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The Beatles? My wife and I, children of the seventies, remember them as the creepy guys with stringy hair and granny-glasses. But the four are groovy once more, and our 14-year-old son loves them. So we draft along in his excitement and head to the Beatles concert in Virginia Beach.

It is July 4, and we're on vacation. "The Beatles" aren't. This version of the fab four goes by the name "Revolution" and makes (one imagines) a pretty good living doing dead-on covers of Beatles songs, complete with wigs and changes of costume that go from the sleek thin-tie look of the early sixties to the sunburst radiance of the late-sixties. The resemblance of "John" to John is particularly uncanny, even eerie, but George's hairpiece is awful. Ringo's "With a Little Help From My Friends" rings true, if a bit heavy. Paul is bright, light, young, and magnetic. He even plays left-handed bass.

It works. The crowd, the Atlantic Ocean to its back, chants and sways. The evening begins with sunshiny harmonies, Sinatra, Como, and Cole not so far away. It ends with Lucy in the sky with diamonds imagining there's no heaven, guitars unshackled, voices unthrottled, the crowd swept into another summer of love, guided, indeed, through a revolution, as true a revolution as we in our time have known.

I watch. My son joins in.

The distance between "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "I Am the Walrus" seems inexplicable. How do you move in less than four years from Oh please say to me/you'll let me be your man to Yellow matter custard/dripping from a dead dog's eye?

These guys do it every night in two hours. From the start the crowd knows what's coming, that the sweet chirpy harmonies are only preparing the way for the raw intensity of Real Rock and Roll. When the Sergeant Pepper's transformation begins, the number standing at the stage triples and all manner of manic activity breaks out. My wife and I notice (what she calls) "the bouncing girls," a pair of pretty teenagers who, seized by the spirit, enact the famed psychedelic rhythms with enormous infectious creativity, bending, swaying, entwining with shrieking serpentine delight, utterly enraptured by the moment. They bounce from the right side of the stage to the center, directly beside our son. He's so taken with the music he barely notices them (or so he says).

This concert, compressing the Beatles' lifespan into one short evening (yet somehow giving it the feel of eternity), makes it clear that in the 1960s an encompassing tautness, a still lingering tension, was swiftly and permanently eased, neck-ties turned magically to tie-dye. Tightness, once the friend, quickly became the enemy; flowers, formerly dainty, now had power. We began to rock!

What do the Beatles stand for if not this change?

What happened? What does it mean?

All kinds of names have been given to this transformation. But this concert leaves me thinking one thought: We're on vacation with the new pagans. They're everywhere.

Paganism: an old word with enduring resonance, and for good reason. Think of it as the state of heart and mind that has emerged as the reality of Law has come, over the past century, to seem less and less real—a long historical process that reached a kind of climax in the '60s, when to "question authority" meant, among other things, to question the very existence of authority.

Crucially, though, among the varying norms and mores Americans challenged were many that reflected misguided perceptions of Law, often rooted in the idiosyncratic culture of American Protestantism. In the 1960's aftermath these received ideas, on matters ranging from hair length to alcohol to race relations to worship, fell quickly. Vast space opened up in which efforts could be made to (re)define freedom, authority, and law.

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September (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53