The Beatles - Abbey Road

Ah, man. Well, Abbey Road is just the holy grail, isn't it?

My uncle Dean, old hippy and serious music freak that he is, maintains that this is the best album ever recorded. Not the best Beatles album, the best album EVER. It is something else, I gotta admit. It's the Beatles at the height of their career and their talent. It's their best selling album. It's representative of their entire body of work. Each member of the band stands out on this album. It's the last thing they recorded before they all hated each other. I dunno, maybe they did hate each other by then. They definitely did by Let It Be.

But you know what? The music nerds at Rolling Stone can write that kinda crap better than I ever will. So all that bullshit aside, here's what it means to me.

My mom is a Russian Jew and my dad is an Irish Catholic. But they were both iconoclastic hippies and they left all that behind. It never touched me, growing up. I was just a lost, little, pale, curly-headed American mutt surrounded by creepy puritanical protestants in New Hampshire. I wasn't part of the culture that surrounded me. I never had Wonder Bread or baloney with a first or a last name. My mom put zucchini in everything. She snuck it into CAKE... We had a TV but it only got two channels and we barely watched it. No matter what I wore, I always looked weird. We stuck out like sore thumbs. I didn't have a religion. I was the only kid in my school whose parents were divorced. The other kids thought I was a freak and they let me know it.

Actually, that's not true. Stanley's parents were split up too. And he was even weirder than me. We were good friends. He wore a lot of corduroy. I digress.

I didn't have culture. I didn't have religion. I wasn't into sports. I didn't have heroes, not the way the other kids did. I had the Beatles. They weren't my favorite band. I liked them. But I wasn't obsessed or even particularly into them. But in the same way the other kids had Wade Boggs and Roger Clemens I had John and Paul. At the times the moms of the other kids in school would pray, my mom would play Sgt. Pepper. When they couldn't sleep their moms brought them warm milk. Mine sang me "Here Comes The Sun."

The Beatles weren't my favorite band. They weren't my favorite anything. They were just always there in the background. They were my Zeus and my Hercules and my Apollo and my... Pan? Which one is Ringo? Doesn't matter. They were my culture. And now I have the same copy of Abbey Road my mom played me when I was a kid. It skips and it pops but only a little and it's 45 fucking years old so I gotta cut it a little slack. Right?

Anyway, enough of this sappy horseshit. Now I'm gonna go play Mott the Hoople.

[wikipedia]