Double Fantasy: Fab Four band member from Moses Lake is living his Lennon dream

Growing up in Moses Lake, Jonathan Fickes once drew Beatles logos on his notebooks at school and practiced signing his name in the same handwriting style as John Lennon. He is now portraying Lennon as a cast member with the Fab Four Beatles tribute band.

Imagine that.

A self-taught guitarist, Fickes was inspired musically by his grandfather.

“He taught me how to play harmo nica. I still actually use one of his harmonicas today on the road with the Fab Four,” said Fickes, who has been a member of the Emmy Award-winning group for about five years. “The Fab Four is like the cream of the crop. It was sort of like a goal of mine to eventually, someday play with them.”

It was a road trip he prepped for early on.

Fickes was just 10 years old when he discovered the Beatles Anthology, a documentary series that includes archival footage and interviews with the Beatles band members. He instantly became intrigued by Lennon.

“He was the funny one. He just drew me in,” Fickes said. “John had such depth. You can really feel the emotion in John’s lyrics. It doesn’t seem contrived in any way. It seems very, very honest and authentic.

“He was a pretty raw dude and it really came through in his songwriting.”

Fickes unburied his father’s old guitar and never looked back.

“I just became obsessed. Everything from then on out was music and guitar and the Beatles,” he said.

After earning his music degree from Central Washington University, he hit the long and winding road for New York.

“I was a huge Bob Dylan fan,” he said. “I had these dreams of moving to Greenwich Village and like playing folk music, and smoky nightclubs, and wearing black turtlenecks, and reading deep poetry and stuff.”

Fate led him in a different direction.

After working a bunch of Beatles tribute band gigs, Fickes had met enough Johns, Pauls, Georges and Ringos to fill a yellow submarine. While performing on a cruise ship, he was introduced to the Fab Four members with a little help from his friend, Rolo Sandoval, who was the original drummer for that group.

His “Lucy in the Sky” moment had arrived.

Fickes recalled the jitters of his Fab Four debut at a Connecticut casino.

“Honestly, I was a little nervous,” he said. “I quickly realized, ‘Look, these guys are Beatles nerds just like I am. We all love the music.’ And when we all got on stage and played together it just clicked and a lot of my nerves kind of went out the window.”

His George Harrison bandmate, Robbie Berg, is an Eastern Washington friend.

“We’ve known each other since even before the Fab Four. We played (together) in a different Beatles tribute band,” said Fickes, who recalled having first met Berg at the Red Lion Hotel in Spokane while touring with the group, British Export. “I think Robbie just showed up to watch as a fan. I remember he was just a young guy. He was like showing me this guitar.

“You can always spot a Beatles fan from a million miles away.”

These days, the band members both reside in the Seattle area.

“I love playing with Robbie,” Fickes said. “He’s fantastic. We show up at SeaTac and fly out together.”

In the end, it’s all for love of the Beatles.

“The Beatles are why I play music,” said Fickes, who admitted depicting the slight nuances of a performer as legendary as Lennon is a tall order. “It’s a genuine thing. It’s not like a mask that he would put on. He was just completely being himself.

“I can stand the way that he did, and hold my guitar the way that he did, and comb my hair the same direction he did, but there are some things that are just very, very subtle.”

When he’s not donning that iconic Sgt. Pepper’s costume, Fickes enjoys teaching guitar lessons and he is always happy to get back to where he once belonged in Eastern Washington. His high school music teacher paid him a surprise visit at his last two Bing shows.

“We bonded about the Beatles when I was a kid,” Fickes said. “It was so great, because I hadn’t seen him for so long.”

After George Harrison died in 2001, Fickes sneaked into his high school office and made nearly 50 photocopies of a Harrison picture.

“I taped them up all around the high school, all over the hallways and everything like a dedication to him,” he said.

When asked about the incident by his music teacher he fessed up and the teacher responded as any true Beatles fan would: “He was like, ‘Good job dude!’ ”