We're sitting in Muzzy's Subaru Outback, in the parking lot of the Bertucci's in Woburn, going through a package he pulled that morning from PO Box 2409 up the street. Outside, a torrential January rain is playing an icy percussion on the hood. Muzzy turns the heat on, fishes his hand down into the envelope, pulls out a CD, and slides it into the car stereo.
"This could be our new singer," he says. Muzzy is normally a barrel of positive energy, but in his eyes I see a wet mix of hope and doubt.
The music starts and you immediately know you're listening to a Beatles song. It's like looking at a color. And this unknown singer, whose voice is about to come through the speakers, has chosen from the sacred end of the Beatles' arsenal, because the angelic guitar solo at the beginning of "Here Comes the Sun" has begun to waft through the car. This is the Beatles song Carl Sagan wanted on the Golden Record they shot into outer space aboard the Voyager, a representative to some alien world of all that is mankind. It's a song so familiar, such a part of our shared cultural literacy, that anything other than George Harrison's voice is going to feel like drinking milk and tasting orange juice.
Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right
After about a minute, Muzzy reaches out with his right hand, skips the CD forward a couple of songs, and then turns it off. Pretty good singer, we agree, but Muzzy has already decided: The long cold lonely winter is not over yet. It's not all right.
One year ago today, on March 9, 2007, Brad Delp sealed himself in the bathroom of his home in Atkinson, New Hampshire. He lit two charcoal grills, clipped a note to his shirt that read, "Mr. Brad Delp. Je suis une ame solitaire. I am a lonely soul," and waited for the carbon monoxide to extinguish his life.
Delp was best known as the lead singer of Boston, the voice behind some of the biggest rock anthems of the 1970s, songs like "More Than a Feeling," "Amanda," "Foreplay/Long Time," and "Rock & Roll Band." For the last 14 years of his life he had also, quietly, been the lead singer of Beatlejuice, a Beatles cover band. Delp was a fanatic for the Beatles' music, and after his death, Beatlejuice decided that the music should go on. The band members believe Delp would have wanted it that way. Muzzy, who is Beatlejuice's drummer, tells me it's part of their mourning, and part of their healing. So Beatlejuice began accepting audition tapes for Delp's replacement, though replacement is not quite the word. For the past six months, I've followed this process. They've received about a hundred tapes. They've auditioned a handful of singers. They're still looking.
The job description, as one of the would-be contestants pointed out, is ominous: Vocalist needed to replace a rock legend. Must be able to perfectly re-create the music of four super-legends. Audience will accept nothing less. Emotional baggage everywhere.
The bar is high. Maybe too high, Joe Holaday, Beatlejuice's bass player, told me once. "I don't know," he said, "if I'm in the right emotional space right now where if the guy walked in the door, I'd recognize him."
IT'S THE LAST WEEK of summer, and a couple hundred young white professionals who have just run 4.2 miles in a road race called "Twist and Shout on the Charles River" are standing next to an old American Legion post in Cambridge, along the banks of the river, beers in hand, waiting to hear some Beatles music. "If you have energy left," Holaday says as he steps to the microphone, "maybe we'll dance a little. We're Beatlejuice. Let's have some fun."
Brad Delp's genius, as I've repeatedly heard, was that he didn't try to be Brad Delp when he was singing with Beatlejuice. He tried to be John, Paul, George, or Ringo. The Beatles were his desert-island favorite band; his muse for becoming a musician. And when he stepped to the microphone, it was to re-create that experience for others like him, that indescribable magic of listening to this music that means so much to so many. As Delp himself sang on his biggest hit, "More Than a Feeling," "I lost myself in a familiar song/I closed my eyes and I slipped away."
Delp refused to allow his name to be used to promote Beatlejuice. He wanted the audience to be able to close their eyes, forget about Brad Delp, and slip away with the lads from Liverpool; every Beatlejuice fan I've spoken to - and there are many - said he had the talent to do ebony porn it.
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