The timeless quality of the Beatles’ music has made it endure long since the Fab Four broke up in 1970.
No one knows this better than Alameda’s Drew Harrison, who has performed the group’s hits as a member of Beatles’ tribute band The Sun Kings and as a soloist focusing on John Lennon’s later work. Harrison will bring his Lennon solo tribute show, “In the Spirit of Lennon,” to Alameda’s Immanuel Lutheran Church this Sunday. Accompanying Harrison on stage will be pianist Tommy Cosentino.
Harrison, 64, a self-described staunch “Beatles fanboy” growing up in New York (before eventually moving to Alameda), says he always admired the peace-loving ideals the group stood for, especially those of Lennon.
“I identified as a teenager with him and never thought I would sing his stuff. But as I grew older, I wanted to play music and was inspired by him,” he says.
Harrison says the moment he went from being just another Beatlemaniac to becoming a tribute artist came in the Czech Republic during the late 1990s, when he was asked to sing “Ticket to Ride” in front of about 6,000 people with a local band.
“People went nuts,” says Harrison, who attributes the reaction in part to the fact that many in the crowd had not had the opportunity to hear Beatles tunes from behind the Iron Curtain, which had only recently lifted with the country’s formation in 1993, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Tribute groups at the time in America were frowned upon, says Harrison.
“But they were big in Eastern Europe because they didn’t have access to Western music,” he says.
Convinced he could make a Beatles tribute band work stateside, Harrison says he formed The Sun Kings when he returned to Alameda in 2001 and has been “all Beatles all the time” ever since. He’s also the only original member of the tribute group left.
About 10 years ago, inspired by the old MTV show “Unplugged” on which singers would perform acoustic versions of their hits, Harrison came up with the idea to do a Lennon tribute show in the same vein. The result is “In the Spirit of Lennon.”
“A lot of folks don’t know him as a solo artist. They know him as a Beatle, and he’s kind of kept in that shell,” says Harrison. “But his solo material and the experiences he had in his life — they’re just beautiful, and they’re dramatic as well as traumatic because he was assassinated.”
While Harrison’s portrayal of Lennon’s singing is considered spot-on, he says he doesn’t try to sound like the legend during his between-songs banter.
“It’s just not my thing,” he says. “If I was on Broadway, yeah, I’d be happy to affect the personality. But the music is enough, and I mean, that’s what we all remember, isn’t it? Everybody I know goes, ‘Oh yeah, I know where I heard my first Beatles song.’ ”
In the show Harrison doesn’t just sing Lennon’s work but also segues in and out of the tunes with stories relevant to them. Although known for his political activism, one of the more powerful stories about Lennon that Harrison weaves into his performances has nothing to do with politics.
“There’s a pivotal moment for Lennon, and it’s the birth of his second son, Sean,” says Harrison, relating that this is when Lennon took a break from show business “and just decided to be a house husband. And it matured him. He grew up.”
The resulting song from that pivotal experience is “Beautiful Boy.”
“This guy, the pop star, the biggest cultural icon, the thing that he wanted most was to be with his family,” Harrison says.
Incorporating this aspect of Lennon’s life is intentional on Harrison’s part.
“A lot of artists become caricatures of themselves. John Lennon, McCartney, Ringo and George just wanted to be normal. They were not heady about their fame.”
In his last interview, given the day he was killed in 1980, Lennon spoke about his everyday life “which would bore any rock-and-roller. ‘Oh, I made bread, and I took the kid to the nannies, and I had an espresso, and I read the paper. Then I took the kid to the park,’ ” says Harrison.
“It just humanized him so much. And that’s what I think the show does. It’s not my intent to take away his luster. But I think it fills a couple of gaps that people don’t know about him.”
“In the Spirit of Lennon” will start at 4 p.m. Sunday in Immanuel Lutheran Church at 1420 Lafayette St. in Alameda. The concert is a fundraiser for the continued rehabilitation of the 134-year-old church that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Tickets can be purchased online at immanuel-alameda.org/church-event and may be available at the door if they haven’t sold out online by then.
Paul Kilduff is a San Francisco-based writer who also draws cartoons. He can be reached at [email protected].
