Fave Rave

Who is your favorite Beatle? If you picked Pete Best or Stu Sutcliffe, I congratulate you on your ability to cling to the margins, but I will encourage you purely for the sake of argument to stay within the rigidly drawn parameters of this exercise. There are four Beatles: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Naming Murray the K or Billy Preston only continues to stir muddy waters, and no, even Muddy Waters would not be a sufficient answer here.
Brian Epstein shows a nice sense of history, but Clarence gets you obscure eighties points. Neil Aspinall or Mal Evans show that you read a lot or have access to Al Gore's Internet. If someone told me that their favorite Beatle was George Martin, I probably wouldn't slap them. At least he was in the studio when all that mania was taking place. But we're still postponing the inevitable. Since Rolling Stone magazine decided to rate the top one hundred songs by the Fab Four, from a catalog that includes just over three hundred tunes, there is a renaissance Tiger Beat proportions. The Cute One. The Smart One. The Funny One. The Quiet One. Come on now, the clock is ticking!
To be fair, I think we all have spent time in each of those camps. I was a Paul fan early on, since he seemed to be the most accessible of the bunch. I switched to John soon after that, mostly to bring my alliances in line with my favorite Monkee: Mike. In college I went with Ringo, mostly because I got tired of listening to others badmouth him. It wasn't until I got married and settled down that I finally arrived at George and his ukuleles. This was a guy who seemed completely at peace with his place in the firmament of musical mythology and he helped pay for Monty Python's "Life Of Brian." He will forever be the person who introduced me to the concept of "grotty."
Who knows, in a few more years, I may come full circle, but for now it hardly seems worth fussing about. Unless somebody comes up with Tony Sheridan.