THE BEATLES: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

(The Beatles LP, Apple, 1968)

One rainy Monday morning in the shiftless months after I’d graduated high school, I unlocked the steel-and-plate glass door to Shaky Jake’s, the musty vintage clothing store where I worked. Before I hit the lights or reversed the OPEN/CLOSED sign in the window, I went up to the cramped office to switch on the stereo, and whatever station it’d last been tuned to began playing the familiar opening guitar strum and piano chords of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” I’d heard the song numberless times, but now, alone in the store, surveying racks of polyester shirts and faded Levi’s and tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirts and plaid sportcoats and floral-print broom skirts, and the wall of curling postcards friends and customers had sent the shop over the years, and the cars passing on Highland Street beyond rain-streaked windows—going somewhere, anywhere—I spent five minutes transfixed. Even though my days began with as much routine as the speaker in Paul McCartney’s section of the song, I hadn’t read the news that morning, or any recent morning. Daydreaming as remotely as John Lennon’s echoing sighs suggest, I hadn’t noticed that the lights had changed, that almost everyone from my high school class had left town while I still lived and worked half a mile away.

At the time, I didn’t own a single Beatles LP, though my mother soon gave me a reissue of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band after I’d asked her some questions about the band when I couldn’t get “A Day in the Life” out of my head. As is probably true for a lot of kids, especially white kids, born at the cusp of the 1970s, I’ve always had a burdensome relationship with the Fab Four. During childhood, I heard the Beatles’ music everywhere: the radio, my mom’s records, friends’ parents’ homes, friends’ older siblings’ bedrooms, even—“Here, There and Everywhere,” or “In My Life”—on the easy-listening radio station that my grandmother played before Sunday dinner. Beatles songs suffuse my earliest memories so irrevocably that I never understood the band’s musical or cultural significance, never grasped the strange mythologies and esoterica, never knew the music as much more than the background tracks to my own insipid days: the Beatles seemed just another part of the weather. I knew I’d missed a complicated history—if only from the way the Beatles’ hairstyles changed on their LP covers and posters—but I also knew that that history belonged to other people. By the time I began establishing my own musical identity, I hated the whimsy, hated the sing-a-longs, hated the cartoonish psychedelia, hated that parents who only listened to classical music would make an exception for the Beatles. I resented the ongoing, ever-present Beatlemania—in part because the band’s importance was undeniable, in part because the kids exalting the Beatles seemed so satisfied to celebrate a past they’d never experienced. The reverential Boomer nostalgia toward all things Beatles—the mock outrage when Nike used “Revolution” in an ad campaign, the hype when the White Album was released as a compact disc—haunted me. The Beatles also haunted many of the albums I bought, and this too aggravated me: why did so many bands feel a need to record a version of “Tomorrow Never Knows”? Why, if I had the good taste to like a band’s music, did that band have the poor taste to admire the Beatles?

I wasn’t one of the kids who choreographed dance routines to certain Beatles songs, who watched all the films, who memorized all the lyrics; I wasn’t one of the teens who learned to pluck a passable version of “Blackbird” on an acoustic guitar with a chipped veneer to woo a sweetheart. I knew the most popular songs by ear but rarely by name. My mom had a few Beatles records—the only leftovers her younger brothers hadn’t filched—filed in the living room cabinet with her old Motown and folk LPs: years earlier, she’d inked her maiden name onto the sleeves, another property line that excluded me. After her gift of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I listened to it a few times, then didn’t bother picking up any more Beatles LPs for another decade. I did so finally out of a sense of obligation—didn’t a decent record collection need at least a handful of Beatles records?—and also because I couldn’t find much else worth buying at the one used record store near the small town in central Pennsylvania where I then lived.

One of my college girlfriends told me that her father, after he’d decided to leave her mother sometime in the mid-’70s, had driven an hour or two away from home when “Hey Jude”—a song that McCartney wrote for Julian Lennon as his parents were divorcing—came on the car radio. My girlfriend’s father heard McCartney singing directly to him; he turned around and headed back to his family. I realized only recently that so many Beatles songs sound sad to me less because they accompany a depressing jumble of images from the first half of the 1970s—cold, sparsely furnished houses heated with woodstoves; macramé owls hanging on painted plaster walls; boxes of herbal teas; toothpicked avocado pits in glasses of water and enormous spider plants; mass-market paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings, Future Shock, and Passages; being sent outside to play with some kid and his broken Big Wheel while inside our parents possibly got stoned; small plastic garbage bags hanging from the knobs of AM-only car radios; straw-wrapped Chianti bottles plugged with half-melted candles; our young mothers drinking instant coffee from butterfly gold Corelle cups while we ran in and out of the kitchen seeking their attention—than because our parents, still listening to the Beatles in the aftermath of political assassinations and anti-war protests and race riots, in the depths of the Nixon era and the oil crisis and inflation, must have heard those songs through the prism of failure, and probably felt sad themselves, remembering when their relationships with each other were uncomplicated by kids, mortgages, careers. The Beatles’ sudden and prolonged break-up—with its various walkouts and brief reconciliations and press releases and ultimate years-long legal battle—prefigured the divorces my parents and so many of my friends’ parents would soon experience: even “Hey Jude” only delayed the inevitable for my girlfriend’s family. It’s one thing to listen to songs of hope and love when change seems possible, and another thing entirely when change as social and personal utopia has been diminished to a barely winterized rental cottage on a lake, court-ordered monthly child support payments, and shared visitation rights.

So when a friend noted in her Facebook status that she was playing the Beatles’ “Red” and “Blue” compilation double LPs for her young kids, “marveling” and “explaining,” I felt a sudden desire to hear my own long-ignored Beatles records. I began digitizing the LPs as I went through them, late at night, listening on headphones.

“Turn it up, dude,” Sarah says, reaching for the volume knob before I can lift my hand from the steering wheel. We’re headed north on the Taconic State Parkway, the iPod plugged into the Volkswagen’s stereo, and she’s asked me to play the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

“You should write an essay about the Beatles,” she continues.

“Really?”

“I heard this on my walk to work the other day.”

She skips the track back to its beginning: the huge stereo separation makes the tinkly piano rise from somewhere to the left of the brake pedal, while the descending bass notes seem to float in from the window beside her.

“I mean, it’s called ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,’ but this song is all about the bass,” she says. “Listen to it.” She turns the volume up a little more. “I think that bass inspired Led Zeppelin. Has anyone ever talked about that? When did the first Led Zeppelin record come out?”

“After this one,” I say. “A year later, maybe.”

“The bass is really crunchy and pounding and slow—not weeping exactly, but more like a dirge, like a weight being dragged along. And that wanky guitar—it’s so Led Zeppelin,” she says. “I can just picture Robert Plant and Jimmy Page listening to this and stealing the whole thing. And George Harrison even moans at the end of this, like Robert Plant.”

“Well, not exactly like Robert Plant,” I say. “Anyway, I think it’s actually Eric Clapton playing the wanky guitar here.”

“Did you ever read that Bugliosi book about the Tate-LaBianca murders?” Sarah asks. “I always associate this song with that for some reason. I read it when I was a girl, and it stayed with me way too long—especially the grainy picture of a dead Sharon Tate at the crime scene.”

“This song’s from the same album as ‘Helter Skelter,’” I say.

“It just all seems so much about the end of the sixties, when love was supposed to be ‘unfolded,’ and abounding, but this love is still sleeping, and if so, what the hell have we been doing all these years? It’s like he wakes up from some drugged-out haze and notices that the floor needs sweeping, everything’s been bought and sold—”

“—and it was supposed to be free love,” I say.

“Right! And he’s bewildered at how the movement of love’s all ended. He just realized the world’s still turning. It seems so ironic when he says, ‘Every mistake we must surely be learning,’ since they’re all stoned and barely noticing anything at all. Wasn’t this song from the Summer of Love? When love was supposed to be changing the world, not sleeping? He sounds so disgusted when he says, ‘Look at you all.’ And all that energy’s been diverted, perverted….”

“This record came out the year after the Summer of Love,” I say. “But you should read Joan Didion’s essay ‘The White Album’ if you never have.”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah says.

“It’s about the end of the sixties: Manson, the Black Panthers, campus protests, all that.”

Clapton’s solo, Harrison’s falsetto, McCartney’s grinding bass notes, Lennon’s ringing acoustic chords, Ringo Starr’s tambourine rattle lead us through the song’s lengthy fadeout. I’ve always considered this song one of the Beatles’ lesser moments, the lyrics contorted from the exigencies of finding rhyming words rather than anything as considered as Sarah’s interpretation, and prefer All Things Must Pass as evidence of Harrison’s songwriting skill to the few songs Lennon and McCartney allowed on Beatles records. “Now the two most interesting Beatles are gone,” my mother lamented in 2001, when Harrison died. But the world always persists no matter the forms—weeping guitar, political protest, drugged stupor, rainy-morning epiphany, annotated pop song—in which we register our sadness or resistance to its outcomes. Didion’s essay is less about the end of the sixties than about our desire for the imaginary security and orderliness of a narrative when our lives seem insecure and disordered—and the precariousness that Didion noted as symptomatic of those years has not left us. “In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and the narrative’s intelligibility,” Didion writes. When did I realize that I wanted to believe that those apparently endless childhood days scored by the soundtrack of the Beatles would not end? That a song I heard by chance on the radio might help me resolve some difficult decision—or explain myself to me? Maybe the Beatles endure because they’ve inspired untold conversations like this one. They grew up alongside their audience, and their music and fashions and public proclamations both responded to and affected the cultural tumult of the sixties—and for that reason seemed worth interpreting. Amid endless versions of who buried Paul and who was the walrus and who was counted in or out of the revolution, a listening audience learned to personalize the Beatles—about whom they spoke on a first-name basis—by composing narratives around the frameworks of their LPs, and learned to see all future pop music through similarly individual lenses.

In what will hopefully be the middles of our lives, Sarah and I keep driving, and the iPod plays the first notes of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” a song I probably first heard when the Breeders covered it on their Pod LP in 1990. “She’s not a girl who misses much,” John Lennon sings.

“Don’t you think it would make a good essay?” Sarah asks.

“Maybe you should write it,” I say.