In my life
In my life of moving vehicles to photograph them, one of my first tasks after setting the A/C, is switching the SXM station if a vehicle is so equipped, from the various obnoxious rap stations laced with profanity, to channel 18.
And I am for a short duration, back to February 9, 1964, watching Ed Sullivan on the black and white television announcing, “ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!”
And the world began screaming and hasn’t stopped since. Up until that time, I never put much thought into music. My sister had her 45’s she and her girlfriends would play at slumber parties, groups such as Jan and Dean, the Dave Clark Five, The Beach Boys, nothing they’d scream over.
I did not aspire to become a Beatle that night. I wanted to become a Bart Star Quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. And in that summer of ‘63, when in Monticello I took second in the Pafford Motors Punt, Pass and Kick, winning a Washington Redskin helmet, I was let down it was burgundy with a feather. I considered painting it green and yellow.
Then in the Spring of ‘68, after four of my 4th grade friends won the Jefferson Elementary talent show, impersonating the Fab Four, down to wigs from the downtown toy store, seeing how the girls even screamed over them, Bart was a falling Star.
I begged mamma to let me buy a Beatle wig. I now listened with my sister and her 45’s.
But like all fads that last a lifetime, we moved from Monticello to Kentucky that year, and the Beatles were no longer played much. I think the only album I ever owned, from one of those record clubs, was Rubber Soul.
But their music never left me, all the way through The Monkees, through the Cat Stevens years, the Pink Floyd Metal Years, The Bee Gees disco out of joint right up to today where I paused maybe a bit too long in that cool F-150 King Ranch, totally immersed in the Beatles singing In My Life, and of all the faces I remembered sitting there.
