Hindu Love Gods, "Raspberry Beret"

I'm willing to bet that, while a lot of you imaginary people out there who potentially read this thing know the song, you don't know the artists. The song, of course, is a classic from the Purple One (AKA Prince), and during the holiday season I read a very good short book by Toure about how Prince's music came about and what it might mean. I won't spoil the book for you, seek it out for yourself if you're a fan (title: I Would Die 4 U).

The artists in this case are much more well known to you if you're a fan of alternative rock: Warren Zevon and the musicians from R.E.M. (Michael Mills, Peter Buck, and Bill Berry). The Hindu Love Gods were one of those one-shot collaborations that occasionally occur in music history, where an older artist (Zevon) beloved by the younger musicians (R.E.M.) stretches his musical muscles, in this case on a cover of a then-contemporary song. It came across my radar because of a Zevon best-of that had the song alongside The One Song That Anyone Knows Warren Zevon For. That's right, "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner."

This does give me a chance to revisit two musical acts I admire (if not downright love in the case of R.E.M.). Zevon was always that guy whose two seconds of "Werewolves of London" jazzed up an otherwise predictable stream of easy-listening hits from the Seventies on the commercials that used to air late at night for CD collections of...well, wouldn't you know, "easy-listening hits of the Seventies!" The concept of such collections has been rendered almost moot by iTunes and other song-sharing software, and the oft-repeated phrase in said commercials about "wanting one song by the artist, but not wanting to buy the whole album" always struck me as being a musical pussy of sorts (why not? Some of my favorite songs are album-only filler by some artists, stuff that wouldn't even be available on a second rate best-of unless it was imported from the former Yugoslavia or something).

Then again, some artists were only as good as one song; it's kinda painful to think what an entire album of Wang Chung might sound like, if you really just wanted that one song of theirs (well, and the other one, "Dance Hall Days"). One-hit wonders are usually that for a reason, and the implication was from the commercial that Zevon was in the same league as Dr. Demento, a novelty act of dubious merit.

But Zevon, of course for those who know, isn't one song, or even ten. The best-of I got (Genius) makes me consider him one of the unheralded geniuses of American pop songwriting, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Zevon wrote some incredible songs, and in this cover of a Prince song that ain't too shabby in its original form, he tips his hat to the Once and Future "Formerly Known As" One with a rocking version that might not live up to the original, but is fantastic in its own way. Covers are dicey: either you hew too closely and lose the chance to find the song underneath the original artist, or you fuck up what was great about the song in the first place and lose your way. Some covers that work, off the top of my head:

Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"
Talking Heads, "Take Me To the River"
R.E.M., "Toys In the Attic"
Nirvana "The Man Who Sold the World"
Modern Lovers, "Foggy Notion"
Devo, "Satisfaction"

And there are more, of course, songs that were so good the first time that you don't mind hearing them again if they're done right. The Hindu Love Gods did right by Prince on this one, in my humble opinion. You should seek it out now if you have the time.

The Animals, "House Of the Rising Sun"

My sis and I are constantly talking about wanting to go back to New Orleans, where I went to try out for "Jeopardy" in August 2012. I mean "constantly." When I did the online test for this year, I was disappointed to see that N'awlins wasn't on the list of possible tryout sites in case you get picked to go that far. Savannah was the nearest tryout city, and truth is I've never been there so it might be nice to see. But still...

The Animals sang about New Orleans in "House of the Rising Sun," an old blues number they re-did as a raucous apocalyptic anthem. The song came out in 1964, was in fact the band's first shot at climbing the charts like their peers the Beatles during the "British Invasion," and while I often hear people on VH1 charts shows (i.e., best of the Eighties, best of Rap, etc.) proclaim that a classic song of that genre and/or era could be a hit today if re-released, "House" really does meet that criteria for me. You've probably heard it without hearing it, it's a go-to if you want to show the Vietnam War as a morass of questionable tactics and even more questionable results. It's also just a brutal slog of a song, a fantastic fatalistic romp through the underbelly of (I guess) gambling or other such sundry criminal deeds.

The song is an old blues standard, re-arranged by the Animals but not written by them, lyrically. Bob Dylan covered it on his first album (which came out in 1962, if I recall correctly), and it's possible that the boys in the Animals heard Dylan's take and re-did it with howling electronic accompaniment (much like Jimi Hendrix did with a Dylan original, "All Along the Watchtower," later in the decade). I've never heard Dylan's take on the song. I don't know the history behind the song (there is a book about it, I've seen it in the Pendleton library but never thought about trying to check it out or see if I could find a copy for myself). Alan Price's organ-playing tells me quite a bit, as does Eric Burdon's singing. The cacophony that the song concludes in is a tremendous mood-setter, if the mood you're going for is doom.

The Animals, like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, started out the British Invasion as cover machines, recording takes on classic blues songs that were neglected States-side and formed a definitive musical bridge between the African-American musical forefathers of blues and rock and roll and their pasty white English progeny. In time, the Animals (as indeed did the Stones and the 'Birds) grow out of their desire to simply record old standards and make standards of their own, but "House" belongs to that exciting time when a lot of great blues records were being re-done by white acts (mostly British) as a sort of pay-it-forward to the black musicians who had inspired the English bands in the first place. True, Elvis Presley was the catalyst for a lot of the English cats, but so was Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, and countless others, either famous then or famous now but mostly overlooked in their own country, beloved overseas but unable literally to get a cup of coffee in their own country. It's a fact that the British Invasion rescued a lot of bluesmen from obscurity, either reviving their careers or at least giving them royalty checks every time Mick or Keith Relf or Robert Plant sang a song they'd written.

Eric Burdon, like Mick and the other English white guys who loved the blues, doesn't sound like a black man. He sounds like a white guy's *idea* of a black man, especially on this song, but the pain of the lyrics is there in his voice all the same. He might not come off as a desolate bluesman bemoaning his fate (something about going back to New Orleans to seek his ball and chain, ostensibly slang for a wife and kids), but he sure does try his hardest to almost sing through the stereo and into your ear. It's a great performance, one that would have earned the Animals instant access to enshrinement in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if they'd never recorded another song. But they did, a lot of them, and Burdon even led the mostly black, mostly American band War for a spell ("Spill the Wine" ring any bells for you). Like a lot of the English bluesmen, Burdon owes a debt to the African-Americans who inspired him, whose records came to his hometown of Newcastle (like Liverpool, a port city) courtesy of the record collections begun by sailors on commercial vessels which crossed the oceans between the UK and the USA. Those guys are the unsung heroes of the rock world, the men who brought the blues to England and helped inspire a generation of wannabe bluesmen.

I love New Orleans, even though I was only there a couple of days and (if we're being honest) saw maybe ten percent of the city. I love the Animals, whose "Greatest Hits" CD was the first I ever bought (though I had to wait months before I could listen to it, on account of not having a CD player. And I love this song, this weird bluesy number that on some level makes no sense, but doesn't have to. The soundscape the song creates is light-years ahead of 1964, and if you don't believe me seek out the song for yourself. I guarantee it will blow your mind if you've never heard it before.

White Man's Bookshelf

I tend to think of myself as a fairly progressive guy, someone who (within the part of the country in which I live) is liberal in my outlook on life and inclusive rather than exclusive. But looking at my bookshelf might not show that.

Much of my time lately has been spent thinking about grad school, and what I'd want to teach if I were able to teach in a college setting or elsewhere. My personal preference is something along the lines of "post-war American literature," "post-war" being "post-Second World War" because a lot of the books I love are post-1945 in origin. Also, I think it would be interesting to consider not just fiction in the wake of Hiroshima but also non-fiction, or "creative non-fiction," which allows for essays and other forms of journalistic endeavors. A lot of my favorite authors would fit under that banner of post-war writers, not just American, but I want to have a semblance of some boundaries as to what this prospective class would cover. And I'm of the opinion that, starting with J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher In the Rye" in 1951, American literature started to confront post-war complacency and challenge a lot of the assumptions that were prevalent and would be cast asunder by the Sixties, Watergate, and Women's Lib. And so on and so on...

This is a purely intellectual exercise, of course, because for the time being I have no class (har-har), and my idea is probably one that's been implemented on the college level already, albeit under a less unwieldy title. I took classes in the 20th-century novel, which introduced me to Don DeLillo, and world literature, where "Gilgamesh" reared its ugly head yet again but I got turned on to Haruki Murakami (both of whom I've finally gotten around to reading other books besides the two that I read in class back in the day). Surely someone has already hit upon the idea of teaching a class where Kerouac and Vonnegut share the limelight with Franzen, Chabon, and David Foster Wallace. But still, let's say no one has yet. I call dibs on it.

Anyway, my bookshelf might not reflect my inclusive hopes on what constitutes post-war American literature. I sure have a lot of old or dead white guys on my bookshelves. Much like how I fretted a few years ago that my record collection was whites-only, I could see where this is white-liberal-guilt navel-gazing. But guilty I do feel, because there are interesting works out there for sure that could be covered in my imaginative course.

A quick survey of my bookshelf: outside my idea of post-war American lit, I have thirteen books by Graham Greene (very English and very white, also very Catholic and very dead), two by John Lennon, two by Francois Truffaut, two by Jon Stewart (though I could make an argument for "America: The Book" for my imaginative course), and a bunch of sports biographies or memoirs. Of the books I'd want to cover, I have books by Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe (the cultural commentator, not the North Carolina novelist), Walker Percy, George Plimpton, Jonathan Lethem, and David Halberstam: all white guys.

Charles Portis is one of my favorite authors, as is Thomas Pynchon. I have "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley, a masterpiece, and "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole. Greil Marcus has two spots in my book collection, and A.J. Jacobs' non-fiction is well-represented. A;; men from varying backgrounds and differing lives. But white guys nonetheless.

I do have four Jane Austen books, as well as a Flannery O'Conner work, and four or five Sarah Vowell books. But they're white women. When I went to New Orleans, I found a great book to take back with me, Tom Sancton's "Song For My Fathers," in which he discussed learning how to play jazz from African-American and Creole musicians. Sancton is white, by the way.

It's not that I've never read black or minority authors, or that my collection is white-washed to the extreme. I have two Gabriel Garcia Marquez books, Frederick Douglass' memoir, and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," bought when I was a curious thirteen-year-old and the movie "X" was in theaters (my mom was a little bewildered, but she bought it for me at Wal-Mart anyway). I read Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" in that 20th-century novel course and damn near cried when I finished. It starts with a black girl who has blue eyes and goes downhill from there. I've always meant to go back and read more black authors. But a lot of dead or old white guys got in the way.

I know this is a bit ridiculous, berating myself for my bookshelves when it's not a crime to have a lack of diversity on them. But I feel like, if I'm going to do justice with my post-war American lit course (which exists solely in my head, I must point out yet again), I should do a little more extensive reading. I feel like I don't know the Beats well enough to teach them (apart from steering kids clear of "On the Road," one of the most over-rated pieces of crap I've ever read), I really want to read "Naked Lunch" sometime this summer. And Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man" mocks me; the movie is so good I want to go back to the book and read it, but I've never gotten around to it. I have read a lot of the acknowledged classics of the postwar period, and I think Charles Portis should be required reading no matter what class I figuratively end up teaching. But I just worry that I might not have the right amount of background for such a class if I don't introduce more women and minorities to my bookshelf.

Leave it to me to think my bookshelf (or record collection) isn't diverse enough...

Buzzcocks, "Ever Fallen In Love?"

Valentine's day is around the corner, or (as it's known to us singletons) Friday. It is a day all about love, which is something that I feel I know a lot about, at least the parts that hurt. Like the rejection, the missed communications, the idiotic lusting after one person when really you should be lusting after this person over here, etc. In the game of love, I am the Cleveland Browns (or really any team from Cleveland since at least 1948, when the Indians last won the World Series. I've been watching ESPN networks to avoid the snow-gasm that is occupying local media all day, so I'm afraid a lot of my metaphors will be sports-related).

But I wear this as a badge of honor, because for every heart broken or every girl left behind in memory, I've always come away with that vital quantity that can't be gained any other way: experience. Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, indeed. Though of course in times when you're broken-hearted or you've broken someone else's heart, it sure as hell doesn't seem that way.

I guess it would be fair to say that Valentine's Day is not my favorite holiday (actually, I despise Halloween just a little more, but that's because I don't like being scared). It's at the very least one that I've always felt ambiguous about, wanting to buy into the cultural myth that it is a "day of love" while noticing that usually I've only got myself to celebrate it with (no masturbation allusions meant, though I'm sure they could be implied). Truth is, love is a game at which I have never been particularly good at. I'm riding the bench this year, no great love to speak of firing all my cylinders as the epic love-fest approaches. There is someone I like, but I won't lie: I got hurt last year bad, mostly my own damn fault, and I've been reluctant since to really put myself out there, to go for something that could be great because I'm afraid of making the same damn mistakes all over again (or some brand-new ones I don't even have a name for).

Perhaps it's the fact that it's a snow day and I don't have much else to occupy my mind (thus the trek for free access to Wi-Fi internet at my mom's place, just a short but suddenly treacherous walk up the street from my grandparents' abode), but I figured it wouldn't hurt to share with my fellow singletons the idea that this Valentine's Day, with no interest in giving off the wrong impression (because that can happen), just take a minute to wish each other a happy Valentine's Day, alleviate some of the stigma that comes from the "relationship status: single" culture we live in. Yeah, this year we might not have a special someone (or someones, if you're a player), but that doesn't mean we have to be mopey about it. Okay, maybe a little mopey, but try not to let that define our day. For me, Friday is also great because at my place of work, it's pay-day (though I'm guessing this week's check won't be so great, what with time missed due to the storm of the century). Being single isn't an illness, it's just a fact that comes when you're just too damn much for some people (keep telling yourself that, or whatever helps you sleep at night). Someday you may get lucky and meet the love of your life, but for now, just try to be good at being you. Don't worry about the fact that you're alone on Valentine's Day; you get to save the money you would've spent on your perhaps-significant other.

Anyway, let me go ahead and wish my fellow single people out there a happy Valentine's Day, or Friday if you prefer. Love makes the world go around, but sometimes it makes your head spin. Still, it beats the opposite of love every time.

The Beatles, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

In a perfect world, this song would be as hilarious now as it was in 1968 (or maybe not "hilarious" so much as "amusing in a boy-John-Lennon-is-running-with-this-metaphor-isn't-he? way"), when it came out on the schizophrenic "White Album," the precursor to the four ex-Beatles' solo careers. In a perfect world, it would simply be remembered as the former slogan for a gun-rights group (I think it was the NRA, but John could simply have stumbled across it during his gorging on newspapers that led to several other song ideas), not as an ironic (cruelly ironic) foreshadowing of Lennon's own murder in December 1980. In a perfect world, that death wouldn't have occurred, because the dipshit who committed it (whose name shall not be aired here, because it would be what he wanted, secondhand fame) would never have thought to try. That stupid asshole would've just ended up shooting one of the guys in Gerry and the Pacemakers in this perfect world (no worries, G&TP fans; he would've been a terrible shot).

Of course we don't live in a perfect world. We live in an imperfect one, where John Lennon is dead, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" a bad joke on the part of the joker, and the song a no-no to be played during any rememberance of Lennon's passing (it's the equivalent of playing the Sex Pistols's "Belsen Was a Gas" on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz). Which is a shame, because the song devoid of such tragic context is a scream, a funny trip through Lennon's paranoid-scatterbrained late-Beatles songwriting, when he and Yoko Ono were having a laugh at the world (and his bandmates) reacting so strongly to their courtship (it just wasnt' proper!). The song itself is a collection of different verses from some other songs, put together and set to a great backdrop of good old fashioned rock grooves. John Lennon went off the farm a little bit during those years, drugs and transcendental meditation doing turns on him throughout 1966 and 1967 (heroin was around the corner, if not already on the scene, when the White Album came out in the fall of 1968). The songs from that era that were primarily his are both groundbreaking ("Strawberry Fields, Forver") and batshit crazy ("The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"). And if anyone can figure out "Revolution #9," please let me know. It sounds like an acid trip though Hades.

So yes, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is batshit crazy, but in a good way; heard outside the context of Lennon's murder, it's possible to find the humor in Lennon's wordplay and suggestiveness. But of course the context is everything; ever since 1980, it's been impossible, once you've come across the song, to hear it outside of the tragic consequences. Unless you're Michael Moore, and then you use it as the soundtrack to a montage of gun violence (including the infamous clip of Bud Dwyer shooting himself on live television) in your movie "Bowling For Columbine." I'm willing to bet that was the introduction to the song for a lot of people who hadn't heard it before, couldn't concieve that such a downright eerie thing as a John Lennon song about shooting guns could exist.

The White Album was either the first or second proper Beatles "album" I ever got, as a Christmas gift along with the first of many late, lamented CD players. My mom got it for me the first Christmas that I ever wanted a Beatles album for Christmas. Her favorite Beatles song, she told me, was "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Like I said, the White Album was basically a run-thru for each Beatles' solo careers. John and Paul get the lions' share of songs, of course, but George Harrison had some good ones, and Ringo got a couple of vocal showcases (courtesy of the boys, of course). The album is a mess, a glorious two-disc mess on CD (it was one of the first double albums, a trend towards bloated grandiosity and the clear lack of a producer with backbone enough to edit the album for cohesiveness, but this is one of the few that actually benefits from such variety). When I first heard "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (hell, when I saw the song title in the listings), I probably couldn't believe it; after all, this was sung by the man who'd be gunned down a little over a decade after the album came out. Of course, I did better than Charles Manson, who thought the proto-stomper "Helter Skelter" was a call to arms in a coming race war (that old Charlie would become a leader of, with all the glory and pussy that affords, of course). Yes, Charles Manson used the Beatles to justify his crime spree.

Taking the Beatles out of context isn't unheard of, naturally; take John's infamous "Bigger than Jesus" quote, from an old interview but given new life in 1966 when religious fanatics took the quote out of context (that he was saying that a lot of young people worshipped the Beatles more than conventional religion, an idea that isn't as bizarre in our celebrity-obsessed world as it would've been in 1966). Beatles records were burnt, concerts were boycotted, and death threats were recorded (no doubt when Lennon imagined himself in the guise of a gun-nut who gets release from shooting his warm gun, he had plenty of invective from those past threats stored away for reference). Not for the first time, a celebrity retreated from the spotlight, though in John's case it was him and the band retiring from live performances because of the uproar and also because frankly Beatles concerts were outlets for teenage girls to scream their heads off (much as a Justin Bieber show fulfils the same function today). When they did re-emerge, with 1967's questionable-concept-album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," it was a stab at something deeper than what they'd be able to do live, an album basically made for the listener at home.

Studio experimentation was both good and bad for the band, as it led them to new creative heights but also down a rabbit hole that would eventually allow the tensions that took a back seat to their schedule on the road to come to the forefront, where it would drive them apart. No, it wasn't Yoko anymore than it was Linda Eastman (later McCartney, in 1969) that drove the band apart, though that probably didn't help. The recording studio gave us wonderful songs that wouldn't be reproducable live (at least not at a typical Beatles concert in that time, hence when they did return to the stage it was on the roof of Apple Records, for the "Get Back/Let It Be" sessions). But it also gave them time to reflect on how they were growing as artists (and growing apart). Think about people that you were forced to be around for a long enough time, no matter how close you were to them eventually you'd probably have your complaints about them as well. John and Paul were the alpha dogs of the band, doomed to butt heads over John's artiness versus Paul's popualism, and poor George was marginalized to the point that he lacked confidence in his songwriting ability. Ringo was a happy soldier during much of the tumult (he was the late man to the party, but it wouldn't have worked without him), but even he started getting upset, being the first to threaten to leave the group during the sessions for the White Album.

"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" isn't a great song, but it's a favorite, much the same way that while I agree with those who find "Hello Goodbye" obnoxious and daft, I like it nonetheless because of how stupid it is (see my entry on R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People"). I was watching the documentary on J.D. Salinger and how "The Catcher In the Rye" inspired three desperate losers to shoot famous people (along with Lennon's killer, there was John Hinckley Jr. and Robert Bardo). That must've been a hell of a thing, to know that three people used something that you wrote as "justification" for murders or attempted murders, and it's no wonder Salinger kept his head down for the most part during the last few decades of his life (though in a quick aside, I think he played the "recluse" angle too well, because people kept talking about him despite his lack of publishing since 1965). If John could've known that he'd have been gunned down in a short time, one wonders if he'd have written the song in the first place (maybe "Happiness Is a Warm Bun," a ode to bakery? Or "Happiness Is a Warm Crossbow," to keep with the weapons theme?). I'd like to think he'd go for it anyway, to confront the fear that was no doubt triggered (pun intended) by the death threats he recieved for a comment that today would be a badge of honor (Kanye West probably tweets that he's bigger than Jesus on an hourly basis). I'd like to think that somehow he knew how inappropriate the song would seem in the wake of his death, and yet he'd go for it anyway. He'd confront the abyss, the relegation to "peace and love John Lennon" that negates the deeper, more substantial man behind the myth that would follow his death, where "Imagine" is over-used to the point of banality (and where Cee Lo Green would both feel the need to change the lyrics and be bombarded for it, because he's uncomfortable with the notion of no higher power). True artists confront uncomfortable truths, and the truth is that John Lennon was gunned down one night by a loser with shit for brains and a fixation on Holden Caulfield. The truth is also that "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was a song that foretold that end, perhaps, or at the least it was the desperate laugh of a man facing mortality from nutjobs like the one who would eventually kill him, and he was raising something of a middle finger to those nutjobs, especially the one that would take him up on the song's title.

Whatever the facts are, the song deserves better than as some pop-culture fortune-teller of doom for the man who wrote it.

What the Beatles Mean to Me

This February marks the fifty-year anniversary of the Beatles arriving on our shores, storming the beaches of American pop culture and leaving in their wake a whole new landscape. What they mean to America is self-evident in the flurry of documentaries and other specials to mark the occasion when, on February 9, 1964, the Fab Four appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." What they mean to people who came of age during their peak, and who continue to look upon them as the peak of their adolescene or childhood, is very different to what they mean to me. I missed the wave by about fifteen years, and was just over a year old when all the talk of the Beatles re-uniting was forever put asunder by John Lennon's death in 1980.

When I began to be aware of the Beatles, it was at the start of my high-school years, almost twenty years ago (way to make me feel old, passage of time. Thanks a lot). Grunge was in, and Kurt Cobain was still among us on this mortal plain, but the music of that era didn't really *speak* to me (or if it did, it spoke in a language that I wasn't yet privy to, the obsession with childhoods ruined that didn't really apply to me because, in all honesty, I had a good childhood all things considered. Not a lot of fuel for the coming-of-age novel that I would like to write, but you can make that shit up anyway). My family could tell you that, when I got into the Beatles, I got into them big-time. I remember freezing my ass off sitting outside on the porch at my house (the same porch where I still like to retreat with a good book when it's not the middle of an Arctic blast outside) with a borrowed Walkman and a Beatles tape either bought or borrowed which I could then turn up to ear-blistering volume and hold a private commune with, no one around except my concerned family members warm inside, wondering what had gotten into me, this previously sports-obsessed kid with no father around, who always had his nose in a book (even if I didn't finish the bulk of the ones about WWII or baseball that I checked out of the local library, keeping their war and sports sections fully stocked well into the late Nineties). To them, I'm sure it looked like I'd lost my mind.

And in a way, I had; a chance glancing through the "Guinness Book of World Records" had revealed that I shared a birthday with John Lennon (October 9), and perhaps it was being fatherless (my biological father being a Vietnam vet who was never really in the picture, and whose absence didn't occur to me as "unnatural" except when I started to have step-brothers and step-sisters courtesy of my step-dad) that drew me into looking up to Lennon as an idol (indeed, after reading most of the good books about the Beatles and even some of the shitty ones, I still think of Lennon as the spirit-father I never had, even when he could be a dick to people and even abusive on a violent scale to the women in his life). Oddly, the first Beatle biography I ever read was one about Paul McCartney, whose left-handed bass playing style I modeled chiefly because, in the mirror, it looked like I was playing right-handed (to this day, I air-guitar that way, even though if I had a real guitar I'm sure I'd do it right-handed. It would sound terrible either way, as I am not a natural musician). I say ironically because, as I read more about the Beatles (including their acrimonious split in 1969/1970), I began to think of Paul as the asshole of the group or "the one who should've gotten shot" (a sentiment I'm sure Ringo and George might have shared with me at various points in post-Beatle life, especially when he took charge of the "Anthology" project and had an uncomfortable-looking reunion with his bandmates in a field somewhere in England to sit around and remember "when they were fab" or something like that.

In fact, I picked a good time to become a Beatles fan, as in 1993/1994 not everyone was buying into the myth yet. I even met a girl once whom I fell in love with because we both loved the Beatles (and John was our favorite, of course) and she had books about the Beatles that I'd never seen before. Brooke was my crush during my junior and senior years of high school, as the "Anthology" made it seem suddenly cooler to like the Beatles than it had been only a few years before (i.e., back when I was freezing my ass off listening to tapes of the Beatles, some of which mixed all the various stages of the band together to make for a confused attempt to make sense of their history). That history, represented by Philip Norman's "Shout" and Ray Coleman's "Lennon" and so on, became part of my history, as I became Walhalla's resident Beatles scholar and earned much derision from my peers in college my first time around because of my Beatles posters and "old-timey" music collection (by that time, I'd added the Who and the Kinks to my CD collection, along with Oasis and other English bands that seemed to be like the Beatles, but never the Rolling Stones. I actually believed in the "Beatles vs. Stones" mythology put forward by the press officers of both groups when, in 1964 or 1965, it seemed like a good idea to jin up interest in both groups by saying that they were the opposite of their most popular rival). The Animals came from another port city like Liverpool, Newcastle (port cities having a monopoly on American blues artists whose records were brought over by sailors and disseminated by music-hungry white teenagers, much as how rap became prominent because white American teens were tired of rock and sought out rap music, like my uncle did in the Eighties). The Yardbirds were blues purists when Eric Clapton played with them, becoming pop stars when Jeff Beck opened them up to the possibility of writing their own material. The Kinks were snarky before the word existed, both celebrating the quaint Englishness of their home and mocking it gently. And the Stones, when I finally let them in? Fucking fantastic, of course. The British Invasion was the best thing to ever happen to me.

I care about music because of the Beatles, maybe a little too much (as any girl who's ever recieved a mix CD in place of an honest attempt to tell them how I feel can attest). In "Rock and Roll" Lou Reed sings of a girl whose life was saved by rock and roll. That's how I feel about the Beatles, and fifty years after they came to these shores (and a little over twenty since I was freezing my ass off listening to various tapes of them, and the Who, and Pink Floyd, and the Byrds, and the Yardbirds, and on and on), I still think they changed everything for the better. Musicians could actually write their own material (so we have the Beatles to blame for Taylor Swift and her revolving door of ex-boyfriends), and make albums that were artistic statements and not just shit put together to fulfil a contract with the record company. They started their own record company, proving that just because you can make money for the big guys doesn't mean you know how to do it (I think Apple Corps survived mostly in spite of the Beatles). John's death in 1980, and George's in 2001, means that we will never see them ever reunite again (though a 1998 message board quip about "three more bullets" would actually get the job done, I still don't find it funny). But what they did for me, opening me up to caring about art far more than maybe is healthy, but still...well, for that I owe them a lot. Certainly a rememberance of them on the occasion of their fifty-year residence at the top of the charts in the hearts of fans and non-fans alike (I'd like to think that the cretins who mocked me for my Fab Four love in 1998 have since gotten married to the sounds of a Lennon/McCartney original, or divorced, or gay-married, because I suspect the lot of them were closet cases and that makes me feel better somehow). None of the other bands I like now, from the Velvet Underground to Vampire Weekend, would mean a damn thing to me if not for the Beatles. They made me less prone to want to get a haircut (when I did, it would be something resembling Ian Curtis, whose picture in his wife's memoir was my go-to on how I wanted to look for years). They made me more open to British things like Monty Python, punk rock (even though the punks despised the Beatles, I think deep down they knew how important the group was at least as something to rebel against), Manchester music (Joy Division and New Order chiefly), and on to the works of Graham Greene and Jack Higgins.

The Beatles still rock my world, as much as the time that I finally heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as more than just background music. That was my turn-on song, as it happens, and yeah I know they recorded their fair share of crap. Everyone's favorite band has a b-side or even an album that you'd rather not get brought up when you're trying to make the case for them as important (I think "Sgt. Pepper" is overrated and the "concept" album is bullshit, if that helps). "Run For Your Life" comes to mind, or the cover of "Mr. Moonlight." But it's too easy to pick apart the misses, too easy to ignore the hits that still hit on an emotinal level. Any group that can put out "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" on the same single has to have done something right. The Beatles matter to me, their story is essential to understanding popular culture in the postwar period, and they just fucking rock. I feel sorry for you if you don't get it, but I'm also a little envious. If you've never really listened to the Beatles, you're in for a journey of discovery. Trust me on that one. We've only got Paul and Ringo now (and as evidenced by the Grammys collaberation on some bullshit "new song" of Paul's, there's not much left there to get excited about), but the music itself is better than anything else about them (even if you share a birthday with one of the dead ones and wish he'd been your dad). The Beatles still matter. How the fuck could they not?