B/The Beatles

Here, there and everywhere

Once upon a time when I was a very little girl, my father and my Uncle Hugh took me, along with my brother Corry, and my cousins Alice, Rob and Jeremy, to see the film “Yellow Submarine” in London at a large cinema located in Piccadilly Circus. I have always liked to think it was the premiere of said film, but of course it was not: as far as I can tell, it had been playing for several months, and anyway, we were at a matinee.

Be that as it may, it felt like a premiere to us, since we were all between the ages of 5 and 8. My dad and his brother would then have been in their early 40s, and it cracks me up to imagine these two proper middle aged Englishmen dragging five tiny children to the cinema. Imagine if that had happened to James Bond and Dr. Who. God only knows what their wives had threatened them with to get this to happen.

“Chris, Hugh, take the children to the movies while Pam and I catch up. Or else.”

Hugh (hopefully): “Thunderbirds?”

Chris (decidedly.): “Beatles.”

My Dad won that one, and if he hadn’t everything might have been different, since it was surely the start of my life as a rock critic. I don’t remember the outing altogether, but it was 1968, and Picadilly Circus, so it’s easy for me to re-imagine how I know it was at the time: the colorful dresses of the leggy girls in Mary Quant makeup, the billboards advertising cigarettes and liquor, the fabulous clothes in the nearby shops on Carnaby Street, us five eating ice cream cornets in the tube back to Harrow on the Hill and all the rest of it. I know for a fact that whatever we were seeing in London that day was outmatched by the colorful swirling images in the movie, which I doubt I even realized was animated. Parts of the film I remember in such detail even now that I believe it was the ur-experience of my entire childhood.

The Beatles already loomed pretty large in my mind, though. They were central to my family to such an extent that the night they were on Ed Sullivan, my parents rented a television set so we could watch it. (We didn’t own one on principle, because my parents thought it rotted the mind.) We also had a pair of guinea pigs named Ringo and Starr, and when I was four I dressed up like him for Halloween – this was probably my sister’s idea, and probably because I had the right haircut, a shaggy bowl cut. (I wish I had a picture, but I don’t.) Once I asked my Dad why he liked the Beatles – since popular music was not his thing, and he said that, at that time in America, there were very few English celebrities, and they reminded him of home. My Dad grew up in London, and the Beatles were not really his era, but his family spent most of the War in Blackpool, so perhaps that also played in their favor. Their accents, I mean. The one time I was ever even close to Liverpool, I had to ask for directions from a bobbie, and when he called me ‘LOOV’ in actual Liverpudlian, I could hardly believe it. It was like he was joking or something.

(Artist Bernie Carroll’s installation in Sefton Park, Liverpool. Photo by Carla Kent.)

I went through a phase years later when I professed not to like the Beatles music so much – or at least not to listen to it. It felt corny to me, like listening to vaudeville, or to Broadway musicals. Songs like ‘Here There and Everywhere,” or “Got to Get You Into My Life” were so trivial. But then I got over it. The Beatles music was the first rock music I ever heard and therefore it is now what I judge everything else by. I can’t imagine not knowing the words to every single song by them: perhaps they are to me what Shakespeare was to an earlier generation, a template upon which other artists can remold in their own image, and which the rest of us can rely on for advice and comfort, bedrock for our very dreams.