This is a really personal entry. Just to warn you.
My mom loves the Beatles – a superfan if ever there was one.
When she tells the story of how she lost all her Beatles trading cards when the car got stolen at Connie Mack stadium several decades ago, there is still a hint of genuine sadness in her voice.
When we saw Paul McCartney last weekend, my mom turned 16 all over again right before my eyes.
Last weekend, sitting and listening to him sing hit after hit, it was no surprise to me to see mom going nuts. It was pretty awesome, because she couldn’t afford tickets when she was a kid, and now she was sitting in a skybox at the MCI center with a giant bag of t-shirts, feeling happy and nostalgic. The best part being when 63-year-old Sir Paul took off his jacket, and my mother let out a “WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” that could have stopped traffic.
What I didn’t expect, however, was my own personal nostalgia for songs that were written before I was born. A curious thing, for sure. I thought about it for a week, and I think I finally figured out why I was almost in tears when those first chords of Magical Mystery Tour were played…why my sister grabbed my arm in a death grip and shouted, “Oh my god, Kris, that’s Paul McCartney down there!”
Growing up, it was Beatles songs that formed the soundtrack to our lives.
Saturdays spent cleaning meant Rubber Soul playing on the stereo. Trips on Sundays involved the Beatles radio station blasting in the car.
Weekend visits to my grandparents? My sister and cousins and I played my mother’s well-loved Flip Your Wig. When I ran out of books to read, which was more often than not, there was always a biography of one or all of the Fab Four somewhere around the house.
Our basement is a shrine to them, full of amazing memorabila, like a case from the Hard Rock Cafe and huge promotional posters and cardboard standups from the Anthologies and the launch of 1 that my dad managed to snag.
There never was a time I can remember when I didn’t know the words to “She Loves You” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, and when those songs came on, there was never a time when all of us didn’t sing every word.
When I hit those particular teenage years where music suddenly becomes important, when you need music to speak to you and be relevant, it was my mom’s Beatles CDs that somehow seemed to make their way into heavy rotation in my room. I loved Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Bush and Alanis as much as the next kid who grew up during grunge, but for some reason, it was those old songs of my mom’s that I listened to more than others, and those were the ones that held up over time. And they became my songs, too.
Driving around with my best friend, in the summer, at the beach, staying late after school for yearbook meetings, going to basketball games, Seargent Pepper was in heavy rotation. Her old red Ford Tempo didn’t have a CD player, so we made endless mix tapes, and listened to them with the windows open, hitting rewind over and over again.
I remember a particular breakup with a shitty high school boyfriend who shall remain nameless, when I played the White Album on my walkman over and over until I fell asleep, trying to forget about the imcomparable pain of a teenage love affair gone wrong. I remember another boy, Abbey Road on the stereo, driving down Old Airport Road in the middle of the night, probably too fast, with the windows down and the sunroof open, stopping on the side of the road to look at the moon. It’s still my favorite CD.
When my 10th grade English teacher made jokes about Norweigan wood and glass onions, he appreciated the fact that I was the only kid in the class that laughed with him and not at him.
Getting to see a real live Beatle with my mom was pretty cool. Songs that meant something to her at 16 were the same songs that 30-odd years later meant something to me when I was 16. Memories of all sorts of things flashed through my head during those three hours, and I am positive that the same is true for her. Memories of being a kid and listening to Beatles records, and later memories of listening to those same records, now in CD format, with her own kids.
I think that was probably the best part for my mom. And for me, if you want to know the truth. That and flashing the Wings sign with my sister. You can’t be any cooler than that.
I guess I’m a superfan, too. It might not be genetic, but it’s one of the best things my mom ever gave me.
