Paul McCartney was 24 in December of 1966, the month that the Beatles recorded When I'm Sixty-Four, their romantic nostalgic anticipation of a golden sunset still far in the future, for the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Its public debut on vinyl was a long-time coming. The Beatles had been playing it live for years. McCartney was not even a larval Beatle when he wrote it as a barely budding songwriter long before he met any of his bandmates, at age 14.
I was 4 when the Beatles first played the Ed Sullivan show and I tell myself I remember it vividly, but what I remember is undoubtedly my older siblings' excitement at the time and subsequent viewings of footage of the event. Irresistibly fun and subversive from the beginning, the Beatles' own growth musically schooled a generation in what it was possible to do with a pop song and with fame. Their progressively rarer appearances were thrilling and each seemed to herald something unprecedented for their fans and the public at large to deal with. As adventurous as they were with their music and their image, they seemed to bring the culture with them.
Hearing Walter Cronkite spill the news in April, 1970 that the Beatles were breaking up was like learning the world was ending, and my heart resisted the news for years. As time passed and post-Beatles reality revealed itself to me I became less and less confident that the head-scratchingly unappealing post Beatles output of the 4 dispersed members could be cured if only the crazy mop tops would just get over themselves and get back together, but while my Beatlemania was frequently in remission over the years, I continued to experience periods of recurrence for decades. The cure was probably reading Jonathan Gould's 661 page song-by-song biography of the group, Can't Buy Me Love which came out in 2007. After many years of scrutiny, I was already aware of the individual Beatle's humanity and foibles, but something about seeing it in all that day-to-day detail heightened the tedium of even these most privileged of lives. By the end of the book, the sheen had come off of even their music for me. I was saturated. Everything once new becomes a cliché with too much exposure. While for many they were undoubtedly a gateway drug to far more experimental and radical music, there was always something genuinely unthreatening about the Fab Four. For all their iconoclastic expansion of the public's mind, this is after all still the band that only ventured into political topics with the grumpy libertarian rant of "Tax Man" and a wet blanket thrown on you who "say you want a Revolution."
We could not have known that only 2 of the Beatles would live to see the age they sang about in that Sgt. Pepper track. Sir Paul turned 64 in 2006 the year before Gould's book appeared. Unparalleled wealth and fame have made his post productive years exceed his naïve adolescent vision. Sixty-four is still more than a year away for me, but it's closing in, and my consciousness of its approach has moments of hyperactivity. Once I got the message that nothing (with the possible exception of war, the Simpsons and neoliberalism) lasts forever-- which got through to me far too early in my adulthood-- sentimentality has not particularly reverberated for me. Which may explain why news of the 8 hour Beatles documentary series Get Back released in November crossed my consciousness without raising a ripple of curiosity. It wasn't until I learned that my brother thirteen had succumbed, signing up for a Disney+ trial in order to see it and reporting Beatlemania-like symptoms, that I recognized the dearth of interest news of its existence had aroused in me.
I wanted to relate this somehow to my own approach to that golden age sung about in the young Beatle's song. I had planned to talk about how in spite of my customary alienation from my cohort, I have found myself entertaining the notion of indulging in some perquisites of age*-- e.g. excusing lapses of taste especially on the basis of sclerosis of the aesthetic sense. I think I could be forgiven for going the way of the PBS audience from time to time and reminiscing about when entertainment was different, meaning actually good, No one but me has a problem with it. I do in fact occasionally indulge an age old guilty pleasure or permit myself a guilt free binge of threadbare favorites every now and then and it's not entirely out of the question that someday should an opportunity, the time, and a mood to see Get Back converge under the right alignment of stars, I might. But truthfully, most of the time I'm not done being excited by the new. It's a habit I fell into long ago. I think I was 4.
* I hasten to add - I don't consider the impulse to latch onto, dominate and refuse to yield an ounce of political, economic or judicial power a perquisite of age as so many of our current power elite seem to. On the contrary, I think that's a disease of age. It's one thing to fight to the end alongside comrades of every age for a world better than the one you came into and quite another to hang over things like a toxic windless smog because you can and because that's all you're capable of.
No comments:
Post a Comment