Beatles, Jackson rule charts

Fab Four charges onto Billboard’s top 200

By STEVE CHAGOLLAN

If it weren’t for Michael Jackson and all of his postmortem success — including the bestselling catalog album of the year in “Number Ones” (released in 2003) and a $186.2 million global take for the concert film “This Is It” in less than two weeks — 2009 could just as easily have gone down as the year of the Beatles.

In other words, legacy pop rules.

The Fab Four’s remastered albums continue to enjoy healthy sales, claiming 10 of the top 200 slots in Billboard’s Comprehensive Albums charts two months after their rollout and racking up almost 1.5 million sales to date, not counting the stereo and mono boxed sets; and preorders for the limited edition “Beatles in Mono” pretty much blew through the initial allotment of 30,000 provided by EMI by the time they became available Sept. 9. All told, 2.3 million remastered CDs have been sold, if the individual boxed titles are counted.

Not only have boomers and their offspring kept the Beatles flame alive via old-fashioned album sales (no cherrypicking of singles for these Liverpudlians), but filmmakers also have shown continued fascination of late. “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” which chronicled Beatlemania back in the USSR, recently bowed nationally on PBS; “The Beatles on Record” — which originally aired on the BBC in September and features narration by John, Paul George and Ringo, as well as candid conversational outtakes from the original recording sessions — is making its way to the History channel Nov. 25. And the feature “Nowhere Boy,” about a young pre-Beatles John Lennon and his relationship with his aunt Mimi and estranged mother Julia has been making the festival rounds and is due out next year from the Weinstein Co.

Paul McCartney, refusing to live in the past, has contributed the song “(I Want to) Come Home,” for the upcoming Miramax release “Everybody’s Fine” — this after wowing an alt rock crowd at Coachella in April before crisscrossing the U.S. with his band over the summer. His three-night stand at New York’s Citi Field, which drew 120,000 fans, is the subject of the DVD, “Good Evening New York City,” to be released Nov. 17 by Hear Music/Concord Music Group. And starting in December, he’ll embark on his first European tour since 2004. As Sir Paul indicates on his website, “I’m looking forward to ending the year on a high.” In other words, the dream isn’t over.