My dad likes to tell the story of when he took me to a garage sale when I was about two and I picked up a discarded pricetag from the ground, held it up in the air, jumped up and down, and yelled, “LOOK! I GOT A TICKET TO RIDE!”
My love affair with The Beatles began almost at birth. This is actually sort of odd, since neither of my parents is a huge Beatlemaniac, but I distinctly remember that on one road trip up to Wisconsin to visit my grandparents when I was three, we listened to the Oldies Station and for the seven minutes that “Hey Jude” played, I finally sat still, shut up, and stopped performing an argumentative puppet show with my feet.
My left foot was Carpeachy. My right foot was Carpoochy. They didn’t agree on anything except that they liked “Hey Jude.”
The Beatles aren’t included on the soundtrack for The Boat That Rocked, a Richard Curtis film released in Europe a few months ago and due out — abridged, and under the name Pirate Radio – in America on November 13. However, the soundtrack is as effervescent, raucous, and comforting as The Beatles’ best work. Or at the very least, like an excellent deejay’s selections on the local Oldies station.
I think that the reason that I love oldies music is that, well, it seems like everyone loves oldies music. I’ve met very few people who don’t know at least a few Beatles songs, an Elvis, maybe some Neil Diamond they can’t name, or some unitelligible Bob Dylan.
Anyone who throws a party asserts their right to “cry if they want to, cry if they want to, cry if they want to,” and more people know Ecclesiastes to the rhythm sung by The Byrds than by any preacher.
“Oldies music” is the only genre I know that’s universally tolerated, and certainly almost universally enjoyed.
But really, there is nothing like watching the rain-slicked highway sliding past, and truly beautiful midwestern farm landscape — which I used to hate, but living here for years now, really out in the middle of the farmland, it’s something I’ve grown to really love. The richly variegated fields of grass and green soybean shoots…
And I get really overexcited whenever we see cows that are doing anything besides eating (sitting cows are exciting, but cows walking around make me bounce up and down in my seat!).
The drives when the gray clouds are hanging low over the silos are so peaceful — listening to “Hey Jude,” or “Windy,” or “Incense and Peppermints.”
“Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Son of a Preacher Man.”
The songs that everyone knows, and everyone sings along.
When the rain slicks are lit by headlights like streaks of stellar motion and the landscape is twinkling with lights on faraway towers and white-curtained windows in the weathered farmhouses, the music of my parents’ generation doubling as my soundtrack, the rural midwest seems so much more majestic than I ever thought Chicago or New York City to be.
The soundtrack also benefits from undeniable earworms like The Turtles’ “Elenore” (Elenore, gee I think you’re swell… ahhhh-AHHHHH…) and “The Letter” by The Boxtops. The songs that just make you happy, until you realize they’ve been stuck in your head for three days.
Although I’d like to press that I’m glad to have “All Day and All of the Night” stuck in my head instead of “Single Ladies,” for a change. It’s about time, honestly.
Taylor Hanson once summed up the popularity of his song “Mmmbop” and other earworms as, “The first music you really fall in love with is more than just music. it is something that clicks in you beyond the song, it’s a message or image that causes you to jump in and not let go.”
I fully agree with that. For me, at least, the music that I heard in my parents’ cars when I bothered to sit and be quiet, or became enthralled with in goofy action sequences on The Monkees, or heard while waiting to see if someone would dance with me at the fourth grade Sock Hop, has become so ingrained in my being that listening to the soundtrack of The Boat That Rocked is like wrapping myself up in a quilt of my own life history, even though all of its music was made long before I was even born. It doesn’t matter. It’s the music that taught me what music feels like.
“I think people who can truly live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give.” — George Harrison, 1943 – 2001.
“To all our listeners, this is what I have to say – God bless you all. And as for you bastards in charge, don’t dream it’s over. Years will come, years will go, and politicians will do **** all to make the world a better place. But all over the world, young men and young women will always dream dreams and put those dreams into song. Nothing important dies tonight, just a few ugly guys on a crappy ship. The only sadness tonight is that, in future years, there’ll be so many fantastic songs that it will not be our privilege to play. But, believe you me, they will still be written, they will still be sung and they will be the wonder of the world. … Hit It!” — Philip Seymour Hoffman & Rhys Ifans, The Boat That Rocked/Pirate Radio, 2009
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