I always give you my money: How many times will I buy the same Beatles records, over and over again?
The other day I threw out my first Beatles album — which is akin to throwing out one of the only photos of a dead relative, a perfectly good organic burrito or a $20 bill. Beatles albums have been discarded before, but mostly by crazies and Klansmen back in early March ’66, when dubiously contextualized quotes from John claimed that “Christianity will vanish and shrink…” and that “We’re (The Beatles) more popular than Jesus now.” That was 49 years ago, three years before I was born.
On Friday, I turned 46. And instead of taking some kind of inventory (I’m saving that for 50), I began to think about my relationship with the Beatles, who were still together when I was born (take that, Y and Z Generations!). And my relationship to them, unlike that with just about everyone else in my life after nearly half a century (friends, family, women, pets, the government, R.E.M.) is more or less the same: pure love. I am the human equivalent of Ringo’s peace fingers, and have been since I first began playing with the LPs that my mother and father gave me to play with because I was an early-depressed child. Some of those wonderful objects had posters, and lyrics, and these four beautiful men with sparkling eyes on their covers. Others had dyed vinyl, red and blue.
They were much better than TV. John Lennon was still alive. So was George. It was Camelot in suburbia, with perfect pop music coming out of faux wood-grain speakers and later, an 8-track player made of white plastic and shaped like a diver’s helmet. But that’s when things began to turn. I could no longer stay on the floor in the den with the turntable; I had to gather around the weird-ass 8 track. It’s like that scene in “2001” when the vegan apes live peacefully with the tapirs until the monolith appears and that one ape realizes he can use tools — cut to lots of dead tapirs. And war.
By: Marc Spitz
Source: Salon
