LIVERPOOL -- Down by the Merseyside, where it's forever the '60s and the Fab Four have never left home, people come. All ages and in droves.
''Quarter of a million the last week in August," says Jonathan Schofield, Blue Badge Guide. ''Bands -- Beatles-style bands -- from all over the world, too. Argentines are the best."
Even without the international bands playing on 15 raised platforms outside as well as at innumerable venues inside, the beat of John Lennon (1940-80), George Harrison (1943-2001), Paul McCartney (b. 1942) and Ringo Starr (b. 1940) never stops in Liverpool.
Come by air and arrive at Liverpool John Lennon Airport.
''First time a British airport was named for an individual," Schofield says. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, dedicated it, oversees the John Lennon memorial scholarships, and donates heavily in his name to the Salvation Army's Strawberry Field children's home.
Paul reopened and endowed the old Liverpool Institute as the Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts. George gave anonymously here as well as publicly in New York with the 1971 famine relief Concert for Bangladesh. Ringo, who dropped out of school, likes to repair dilapidated school playgrounds and build libraries.
These were working-class kids from a working-class city, and their rise to international fame began in the look-alike, subsidized houses of blue-collar neighborhoods. Now these are on the route of sightseeing buses, camera-wielding tourists, freelance guides, and self-drive maps.
Liverpool will be 800 years old in 2007, has been named UNESCO's ''City of Culture" in 2008, and has appreciable monuments. Today, however, Liverpool Cathedral, Europe's largest Anglican cathedral, is known less for its magnificence than as the place where Paul was turned down for the choir because he couldn't read music. Most locals saw the inside of the prestigious Walker Art Gallery for the first time when Paul had a one-man show in 2002.
Lennon formed his first group in 1957 as The Quarrymen, named for Quarry Bank Grammar School (''The Eton of the Labour Party," says Schofield). They were a skiffle band, meaning they played whatever instruments they could scrounge or make, and they performed on the back of a truck if that was the only available space.
Whether too young, too old, or just right to remember the Sixties, today's visitors start with ''The Beatles Story" told in a museum of music, memory, and memorabilia in the vaults on Albert Dock. Relax for a minute in the kind of Pan Am seats that carried the lads to New York in 1964. See the white piano on which Lennon wrote ''Imagine." View the screaming girls on black-and-white news film clips. Lift the receivers to hear the boys' own early voices (you may have trouble with the accent); listen to the soundtracks.
It's not kitschy except maybe for the mockup of The Cavern Club, where tourists can put on wigs and costumes for a family photo onstage ($15-$20 depending on the size of the print).
Next, take a tour, perhaps the two-hour Magical Mystery Tour in a bus painted to match the album cover. There are other tours and private guides, but this one starts outside the Albert Dock Tourist Information Centre and ends at Mathew Street. Reserve early, a day ahead in summer (011-44-871-222-1967 from the United States).
Riders see where the Beatles lived, hear how they got together, took their gigs where they found them, wrote hometown and family meanings into their songs. There's a photo stop at the gate to Strawberry Field where a young Lennon and his friends sold lemonade for a penny while the Salvation Army band played at fund-raising garden parties.
''This is where Ringo was born," announces Merseyguide Philip Coppell, pointing to No. 9 Madryn St. ''He moved -- around the corner." Then, ''John's house is the only one with a blue historic plaque on it because you have to be dead for 20 years. Think of that -- more than 20 years ago it was."
McCartney's nondescript family home at 20 Forthlin Road has been restored by the National Trust, furnished in vintage 1950s, and been named an ''Attraction of the Year" as well as ''Birthplace of the Beatles." Here, he and Lennon wrote some of the group's early hits and the boys rehearsed because, Coppell said, ''John's Aunt Mimi didn't much like the Beatles. Think of that!"
''Sergeant Pepper's Bistro" was a bus station on Penny Lane where McCartney wrote the lyrics for ''Penny Lane" while waiting for the always-late Lennon to show up. In 1960, the Quarrymen took their new name, ''For the rock 'n' roll 'beat,' you know," said Coppell. And 1962 is when Starr (born Richard Starkey) replaced Pete Best on drums.
The bus drives by Harrison's No. 12 Arnold Grove (''It didn't have indoor plumbing, and later on, George used the address as an alias," according to Coppell.), then goes past the barber shop where McCartney got his hair cut for a sixpence, the pub where Starr's mother was a barmaid, and St. Peter's Church graveyard where Eleanor Rigby is buried.
In the How-They-Met category, McCartney and Harrison ''both took the same bus to the Liverpool Institute," according to Coppell. McCartney met Lennon in St. Peter's Parish Hall when he was 15 and John was 17. Brian Epstein left his family's music store to become the group's second manager after they played a noon session in The Cavern Club, where they were a local favorite. Starr met them when his band and theirs were playing in Hamburg.
''Let it be" was McCartney's mother's automatic response when Paul and his younger brother Michael fought. ''Hey Jude" was written for 4-year-old Julian Lennon when John and his first wife, Cynthia, were breaking up. That pub wall is ''where they sat after offending Brian Epstein's proper mother." The Epsteins lived in a middle-class neighborhood; the boys, Coppell said, were ''working class and proud of it."
The tour ends at Mathew Street, where everyone goes downstairs into the cellar of a warehouse to a reproduction of the original Cavern Club. The warehouse that held the club was demolished in 1974 for an urban renewal project that never materialized. It was rebuilt in 1984 and is again a music venue.
''Fight your way to the bar and exchange your tour ticket for a free souvenir," Coppell says in farewell. The souvenir is a Beatles poster. A wannabe band is playing to a polite audience -- and doesn't everyone have to begin somewhere? The Beatles performed at The Cavern Club 292 times (last on Aug. 3, 1963), and it's said that in one all-night session there was so much body heat the instruments fused on stage.
The Casbah Coffee Club, 8 Haymans Green, in the West Derby section of Liverpool, also calls itself ''Birthplace of the Beatles." Here in 1959, Best's mother provided a place in the basement for skiffle bands to play.
There's no connection but honor to streets named John Lennon Drive, Ringo Starr Drive, Paul McCartney Way, and George Harrison Close.
Of course, there's more to Liverpool than the Beatles. The port city across the Irish Sea from Dublin was the gateway to North America and Australia during the years of large-scale European emigration. The Titanic sailed from Liverpool (the sailors who went down were mostly Liverpool men) and so did the Lusitania.
It made a profit from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and supported the Confederacy in the US Civil War (Manchester was pro-Yankee). In World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic pitted Liverpool's merchant marine against the German U-boats lurking just beyond convoy range. All this and more is documented and dramatized (lift the handsets to hear the original letters of those involved) in the Maritime Museum at Albert Dock.
Liverpool claims to have more Georgian houses than Bath, more museums and galleries than any British city outside London, and to be the second-most-filmed city in the United Kingdom. (Films made here include ''Hunt for Red October," ''The Forsyte Saga," ''Hilary & Jackie," and innumerable English soap operas.)
If you count from 1960 when the band became The Beatles, the Magical Mystery Tour lasted barely a decade. Epstein died alone in 1967, and things began to unravel in 1968. It all seemed to end when McCartney quit in 1970.
Harrison had the first post-breakup album, ''All Things Must Pass," and the first number one hit, ''My Sweet Lord." McCartney's ''Oratorio" premiered in the cathedral, and his ''Let It Be Liverpool" concert attracted more than 50,000 fans. Lennon and Ono were famous together. Starr appeared in more movies than any other bandsman. On the bus, fans are assured, ''Ringo and Paul -- especially Sir Paul -- visit all the time."
There's a morality tale here, too.
As Coppell says, ''You lads and lasses should always remember that 24 record companies turned the Beatles down" and that Lennon's aunt said, ''The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never earn a living with it."
Think of that!
Beth Lowry is a freelance writer in Wayland.
