Growing Up With the Beatles

by editor Michele Catalano

I am nine years old. I wake up with the sound of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” drifting into my room and I know. It’s Saturday and I’ve got chores to do. I think it’s my turn to vacuum and I sleepily head into the kitchen for some breakfast before I start my task. I eat through “Getting Better” and stare at the cereal box during “Fixing a Hole.” I know I have to get started if i don’t want to waste my morning inside. There are friends to see, bikes to ride, baseball cards to be traded. I trudge into the living room where my mother already has the vacuum out for me and my sister is dusting.

Our copy of Sgt. Pepper skips during “A Day in the Life,” and I hear it that way as if it’s on purpose now. “Woke up, got out of bed…out of bed..out of bed…” My mother jostles the stereo cabinet on cue and the rest of the song plays out. Fifty years later, listening to Sgt. Pepper, I still expect to hear the skip.

Mom always had music playing in the house, all kinds of music. Broadway tunes, Doo-Wop, Elvis, Andrews Sisters. But on Saturdays, it seems like it was always the Beatles we cleaned to. Most often it was Sgt. Pepper, but sometimes we got a treat with Abbey Road or Magical Mystery Tour.

As I got older and made my own way around the music I liked, the Beatles sort of fell on the wayside, reserved only for the days my mother played them in the house. I had moved on to The Doors, Zeppelin, The Dead. It wasn’t like I was too cool for the Beatles; the quote next to my face in my 1980 high school yearbook is from “The End.” They had just become more sentimental than anything else.

**

I was 18 when John Lennon was killed. I had been huddled in my room, listening on my headphones to a Jim Morrison retrospective on WNEW-FM. They broke into the special with the news - tentative at first - and I was shook to my core. A Beatle was dead? It didn’t seem possible. It always felt like the four Beatles would be around forever. They were part of the fabric of our lives, a mainstay in our existence. And now there were three and that just didn’t seem right. I stayed up most of the night listening to the radio, crying along with everyone else, singing along to the songs they interspersed the newscasts with, wondering if anything would be the same again. Why would someone murder a Beatle? What kind of sick person would take something so precious from us? The world felt Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, reliving the days of vacuuming and dusting to Beatles tunes. I appreciated that my mother brought the band into our lives, that John Lennon was a part of my world.

**

I went through a lot of music phases after that. Punk and new wave were my mainstays, but I also listened to Springsteen and John Mellencamp and the like. I worked in a record store for a number of years and had the world of music at my fingertips. Yet for all of that, for all the albums I had amassed, all the genres at my disposal, it was the Beatles I turned to late at night when I felt forlorn or mopey. Their music brought me comfort, it transported me to a simpler time, a happier time.

When The Number Ones came out in 1983, I was reminded of just how good their earlier stuff was. Listening to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “A Hard Day’s Night” was such a contrast to the music I was listening to at the time, but it felt good to dig into it, to lay in bed with my headphones on imagining what it was like to be a teenager during their heyday, to be part of that scene.

After saturating myself with the more pop friendly Beatles, I’d get high and listen to the White Album. “I’m So Tired” became my favorite Beatles song. The songs on this album had decidedly different memories for me; these were the songs my cousins’ band played in the garage; it was the Beatles album that drew the line between my childhood and my teenage years. It somehow felt more grown up, more worldly.

I didn’t always stay listening to The Beatles. I probably went through the whole 90s without listening to them on purpose once. But times and moods change and I’m back in my Beatles groove. I even came around on Paul McCartney and started listening to his solo stuff as well.

I have taken to putting on Abbey Road a lot. It reminds me of being a kid, and how my mother loved to get us to sing “Octopus’s Garden” with her. “Here Comes The Sun” makes me feel hopeful and happy. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” delighted us as kids and I love to recall that feeling even if the song is a little silly. But it’s not just the transportation to my childhood that is at work here; it’s just a genuinely good album to listen to.

It’s always good to bring a little nostalgia into the house, especially when that nostalgia translates to the present, where I can love the music as I reminisce, but also make it part of my present life. Sgt. Pepper calls to me; it’s time to do some chores.