21st Century Beatlemania About To Storm America

BETHESDA, Md. (WUSA) -- Get ready for 21st Century Beatlemania. 39 years after the most influential band in rock and roll history broke up, it is re-issuing it's record catalogue on newly remastered CDs and is also promoting a new Beatles version of the video game Rock Band. Both the game and the new CDs are being released on September Ninth.

The CDs will be different than the ones that became available in the 1980s.

"We Americans had very strange pressings where the Beatles vocals were on the left channel and all of the guitar and the bass and the drums were on the right," said Jonathan "Weasel" Gilbert, a veteran radio personality in Washington who hosted programs featuring Beatles music exclusively. "They were never, ever designed to be released that way. They were designed to be mixed down into mono where everything would be balanced, but for some strange reason when the albums came to be released here in the United States, they were released in exactly that way, with instrumentals on the right and vocals on the left, and they sounded absolutely ridiculous."

The Beatles are the coverboys on the new Rolling Stone magazine.

An appearance by surviving band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to promote the new video game was heavily covered by the media earlier this week. Four decades after it's demise, the band remains popular.

"We sell at least an album a day," said Robert Johnson Lee at Joe's Record Paradise in Rockville.

"They printed so many copies, people are actually always selling them (to us). They are still so popular people are still buying them," he said.

"You know what the enduring appeal is? Very very simple, just like the masters of the American songbook, just like the Cole Porters, the George Gershwins, The Rogers and Hammersteins, The Beatles, especially Lennon and McCartney, had a terrific, innate sense of melody and harmony. It's enduring. It goes from era to era. It will never die because the the songs are really pretty. You can sing them in the shower. You can interpret them.

Foreign people, jazz musicians, no matter where you're from, you can still interpret these songs. It's lyricism. It's melodic. It's a great sense of harmony. And even some of the classical people, the classical conductors have gone about how the chord structure of the songs, they're not basic. They're actually kind of complicated, so all this translates to an enduring appeal," Gilbert told 9News Now.