Writer's Block: Do you want to know a secret?
There have been many musicians over the years who have climbed into my soul via my ears - each of them leaving me changed in tiny and large ways. But none so much, I think, as the Beatles.
At the time of his death, I was vaguely aware of John Lennon. The Beatles had been widely played at carnivals and festivals in Germany, so I'd come to know them without actually knowing them.
I was lying on the floor when the announcement was made that John Lennon had been shot to death at the door to the Dakota Building. I was aware that some profound wrong had been done the world, but I hadn't anything concrete to stitch to that concept. For years afterwards, I would dismiss the Beatles as passé and provincial (I know, I know).
I'd gone fourteen when the paradigm shifted, and it was a monumental shift. Something in the Beatles' music and Lennon's words grabbed hold of my schema and tipped it on its edge. They were alive, and represented a generation* that seemed to me so vital and in motion. They decried social injustice in fantastic ways. In the midst of the dreary 80s? The best I could do was to stiffen my shoulders and wait for it to pass, 'cos as Rod Stewart said in 'Young Turks', ...there ain't no point in talking when there's nobody listening...
I spent the next several years obssessed with the Beatles. I wrote lists and lists of every song I'd heard and knew, and those lists spanned pages' worth.
I built a shrine to John Lennon, and made plans to run away to Liverpool for ever and aye (which has yet to come to pass, but curiously...I have ended up with a house in Liverpool Drive, so...). I suppose it would be entirely appropriate to say that he'd become my guru. At least it's less mad than me saying 'he'd become my God', although...
But never mind that.
In the intervening years, I must confess that I no longer require a steady diet of Beatles in order to remain upright and breathing. It's better when frenzies gentle themselves and settle, I think.
I don't think I could choose an absolute favourite song - so many of them held so many different meanings to me. Once, I was really keen on 'I'm Only Sleeping', which...at first pass seems a silly one, really. All about a fellow who'd rather stay his bed if it's all the same to you, thanks very much. Not terribly deep, is it?
Only to me, it represented a quiet, downy barrier between myself and people who I perceived would much prefer I wasn't amongst them. Even now, I'm most often keeping an eye on the world going by my window rather than jumping into the mix.
*I'm no longer so enamoured of that point in history.