06
May
I’ve already alluded to growing up in the time of bell-bottoms and being a shaggy-head. My mother, a depressive, listened to Janice Ian, Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel, and Neil Diamond on endless loop. Each was good in their own way, particularly for adults, but I wanted my own thing.
So my brother and I listened to the Beatles. We made quite a study of them. When you have to go partners on a piece of vinyl with your brother, when you have to mow lawns and shovel driveways and rake leaves, you look forward to what you buy more than we seem to today. The Beatles had already gone bust-o by the time we latched onto them, but there was a huge catalog to explore.
We knew what album we were going to buy a month in advance and we would obsess over it, and talk about it. When we got it home we treated it like a Faberge egg. We cleaned the album with an album-cleaner thingy. We lovingly dropped the needle onto the record and if I’m honest I’ll declare that a feather hits the ground harder. Above all we treated what came out of the speakers like it was The Received Word of God. We listened to the sides over and over and over. We tried to sing the parts. We listened after lights-out on headphones. We couldn’t believe the richness of what we were hearing and we wanted more of it.
I was reminded of this recently because on a whim I’d bought a bunch of remastered Beatles mp3s. The vinyl was long gone. My brother has them and I’ll bet you can see through them by now. I hadn’t listened to the mp3s really, but had put them on my phone and during a long drive, hitched the phone up to the car’s audio.
Perhaps it has more to do with retracing neural pathways that have lain unused and dusty than it does with actual tonal quality, or perhaps it’s a Pavlovian thing, a sound and a resulting release of pleasure-stimulating chemicals in the brain.
But it sounded good. It sounded so good. Eleanor Rigby, Fixing a Hole, Lovely Rita, all of it. The changes in the middle of songs, the impossible harmonies, the actually quite excellent guitar work, and the constant turning on a dime. And the voices. I realize that they had come to dominate popular music and to some extent defined radio-perfect voicing, but so much has come after them that tries and fails to sound JUST LIKE THEM. They are, or were, in their own way perfect.
For a span of years there was almost endless creativity, and for years my brother and I sat by the weak light of our receiver & turntable absorbing it. I’m glad I spent so much of my boyhood listening to the Beatles, and that I imprinted so many of my aural receptors with their music note by note. Later would come other bands, other music, and I would love them too. But they would never be perfect.
