As Mike Girard, the first of six singers at the show along the Charles River, steps up to the microphone, I forget all of that and get lost in the lyrics of "From Me to You."

I have the urge to grab the person next to me and tell them how much I love this song and this band and this moment under a setting sun along the banks of the Charles. Yet as I look across the crowd, I see dozens of people doing exactly that. Who can be critical of this? It's the Beatles, man. The Beatles! Remember love?

Girard is an old friend of the band. He's the lead singer of The Fools, and one of the pinch hitters who have helped Beatlejuice continue to play while they keep looking. For a short time, he kind of wanted the Beatlejuice gig. He's got a sandy voice, but he knows he can't hit the high Paul McCartney stuff, so he's just happy to sing a few tunes. He finishes with "In My Life," the great ode to bittersweet recollection written by a 24-year-old John Lennon, the one that Mojo magazine named the best song of all time. Wives drag their husbands onto the dance floor and tell them how much they ebony porn love them.

When the song ends, Holaday, tall and thin with piercing eyes, steps to the microphone. "Please welcome to the stage, everyone," he says, and then his face takes on a sly smile, "vocalist . . . number two. Mr. Peter Singer."

Singer wants the job bad. Before the show, he told me he'd been practicing every night for the past month. He's a small guy with dark hair, a good voice, and a fitting name. Muzzy told me his audition tape was maybe the best they'd received, a solid John-type voice.

As Singer comes on, comparison is now on the table. It starts with: Is he better than the first guy? But as the night moves on, through the singers - a woman; a man with outlandish karaoke moves doing the whole romance-the-ladies-in-the-audience bit; a big frontman type; and Singer, who has a good voice but tends to disappear on stage - a natural criticism occurs. The band is painstaking in its effort to re-create the music as it appeared on the original albums. This is what they expect from their vocalist. Close your eyes, hear the Beatles. That's it.

At the gig along the Charles, the singers were all good in their own way, and had at least one or two songs they could nail. But on that night, and many that have followed, the deeper question was always there: Is there really one person out there who will allow Beatlejuice to be able to close their eyes and forget about Brad Delp?

JOHNNY D'S, IN DAVIS SQUARE in Somerville, is a classic dinner-and-live-music joint. For the last dozen years, it has been Beatlejuice's home base. Every eight weeks or so, they play both nights of the weekend, and they're such a hot ticket that Johnny D's has created a special Beatlejuice reservation system that usually opens at 9 a.m. on a Saturday two weeks before their show. If you sleep in that Saturday, you're not getting a table.

On the evening of March 9, 2007, most of the band was at Johnny D's doing a sound check when they got a call from Muzzy. Pack up, he told them, and come to my house. Something has happened. Later that night, as the news broke of Delp's suicide, fans turned the sidewalk outside Johnny D's into a memorial.

In January, 10 months after Delp's death, I sat with the band at a table in Johnny D's to talk about their decision to go on without Delp. In early May, Beatlejuice had played three sold-out nights at the Regent Theatre in Arlington. The shows were billed as "In My Life . . . A Concert for Brad Delp." They were long nights of music, emotional nights, and the band brought out a ton of Delp's friends to sing with them. It was here, they say, that the idea to continue as "Beatlejuice and Friends" first entered their minds. They had healing to do, and the music helped. "To say those first shows were cathartic is an understatement," Holaday said. But they also had fans who were healing, and the music helped them, too. "It's funny to say this, but it's like a public service in a way," Dave Mitchell, the lead guitarist, said. "People would say, 'We're stressed out, and this is our release. It brings us back to childhood.'"

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