For the Love of The Beatles

That's what I'm talking about.

I can't think of anything better than a beautiful summer's evening and Beatles music.

If you missed the Abbey Road concert Wednesday at the Read House, the video gives you a taste of all the fun. (But, to be honest, it's just a taste.)

Abbey Road is one of the longest-performing Beatles tribute bands in the world. They have more than 30 years of experience playing the tunes of the Fab Four. On Wednesday night, they played for about 170 people outside of Mentor Public Library's Main Branch.

We host concerts at Mentor Public Library for a lot of reasons. Sometimes, it's to promote local talent. Sometimes, it's to introduce you to something new.

Now, granted, there aren't many people left on this planet who don't know The Beatles. But, believe it or not, there were some young children who came to the Abbey Road concert last night who didn't know their "Hard Day's Night" from their "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Now they do. They got to learn about The Beatles in the funnest way possible without a time machine. I suspect they'll be some kids raiding their parents CD collections this weekend... or their grandparents' records.

Another thing we love about concerts -- the costumes.

But the two biggest reasons we host concerts is because they're fun and we love music.

So we want to thank the band and everyone who saw them perform. (And the Mentor Arts Commission who sponsored the performance.) We hope you all had as much fun as us.

By the way, that may have been the last outdoors concert of the season over at the Read House, but we have a couple of other performances coming up.

Travelin' Man Band will be playing everything from The Rolling Stones to Sam Cooke to Janis Joplin at 2 p.m. Saturday at our Mentor-on-the-Lake Branch. (The show will be right after the Labor Day Parade.)

Then, on Sept. 9, a clarinet quartet will talk about the evolution of jazz and perform songs from the 1920s through 1950s in the Garfield Room at our Main Branch.

Both shows are free. We hope to see you there.

One last thing: if you love music, you should check out Freegal. As its name implies, it's a free and legal way to download mp3s from hundreds of artists including Pink, Beyonce and Kenny Chesney.

You can download up to three mp3s per week. And they're yours to keep -- load them on your iPod, burn them on CD, play them on loop ad infinitum -- forever.

And it's free with a Mentor Public Library card.