I just wish I was writing this at sea, alone on the deck of a cruise ship. Instead, I'm up at 5am with a stomach ache.
I watched a YouTube video where George Martin plays and describes the original recorded demo by John of "A Day in the Life." John counts it off, "sugar plum fairy, sugar plum fairy."
It occurred to me that the lyrics of John, the Beatles in general, or in fact all of pop music from OUR golden era, are essentially nursery rhymes for adults.
Jack chopping down the beanstalk, and Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill are lodged in, and resonate in our minds. We think we don't have use for them now, but the appetite remains. So when our music heroes gave us intriguing visual imagery and fed that hunger, they lodged in our adult minds. Even today, we can't stop thinking and sharing memories about them.
As I experienced different social circles in my life's travels, say college, I discovered that there are squares who didn't get it, and I felt sorry for them. When I travelled out of state to a fancy music conservatory, it challenged my binary labeling of square vs hip. I was embedded in an entire population who went through some other coming-of-age, whose golden memories weren't about pop music. Now I was the "other" in some unknown and myserious labelling schema.
One friend of mine at the conservatory, who is now retiring as a professor at the peak of his profession, said to me about classic 60's and 70's pop songs, "I used to love it too, but that when I was young." He didn't ever return to that music or experience pleasure in recalling the memories. In fact, once during a chat he made fun of a music colleague of his who specialized in history and theory of pop, because he was going on and on about "Ringo's bass drum." I was the wrong person to appreciate this gossip, because I had just seen the same book by Lewisohn on the Beatles's equipment that his colleague probably had. And yes, I too talk about the Beatles with their first names!
Another difference that surprised and weighed on me was that many of the young students there from affluent families had great relationships with their parents. They would emulate them if they could. I thought we all rebelled against our parents; another assumption overturned.
Then it struck me...latching on to rock lyrics was more than craving fairytales, it was about escape. Escape from the stale town we lived in, the high school we hated, our parents who forced a secondhand morality on us, and a habitat devoid creativity and exploration of the mind. John understood that. Frank, too. I suspect that many of my music peers (who grew up with pop music) loved their lyrics because it gave them membership and solace in a world of art that they could at least live within their minds.
So we all grow up a little differently. Some of us have fond defining memories of youth, and for some of us, those are music memories. I feel grateful for mine.
Now I know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
