So said John Lennon in a typically pithy Christmas hello to the Beatles' fans, in 1963 or 1964. I had been planning to write about the voiceover world and my classes at Kalmenson & Kalmenson, but then the John Lennon line occurred to me and I would really rather talk about the Beatles, who saved me from disco.
I turned 12 in 1977, the year Saturday Night Fever came out. I had mostly avoided music, probably in reaction to all the hippies around me when I was a kid who thought music was gonna save the world. But at the age of 11/12, my inherent love of music started to assert itself anyway--and suddenly, most of what was out there in the popular culture was disco, thanks to that damned Travolta movie. I turned my radio to the station the other kids listened to, and started tapping my feet to Donna Summer and Yvonne Elliman and the Bee Gees. But my mom--the hippie herself--decided, quietly, that this just would not do. So without saying why she was doing it, she started playing her own music much more than usual, in the hope that something would snag my attention.
She had original LP pressings of Revolver, Let It Be and Abbey Road. She also had jazz and classical and all sorts of classic rock bands, but it was those three albums that did the trick. I can still remember getting ready to leave for school one morning with Abbey Road just beginning. The first track is "Come Together," and although I'd heard the song before, this time the lyrics started to sink in. "He got hair down to his knees / Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease." I was at the door, the big sliding door at the back of the house, and I stopped cold. "What does that mean?" I asked my mother. She didn't know either, but it didn't matter. And just like that, something crucial was starting to happen inside my head.
It wasn't just a matter of learning to love the "right" kind of music. (In the past couple years I've been picking up, through iTunes, all sorts of "inconsequential" music just because I liked it--and when Entertainment Weekly recently sent me an 80s CD with music by the likes of Spandau Ballet, Wang Chung and Culture Club, I was secretly delighted. The music is fun, and listening to a song just because it's fun is perfectly okay.
But the Beatles, they turned my head right around. In particular, the way they broke rules, musically and lyrically, became terribly significant to me. What, after all, did those words in "Come Together" mean? I soon decided that it didn't actually matter--but the fact that John could write that way, the free-form beauty of what he created, mattered a whole lot. (It also helped that on that particular song the Beatles' rhythm section hits its apex: the way Ringo's drumming interacts with Paul's bass is still, hundreds if not thousands of listens later, utterly amazing.) At around the same time I discovered the equally free-form brilliance of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and just like that my aesthetic sensibility was formed.
Ever hear Cleese's "Word Association" piece? It appears on the Matching Tie and Handkerchief record, and begins "Tonight's the night I shall be talking about of flu the subject of word association football," and continues on in that vein for two delightful minutes. (If you go to the Amazon page linked above, you will find an enthusiastic review I wrote five years ago.) It didn't take long before I had found my way to James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, and then I wrote a free-form novel called Thereby Hangs a Tale, but that's a tale for another day.
John is gone, and so is George, and that still startles me when I think of it because their work is still so present in my life. I bought a CD player in the mid-eighties specifically so I could listen to Beatlemusic, then discovered that their records weren't yet out on CD. When the first four were finally released, I hit the stores that day and snapped them up. I now have recordings of pretty much everything the Beatles ever even thought about recording, and I know for sure that when the day comes that I'm lying on my deathbed, my instructions will be simple: hold my hand and put on Abbey Road, and let me pass away happy.
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