Winamp Wednesday: Shouting All About Love
For the ones who say it all.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
George Harrison, “All Those Years Ago”
How far back do you have to remember until you start feeling nostalgia?
You know how it is. Things that are too close are just the present. A little bit farther than that in the past and you just remember every dumb thing you said and did. That’s nothing but pain. But a little bit farther back on that road? There lay the good old days. Your squabbles and your regrets fall away and you find that moment you want to go and live in again, even if just for a little while. It could be a whole long stretch of time, it could be a perfect hour or two. But nearly everyone has that Remember When that stays fresh in their minds. We tell stories and sing songs to keep them alive, and we can dwell on them until fact becomes myth and myth becomes legend.
It always stuns me how quickly the mythos of The Beatles became that nostalgia point at warp speed. If one tracks the bootlegs, reissues, and tributes to the band, it seems like fans were ready to jump back into Beatlemania even before Beatlemania hit Broadway. Part of the reason had to be how different 1973 felt from 1963, the urge to revisit what felt like a simpler time for the core fans of the band. Could you imagine looking back in that same way now? Is it possible to have that same nostalgia for 2013 that the Seventies had for the Sixties? Maybe it’s the bias of my own life, but it doesn’t feel all that different. We’ve all been through some very difficult times in the past decade, but I don’t know what I would take from a return to the pop culture of ten years ago. Slightly different Marvel movies?
I can’t put myself in the shoes of a Beatlemaniac in 1980, I can’t understand the shock of hearing that John Lennon had been murdered, not really. “Where were you when” is a question for any number of shattering events for any generation, and there’s no way to put yourself back into a world before that context if you weren’t part of it. Imagine this broadcast, Howard Cosell interrupting Monday Night Football to tell the world:
Conversations left hanging, tasks left undone. Every life ends and we don’t know when, every chance that we’ll go today or tomorrow or maybe outlive our closest friends by decades. It’s tough to put that into words. It’s difficult to say to those have gone and to those who are still living that we want to sum up everything we loved about them when they were still here. That has to be part of where nostalgia springs from. We can’t have these interactions anymore, so we will dive into the archives and reenact those things that we loved so well. I wonder how much better one more conversation would feel when compared to the bones of everything that came before.
The world probably expected every Beatle to have a perfect poignant reaction to John’s death. We needed that conversation to continue. George got there first, mostly because “All Those Years Ago” existed in a demo form. It was meant for Ringo, but when he couldn’t hit the high notes George took the song back. When John died George rewrote the lyrics and took another run at the tune. In doing so “All Those Years Ago” became one of the few post-Beatles tracks to feature three Beatles. (That’s Paul on backing vocals and Ringo back on the drums.) This lineup is the same that tackled “I Me Mine”, that phenomenal coda to The Beatles’ original album releases. There was something about George songs, no matter how they were constructed, that felt like great statements about where the band was and where the world could go. Every song on All Things Must Pass felt like a grand exaltation of freedom, “Within You Without You” screamed growth of the soul, “Something” blossoms into a precarious maturity that—if you’re lucky—turns into something beautiful. George always knew what was up.
But the pressure of the world is felt in every song. “All Those Years Ago” is very George in the way it teeter-totters between caustic and spiritual. Any tribute that begins with “they treated you like a dog” is not going to be entirely mawkish. The lyrics still hedge closer to “remember The Beatles?” with references to John’s songs that aren’t so much peppered but dropped from a great height into the composition. It’s a tad clunky, but it really couldn’t be any other way. George is attempting to write a eulogy on behalf of everyone in the world for someone with whom he shared something singular. There were only four Beatles, but everyone is part of that experience. How do you distill that into three minutes?
“All Those Years Ago” is a curio, part of a worldwide funeral service. The later “When We Was Fab” is a better encapsulation of the Beatle experience, weirder and a touch more cynical in a way that John probably would have enjoyed. But there’s still a lot to enjoy here, especially since the music lives independently of any pressure to eulogize. Somewhere in England is laid-back George doing what he does, and the guitar work is phenomenal. Three of The Beatles were still around, and one could imagine what they were going to do in the Eighties and Nineties.
Looking back now we know what happened. George’s last solo release during his lifetime was 1987’s stone-cold classic Cloud Nine. There were The Traveling Wilburys and his collaborations with Ravi Shankar and the Anthology. He was attacked in his home and survived it, but cancer took him soon after. He was all of 58 years old. With how active both Paul and Ringo have been in the past two decades one can only wonder “what if?” What does Brainwashed, his posthumous album finished by his son, sound like if it’s George’s alone? What does the next album after that sound like? What if George had been around to finish “Now and Then”?
What if. “What if” is a form of nostalgia. It’s a warm and comforting wondering about something that will never be. It’s as real as the imagined past that consists of only the good moments. The future that consisted of recordings of all four Beatles is as real as Beatlemania without the backlash from John’s comments on Christianity, a band that only recorded straight classics and never once stepped on a landmine like “Mr. Moonlight”, four best friends who didn’t take each other to court to dissolve their partnership. Imagining the future is instant nostalgia, “what if” letting you escape for a moment.
What if.
George Harrison and my grandfather died on the same day in 2001. Twenty-two years ago today. I don’t know how to say something here about the most important person I ever knew without sounding trite or labored. I wonder what he would have said at my high school graduation, when I graduated college, what he would have thought about my writing. Would I have taken all of that for granted? There’s no way to be realistic about imagining a past that would have been a future. He deserves his own history, his service to his country and his work establishing artists and entrepreneurs that would change the world, but suffice it to say that I loved my grandfather very much and not a day goes by that I don’t think about the “what if” of cancer taking him when it did. It’s a fluke of concurrent events that I can’t think of The Beatles without thinking of him, and I miss him every single day.
That weekend I reached for a bunch of George Harrison records. “All Those Years Ago” wasn’t among them. Life was already too difficult without hearing another eulogy. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear someone else’s nostalgia. I was trying to sift through my memories and make sense of a death. It’s tough to listen to remembrances by someone who’s left us. I was trying to figure out what I was going to say. In a lot of ways I’m still figuring that out. Because I don’t want it to be trite and I don’t want it to be nostalgic. I want it to be just what’s in my head.
How far back do you have to go to find that?
Next Time: The most unbelievable blue eyes I’ve ever seen.