MY BEATLES MARATHON

First off, it didn’t start as a planned Beatles marathon.

I hadn’t even thought of it when my wife came home and said, “This is the same music I heard when I left this morning.”

Me: Hey Siri, play The Beatles for two days.

No, I didn’t say that. Nobody says that, but here we are, Day 2.

I’m keeping the volume low until my wife cuts the cord, because I’m not.

As with many baby boomer marriages, you know the ones, the ones with two people a similar age, we share many of the same experiences over the same timeline.

As a husband, and this is important for all husbands to practice, I share the experiences, the common experiences of growing up in the seventies, as if it was the first of it’s kind, the most important moment in history, and it only happened to me and my friends.

Am I wrong to think growing up in a small town with fewer media distractions is different than growing up in LA with every media distraction?

As high school graduates from the first half of the 70’s we met The Beatles as seven and eight year olds on that Sunday night with Ed Sullivan.

 

 

She met them in LA, I met them in North Bend. Same TV show, same time, different place.

I just checked with her:

Me: Honey, do you remember the first time you saw The Beatles.

Honey: Yes.

Me: And the name of the show.

Honey: Ed Sullivan. I remember it. I was seven.

 

Why Beatles Marathon

Like everyone my age who hasn’t lived in a secluded monastery the past fifty-odd years, I’ve heard so much music in the background that it seems normal.

Every store I go to, lobbies, not so much elevators, there’s a tune playing.

Of course there’s a tune playing, sometimes a song that makes you wonder how it ever made the playlist.

Keeping The Beatles on low for hours puts them in the background, and like every background something stands out on occasion, which in this case forces me to wonder why it didn’t stand out the last 10,000 times I’ve heard it.

Why? I blame The Beatles:Get Back.

After watching their documentary we were all friends helping each other get through another day in the studio.

Listening, not listening, to the low buzz of them playing in the background feels like being in the room while they worked out the lyrics we all know.

Siri from wiki:

(Siri is a spin-out from the Stanford Research Institute‘s Artificial Intelligence Center and is an offshoot of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency‘s (DARPA)-funded CALO project.^[4] SRI International used the NABC Framework to define the value proposition for Siri.^[5] It was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, and Adam Cheyer.^[4] Kittlaus named Siri after a co-worker in Norway; the name is a short form of the name Sigrid, from Old Norse Sigríðr, composed of the elements sigr “victory” and fríðr “beautiful”.^[6])

Siri plays more than the released music, including the development tracks which sound familiar, but not quite.

Sung at different speeds, different voicing; songs with bare instruments instead of the whole studio orchestra effect makes them all sound new.

 

New Music Matters

Old memories for the old people I grew up with, my parents and grandparents, reach back before the Great Depression, back to the 1910’s.

Did grandma and grandpa have access to the music their parents grew up with? Only if they went to a concert.

My mom and dad had a blonde stereo cabinet full of Andy Williams, Ferrante and Teicher, Mitch Miller.

It sat near the black and white TV the night The Beatles showed up.

My mom combed her wig, my dad tied some fly ties, and the lads burst into the room with All My Lovin’.

 

 

I watched the girls scream, watched the guys wonder why, and then at the end the most improbable thing:

Ed called the guys over to shake hands officially and announce their appearance on next week’s show coming from Florida.

This band, guys in their early twenties, all smart alecks from the same place, knew their manners.

The band blamed for youth rebellion, protest, who made the music called the genesis of all pop music since, showed well.

I’m watching what to do, learning manners, from The Beatles. So was everyone else.

 

Later, the first pair of Beatle boots showed up on older kids.

A few decided to test the waters with a Beatle wig.

To soon The Beatles seemed like old news about old people getting married and having kids.

No longer cool to the cool kids, but now that so much music has passed and The Beatles remain the standard, the cool kids came around, and got older.

 

PS:

If I listen hard, the marathon is still going with While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

 

PSS:

The beat goes on.