Before I was a fully formed individual with my 
own music tastes, I loved the Beatles. It seems less obvious now, because my taste in music has expanded in many different directions, and the Beatles are just about the oldest music I still listen to with any regularity. But I’m old, and when I was little, the Beatles were still almost current – they broke up when I was 1. My Mom was a huge Beatles fan, having even attended their famous show at Shea Stadium in 1965 just a few years before I was born. So The Beatles were always present in my life.
Before I knew that I could like my own music, I only had a pick of what was in the house or on the radio. And the Beatles were the music that I gravitated to the most. As mentioned in the previous post, there was also some Motown (on 45’s!), some Dylan, and on the radio in the car, the Adult Contemporary music that is now called “yacht rock.’ But always, especially early, it was the Beatles.
The early songs were so catchy, and the later songs were so different than anything else. Plus, we had a BetaMax player (the precursor to the VHS) as early as 1972, and the one video tape that I was aware that we owned was The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, recorded off the television (complete with a single ad that my Dad didn’t catch, for Toss Across, a beanbag Tic-Tac-Toe game). So I was a huge Beatles fan from the earliest memories I have.
Of all of the Beatles albums, the one that I went back to the most was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I’m not sure why anymore – maybe it was the varied instrumentation and unique sounds or the build-up of excitement that the title track presented right at the start of side 1? Maybe it was just that the songs were all so perfectly crafted and fit together so well without being all the same? I don’t know – but I do know that I still listen to this album first every time I have ever moved into a new home, starting with my Freshman year dorm room at the University of Vermont. As soon as I have a speaker set up, the ritual begins again, blessing my new home with the pure goodness that is Sgt, Pepper’s.
There are stories that I cover elsewhere on this blog about how this album was the culmination of an artistic arms race between the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and about how the cover of this record came to be, as one of my favorite album covers in rock history. But suffice it to say that it had the same basic effect on me at 4 or 5 that it had on the teenagers and young adults 8 years earlier. It became the soundtrack to my early life. Did I know the record was revolutionary, including an early use of 8-track recording, and the lack of breaks in between the songs, and printing the lyrics on the back cover of the album? No. I Just know it didn’t sound like anything else, and I loved it. And I still do.
