Now That I'm Almost As Old As The Beatles Break-up

It occurred to me recently that the Beatles were roughly my age when they broke up.  Let that sink in a sec: The Beatles produced some of the most revolutionary music of the 20th century by the same age as when I finally returned to Grad School.  By 30, they had peaked creatively, accomplished all that made them the Beatles, and off of which they would coast for the rest of their lives.  While they would all enjoy varying degrees of solo success in their 30s, it was nothing like that first exhilarating onslaught of their youth.  Surely they were all more or less finished by their 40s, Paul creatively and John literally.  It was all down-hill from their 30th birthday.

Of course, every field has these humbling wonderkids; in physics, for example, Einstein had theorized General Relativity by 24, and would never produce anything as ground-breaking again.  And of course it's easy to compile the roster of famous folks who didn't succeed till well after their first flush of youth: your Colonel Sanders and Willie Nelsons; Joyce and Steinbeck didn't publish anything till their 30s, Robert Frost not till his 40s; the average age of Nobel Prize recipients has risen steadily since Einstein, etc, etc. 


But I'm not worried about what I will or won't accomplish, that's not what I'm getting at; no, rather, what gives me pause, is that I fear my relationship with my favorite band may shift now that the young men who recorded those wonderful songs are no longer in my age-peer-group.  Now, to be clear, the surviving members of the Beatles are of course no where close to my age-peer-group; John and George are long dead (John since before I was born), and Paul and Ringo are indisputably old men now (never again can Paul sing "When I'm Sixty-Four" in the future-tense).  Yet no matter their ages now, the boys singing on those records will forever be the voices of youth in their 20s--and from here on out, that means they begin to be younger than I.