Yeah, yeah, yeah

I was six years old when the Beatles' "White Album" was released.  My parents and their friends got together to listen to it, and my sister and I danced around the living room to "Bungalow Bill," and "Rocky Raccoon."  One of my favorite movies was "Yellow Submarine," the title song of which I could sing at the top of my lungs (along with my other favorite song, "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul and Mary).

I was seven when "Let It Be" played constantly on the radio in my mother's little Corvair.  My parents' divorce obscured the actual break-up of the Beatles shortly thereafter, so it wasn't the shock for me that it was for the rest of the world.  Beatles music and the individual work of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison continued as part of the musical backdrop of my childhood without any active acquisition on my part.  I was too young to care about the loss of innocence, the end of an era, the unrequited passions of millions of heartbroken teenagers.  My childhood was defined by the influence and drama of the Beatles but I didn't know or care about it while it was happening.

In 1976, however, I woke up a 14 year old and the scales fell from my eyes.  Paul McCartney formed the band Wings and came to my town.  I began to play the dusty and scratchy collection of Beatles records that my parents had long outgrown, and to save my babysitting money to fill the gaps in the collection.  I learned every song, and even the harmonies, by heart.  I could identify the voices and the songwriters, and I could even do a fair Liverpudlian accent.  I memorized every single line from every Beatles movie and could quote from them for hours (except for "Magical Mystery Tour," which was never made available in screen form to the American television audience, and I had no access to bootleg videos as we do today).  I fell asleep to the sound of Beatles music on my cassette recorder, which I used to record my own mix of songs by the expedient of placing the recorder next to the speakers and pushing the pause button between songs as I dropped the needle onto the next cut.

I bought books and clipped newspaper articles, and had a scrapbook of all things Beatle and ex-Beatle.  The minutest detail was not too small for me to acquire and file away in my trivia-filled memory, though the details of Algebra and Earth Science had trouble sticking with me, no doubt due to lack of space.  I had a friend, Laura, who shared my obsession, and we spent hours wandering the mall, quoting "Yellow Submarine" lines and speaking in our faux Liverpudlian accents, fondly thinking we were being mistaken for British girls.  I even wrote fantasy Beatle stories, which led to the falling-off of my friendship with Laura, who quite rightly pointed out the egotistical nature of including myself in the stories, for which I could not forgive her.  I forgive her now, because she was quite right.

This burn of Beatle-fuelled teenage passion never really wore itself out.  The details have fallen away thanks to disuse and attrition, but the harmonies have never left me, and not only can I belt out the lyrics word-perfect, I can still name that tune in one note.