1963 – I was in seventh grade, in gym class. Freeport Junior High in Freeport, Texas. Girls on one side in those ugly one piece gym suits, boys on the other. No mixed gym classes in those days.
For some reason, someone had brought in a record player, one of those units that had the speakers come off the player and set along side.
They put on a record. I listened to it and it was different. I asked someone who that was. They said it is that new group, the Beatles.
I wasn’t sure. I thought I had heard a preacher or someone talk against them at some point (preachers hated anything new in those days) so I wasn’t sure if I liked them or not.
I don’t know why anyone had a record player in the gym class or why they would play someone as avant garde as the Beatles.
But I will never forget hearing them for the first time.
I have listened to them now for almost five decades. I watched them flame up then flame out. I watched the individual Beatles do their stuff over the years and heard the songs they sang.
Some of them were great. Some of them – like John Lennon’s Imagine, one of the most inane pieces of gibberish to ever masquerade as music – were stupid.
But I have always liked them. Or at least I liked their music.
And I remember the day I heard their music the first time on an elevator. It was You Say You Want A Revolution played by someone like Montovani’s Strings or the like. I realized at that time, we had passed a point. What had begun as counter-cultural became standard and mainstream.
It began to dawn on me then that I heard them a lot in the malls, that easy listening, the music that used to be lush orchestras, had become soft oldies rock.
Now our children listen to them and you can buy a t shirt with their pictures on it in Target.
One of these days I will hear them for the last time. I won’t know it at the time, but it will dawn on me that I no longer hear the Beatles. At that point, I suppose I will be ready to die.
My generation is already resented by many of the young people for what one called our “Cultural Death Grip.” I figure ten more years of that death grip and it will begin to loosen.
We will all begin to die and something else besides our music will take the Beatles’ place.
I wonder what.
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