The Beatles Are Here! (26 page)

David Dye, radio show host

I
WAS IN
Swarthmore Junior High School when the Beatles arrived in the U.S. Beatlemania was pretty universal. It was something that affected everybody. It was a cultural language that everybody spoke at the time.

With Philadelphia area kids, there were sort of two schools. There was the Motown school, the R&B school—these were people who were aware of the Beatles but who were not quite as into them as me and my friends.

I was into Motown but the Beatles had a special place.

The first 45 of theirs I bought was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with “I Saw Her Standing There,” on the flip side. What a great value! Two fabulous songs and I played it to death. I just remember how personally exciting it was to hear the harmonies and to hear these great songs.

I had the
Ed Sullivan
experience like everybody else. I remember my father watching with us and he’d say “Dave, the guy in the back, the drummer, that’s the mother,” because they all had long hair. It was like “Okay, Dad, thanks.”

I loved everything Beatles and I saw the movies and I did all the things that everybody did.

My parents went to England and brought me back a British copy of
Revolver.
That album and
Rubber Soul
are at the heart of my love of the Beatles. They’re the records that had the most profound effect on me. I really love folk rock and these records are as close as the Beatles came to that. Each one is just exquisite. They actually changed my taste in music.

THE BEATLES WERE
still very present and very modern when I began at WMMR in Philadelphia in 1969. For me, becoming a disc jockey, they had a direct influence on my work.

In early progressive rock radio, you would blend records, putting them together in clever ways. The Beatles were doing this already on their albums. Starting with
Sgt. Pepper
and
Magical Mystery Tour,
they had a theatricality that other groups didn’t. It came with that period of time.

These albums had that, as well as high production values. They inspired me in how to put sounds together. They made me want to figure out how to do it with other records.

In the early days of underground or progressive rock radio, you’d put together long strings of music. The idea was that the music would all relate to each other in one form or another. There would be some kind of connection, often a lyrical or a musical one.

A lot of it was done very extemporaneously. You’d just get in there and you’d do it. Sometimes you’d put a record on and you didn’t know where you were going next.

When I played a song and was trying to think of what to follow it with, I could always find a Beatles song that would fit. There was always one that would work and that everybody would know. And there were a lot of them.

MY DAUGHTER IS
now a junior in high school. She always surprises me. You can’t play a Beatles song now—how many years later is this, forty, fifty?—that she doesn’t know. I think, considering the changes that I’ve lived through in music, and what’s popular now, to have that kind of cultural staying power is truly amazing.

I’ve interviewed Paul a couple of times. One of the things I asked him was how he manages to function as one of the most famous people on Earth. I asked if he could go out on the street and he said, yes, but the secret is to keep moving. “If I don’t move, it’s all over, these people are all around me, but if I keep moving it works out okay.” I thought that was great.

I still use the Beatles a lot on World Café [his syndicated radio show]. I play them a lot and I love them.

The Back of the Album

by David Michaelis

IN
JUNE 1967,
when I was nine, my brother and I were farmed out to summer camp in Vermont. In those days you went off with a fully packed trunk and spent more or less the whole summer far away from home. You were not allowed to bring anything that connected you with civilization, not even a transistor radio to follow the baseball season. But late one morning that July, I heard by chance the opening bars of a record that had somehow arrived in camp from the very epicenter of civilization. I had been on my contented way from archery, in the upper field, to woodworking, in the barn—a camp day that could just as easily have been taking place in 1947, because none of the traditional forms or craft lore of a boy’s camp life had yet changed, as everything about the way we thought and dressed and did things was to change after 1967—when from the barn’s shuttered hayloft the electric sound of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
bolted through the clean, sunny air.

The counselors’ lounge was seedy and inaccessible, an outpost of adult mysteries. The physical presence of the new Beatles album up there behind closed doors created a charged atmosphere I will never forget. I was almost sick with the sheer nerve of it. I remember feeling pierced by the words—“It was twenty years ago today”—and in that first instant of listening in, the shock of the new Beatles record combined with the prestige of the counselor’s lounge to produce an alternate reality.

Archery? Woodworking?
I couldn’t have cared less. Of course, I couldn’t give them up either. I loved archery, I wanted to impress my parents with a Bowman’s Medal, and as that summer went on—the Summer of Love, it turned out—I felt the clear, straight lines of my boyhood becoming blurred in a way I did not fully understand.

I knew a little about the Beatles already. I owned two Beatles records (
A Hard Day’s Night
and
Beatles ’65
), and when I was six and my brother seven, we had had Beatles wigs. They were oddly shaped, scruffy thatches of synthetic black hair. They fit over our heads like ladies’ bathing caps and didn’t look anything like the real thing. We didn’t mind—these were
Beatles
wigs, and there was something insubordinate about wearing them, a kind of rampant disobedience that felt new and powerful. Years later, when I studied a passage of Milton that described Adam and Eve’s childlike rebellion in Eden, I had a pang of joy and giddiness that reminded me of the sheer liberation I had felt each time I pushed my scalp through the hairy opening of my Beatles wig.

This new album was different, more complicated. This was no longer just a release of youthful energy; it was playful, as before, but there was now an elegiac tone in the words and music—and that was what made me feel I was entitled to the record’s hidden truths. The previous summer, my parents had sat my brother and me down for an important talk. I knew before the word
separation
knifed into our living room that it really meant divorce.
Everything is going to be the same
, they said.
Nothing will change. We both love you very much.
It was my mother who for years afterward would say,
We’re still a family
.

The message of
Sgt. Pepper
was that things were not as they seemed, which made me, I felt intuitively, the perfect student of its puzzles. Campers were not allowed to listen to records, much less the new Beatles album. But every day, it seemed, additional information about
Sgt. Pepper
came into circulation: a 20,000-Hz tone, audible only to dogs, had been recorded backward into the inner groove at the end of the British version of the album. It was said that dogs all over England were going bananas when tone arms on hi-fi sets failed to pick up automatically and instead drifted into the subversive inner groove of
Sgt. Pepper
. Every night, it seemed, the two counselors in my cabin discussed the album, quietly debating shades of meaning over our heads; I recall one of them telling the other that the reverberating piano chord (E major, held for forty-two seconds) gave him cold chills at the end of the record because it was
supposed
to make you think of a nuclear explosion.

It almost didn’t matter that we couldn’t hear the music, or the chiller chord that ended
A Day in the Life
, or the 20,000-Hz dog alarm. The mystification that surrounded the album had as much to do with the art on the record sleeve as it did with the record itself. Marijuana plants, for example, could be clearly seen in the photographic tableau on the
Sgt. Pepper
cover—
real pot plants
, daringly placed in plain sight at the Beatles’ feet, or so the counselors said.

One night they brought the cover around for inspection. We each had a turn with it. The infamous tableau was as densely woven as a tapestry; it was hard to know where to look. Under the big blue Northern England sky, tiers of cutout faces, cloth figures, waxworks, ferns, potted palms, garden ornaments, and sculptural busts were arrayed around the flesh and blood Beatles, who, tiger bright in military-band regalia and holding brass and wind instruments instead of electric guitars, stood poker-faced behind a circusy Lonely Hearts Club Band drum skin. We tried to name faces in the crowd behind the band. Somebody pointed out Sonny Liston. There, too, was Marlon Brando from
The Wild One
, a popular poster image on the bedroom walls of older brothers in my neighborhood. I recognized the early Beatles as Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, and I knew Bob Dylan—he was a folk singer. All else was unknown to me. I recall turning over the sleeve. There, vibrating in black print on a Chinese-red background, were the words.

It’s hard to remember now what this meant then. To paraphrase Kenneth Tynan’s remark about how
Citizen Kane
changed filmmaking,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
revolutionized pop music as the airplane revolutionized warfare. Until
Sgt. Pepper
, the pop single had dominated the recording industry, each 45-rpm record comprising two songs, the hit tune on side A, a lesser song on side B. Pop singles were marketed in a plain sleeve with minimal design elements and no sign that the lyrics were to be treated as anything more than bubble gum, chewed once and tossed away.

From
Introducing the Beatles
in 1963 to
Revolver
in 1966, the Beatles had supplemented the traditional release of new hit singles with the annual appearances of two-sided LPs, the covers of which, though increasingly brash and inventive, gave no warning of what
Sgt. Pepper
would unleash. Inside and out, everything about the record was narrative. It was bursting to tell a story. On
Sgt. Pepper
, the Beatles made their regular instruments, from bass guitar to drums, sound like voices that had something new to say, while making more conventional European instruments like the harpsichord and the fiddle, as well as ancient instruments from Hindustani north Indian classical music, seem integral to the most far-out aspirations of rock ’n’ roll. It was the first rock album to insert orchestral scoring for narrative effects—one of many ways in which
Sgt. Pepper
was created more in the manner of filmmaking than by the conventions of the recording industry. And if the recording processes devised in the Abbey Road studios gave
Sgt. Pepper
the aura of a mod film, the sumptuous packaging that the Beatles insisted upon clothed the album in its most characteristic quality: readability. Here was the first record ever to publish its lyrics on the back of its sleeve. The songs told a story that was connected by a theme and the story could be read cover to cover.

After that first eager glimpse of the album sleeve in camp, I bought the record, with my mother, at Sam Goody’s, on a visit to Manhattan. Back in our living room, at the exact middle of the sofa, where my mother’s gay designer friend sat each of us in turn to demonstrate the brand new effects of stereo (a scientific moment that my father would previously have husbanded us through), I settled into a habit of sitting cross-legged and alone, ostentatiously studying the words on the back of
Sgt. Pepper
without playing the stereo at all. It was a deliberate act to
read
the Beatles without the music. Using eye instead of ear to ransack the lyrics for their hidden adult meanings turned even a ten-year-old into a seeker of ambiguity, an investigator of the imagination, a devotee of poetry. I had no musical ability then or now, and being given the words on a Chinese-red platter was like being rewarded in school with a period of free play. The literariness of Lennon and McCartney was just my speed. Looking-glass ties? Cellophane flowers that suddenly tower over your head and grow “so incredibly high”? A hole that needs fixing . . . Where had I heard this before? Of course: Alice on the riverbank, Alice down the Rabbit-Hole, Alice in the Garden of Live Flowers.