How The Beatles betrayed me

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The Prince and I have been watching 80s music clips on the TV over the past few weeks (thanks to the Music Max channel), which has been an interesting cultural experience for me. As I grew up without a television, I didn’t really become involved in pop culture until I was about 15 - well into the ’90s. Some of the 80s stuff sounds familiar - from country school discos, and movies - but it’s not the big nostalgia kick it is for the Prince. Watching the clip for Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al for the first time was hilarious. I love that song, but the images in my head which has always played while listening to it is nothing at all like the film clip. Chevy Chase is very amusing.

For my entire life, until about the time I became more aware of modern music and video clips and so on, The Beatles were my favourite band. I was a massive fan. My parents had almost their entire collection of music on CDs, which I listened to over and over. I doodled “I Love The Beatles” in classes at school. I had my Dad photocopy their photos from the CD cover of The White Album so that I could stick them in my school diary. George Harrison was my first teen crush. My brother and I got hold of a copy of the movie Help, and watched it a ridiculous number of times, to the point where we could recite most of it by heart. I thought it was the funniest movie ever made. He and I used to sing Beatles songs together in the car - not along with a tape, no, but just to ourselves, doing the different harmonies. To this day, I know the lyrics of nearly every Beatle song in existence off by heart, as well as a chunk of the dialogue from Help.

I was intensely anti-drugs during my childhood and early teens. I thought people who took drugs were completely depraved and terrible. People who smoked cigarettes were practically criminals, and I would glare at smokers in public, coughing ostentatiously. People who drank were probably alcoholics. I’m sure it was terribly embarrassing for my parents. They were quite open about their own earlier drug use, although I can’t remember when they started being so. Their drug advice tended to be along the lines of, “Oh, don’t ever try magic mushrooms - they make you feel really sick if you have too many,” and in retrospect, perhaps my anti-drug thing was a backwards sort of teenage rebellion. During one of my anti-drug raves, my father told me not to be such a prude, possibly after I accused him of being an alcoholic because he’d drunk two glasses of wine. I didn’t forgive him for for years.

When I was about 13, a friend lent me a copy of Shout: The Beatles In Their Generation by Philip Norman. It’s quite graphic about the Beatles’ drug use, and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I was devastated by it, and remember feeling in a state of shock for days. Everything I knew and loved about The Beatles seemed to be wrong. I had had many arguments with my father about the meaning of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - he declaring that it referred to LSD, me furiously telling him that it referred to a drawing by Lennon’s son - and now I knew that what I’d been saying was all a lie. Everything about The Beatles was a lie!

Obviously, I got over this terrible shock (eventually) and changed my mind about drugs. In the world of high school, all the coolest kids did drugs and drank, and I was overly concerned that people would think I was cool (a campaign which did not succeed very well, and was not helped by my intense shyness). I got older, got over myself, and happily became a massive Beatles fan again. Now it rather amuses me to think of my devastated teenage self, all torn apart by the revelation that, yes, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds actually did refer to LSD. Because damn it, how could Dad have been right all along?

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Filed under beatles, childhood, music