Ticket to Ride: Huntington Beach Academy for the Performing Arts prepares ‘The Beatles 1965’
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The Fab Four are back in Surf City this weekend.
Huntington Beach Academy for the Performing Arts is returning to an old favorite — the Beatles — for its fundraiser concert for its Music, Media and Entertainment Technology Department.
Sixty years ago, the Beatles were in transition between their early pop period and later experimentation. They released two albums in 1965, “Rubber Soul” and “Help!”
HBAPA students will perform all of the songs from both of those albums and more at their “The Beatles 1965” show, beginning Friday night at First Christian Church Huntington Beach.
MMET student and Edison High School senior Blake Zeutzius has always loved the Beatles. He’s playing guitar for many of the songs in the show, and is lead vocalist for “Girl” and “Nowhere Man.”
“All of a sudden they started writing songs that meant something, and ‘Nowhere Man’ is one of them,” Zeutzius said. “I’m so excited to do a Beatles show. It’s just a lot of fun.”
Michael Simmons, one of the MMET directors for the show along with Nicole Kubis, said every song that the group recorded in 1965 will be performed by the students, except for an instrumental titled “12-Bar Original.”
“It’s so blah that even I couldn’t make that happen,” Simmons quipped. “The kids would have probably killed me.”
Simmons has called the Beatles a sort of Sunday school for fledgling rockers, adding that evangelizing that music has been his mission since the day that MMET started.
The Beatles series was first done by HBAPA a decade ago, and Simmons has wanted to reboot it at the appropriate time.
“It’s too hard for the kids to do the really early material,” he said. “It’s not difficult to play, but it’s hard to sound good playing stuff that’s so basic and so stripped down. We can give them something complicated with weird textures, and it will sound awesome. You give them two guitars, bass and drums, and it can go really wrong.
“As simple as this show is to play, it’s difficult to make it sound good. But they’re doing great. They’ve really worked hard.”
The timing is unique for the show, which is being presented in “rockumentary” style, including historical footage. It’s well-documented that Bob Dylan influenced the Beatles — particularly the late John Lennon — and the recent Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown” concludes in the same year, 1965, with Dylan’s famous first electric set at the Newport Folk Festival.
“It’s such a unique era of music and a unique style,” said MMET student Marin Holman, a Huntington Beach High senior who is playing bass and guitar on many of the show’s tunes. “The Beatles themselves are extremely influential, and this is an era that inspired a lot of musicians, like the Byrds and the [Rolling] Stones. This is a pivotal point in their career, especially at peak fame almost.”
Addy McCoy, a freshman at Huntington Beach High who plays drums, said preparing for the show has been an enjoyable experience.
“Honestly, it’s cool to think about how we’re replicating and covering what they did,” McCoy said. “It’s great that we all get to play together, rehearse together and create something super-cool like this together. I think that’s the best part of it.”
Performances of “The Beatles Story 1965” are Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. at First Christian Church Huntington Beach, with a matinee performance Saturday at 1 p.m. that includes a special opening act. Tickets are $35 for VIP reserved seats, $20 for general open seating and $15 for Huntington Beach Union High School District students and seniors at hbapa.org/see.
Proceeds from the concert directly support HBAPA’s pop-rock music and media students, and attendees can arrive early for raffle opportunities.
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