It was forty years ago this week, a sprawling, untidy and almost overwhelming (in every sense of the word) four-sided two vinyl disc set was released by The Beatles usually called The White Album.
What those of us who'd followed them from their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show didn't realize yet, and had no way of knowing, was that it's getting very near the end for the four as a band. I was sixteen and had spent all of my teenage years with their music as the soundtrack to my growing up.
I had no older brothers or sisters so I had been spared Fabian, Paul Peterson, Frankie Avalon (with and without Annette), all the girl groups and what John Lennon, years later, called Elvis Orbison (although this is a little spooky, even for me).
Without a frame of reference at the time, I thought The Beatles had invented rock and roll and, for me at least, not a moment too soon. Less than a year earlier, I, and all of us, had our dreams of childhood prematurely ended by an assassin's bullet with the murder of a US President and while many of us were too young to realize the carnage going on in Southeast Asia, we all had neighbors with sons, brothers, uncles and fathers who knew where it was and what it was.
Just Us Kids hadn't gotten there yet--we were still learning dance moves for the CYO socials after the basketball games. As if Father Costello, eagle-eyed chaperon, was ever gonna let you touch Janet Kinsley anywhere under her sweater, especially since we were all friends with her twin brother, Joseph. Truth to tell, all of us were working on mysteries without any clues and none of us were 'fast' or 'loose'. How could we be? We were Catholic.
The Beatles had gone from wanting to Hold Your Hand to wondering Why Don't We Do It in the the Road? and where they led, we followed. There was no satellite radio, no eighty-three flavors of MTV, no YouTube--heck, there was barely FM radio and I was in that first cohort that bought big records with little holes, albums, over little records with big holes, singles.
To this day, I still marvel over the self-assurance and unshirted cockiness it took to release Sgt Pepper. What could possibly have been lifted as 'the' single from that body of work and how big a shock to the system was it for the recording industry when The Beatles transcended the manufacturing process. In a way they proved McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Message' and made it a fact of life and an immovable object.
If, as it was to turn out, they were to produce only two more albums, and there's some spirited discussion on how those two came to be and why, that was yet to come and in no way kept us from sitting with the headphones on late at night, volume cranked, listening not just to Revolution 9 (where was that video four decades ago, eh?) but to the whole nine yards. What each of us learned, but many years later, was all of us, everywhere, were listening alone, but also together. The Beatles had made rock music global and two generations have grown up and old since then.
In a way, much of what the four did, as The Beatles and since, was referenced by the White Album. John Lennon's last release, Double Fantasy, was barely a month old in 1980 when he was murdered. George Harrison's first album, Wonderwall Music (nothing to do with those well-known posers, Liam and Noel, thankfully) is almost exactly forty years old.
And Paul McCartney has just released The Fireman (go to page two, the right hand side to listen for yourself) and if he rushes in from the pouring rain (very strange), full of fish and finger pies (one of the most eloquent pornographic references to ever make it to Casey Kasem) we've come full circle and the journey has been as much of a reward as the destination.
Like the sun plays in the morning/Feel the quiet, feel the thunder/Every ladder leads to heaven.
-bill kenny
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