progression secretly onto any Classic Rock, Solid Gold and Greatest Hits radio station transmission in the world. It may take more time and the results sure aren’t pretty, but I believe any price is worth never having to hear the Friends soundtrack, Sweet Home Alabama or Hotel California again.
Photo by Luana Azevedo on Unsplash
