When I arrived at work the day after John Lennon was shot, monstrously hung-over and badly in need of sleep after an attempt to play the entire Beatles box set from Please Please Me to Abbey Road I found myself confronted by inquiring minds that wanted to know who this John Lennon was, whether the Beatles were better than Kiss and why their mothers had cried when they heard the news.
Those bullets cut down an important figure, but the Beatles were, by that time, well and truly in the past.
Like most other music fans my age, I started listening to the radio in the fifties, continued that into the sixties, got caught up in the Beatles era like everyone else I knew at school, and started buying records in 1966. As a result I’ve spent a considerable chunk of the last forty-something years listening to music and have directed a substantial chunk of my pay packet over the years towards the various record labels, magazine and book publishers who have provided much of the material that lines the walls of my office.
On the other hand, given a lack of a working turntable and a disinclination to shell out anything on their woefully neglected CD back catalogue, I don’t think I’ve played a Beatles track in something like fifteen years.
So we’re talking about forty-five years of listening, on and off, starting with the Top Forty and gradually heading away from the middle of the road towards the roadside ditch, to paraphrase Neil Young’s explanation of Time Fades Away and Tonight’s The Night as his follow-up to Harvest.
Which resulted in a musical universe that I’m quite happy with, thank you very much. It’s a world where Richard Thompson tops the charts, Little Feat are sitting on the highest level of the Rock Hall of Fame, the band playing in the beer garden at the local pub is Los Lobos, Derek Trucks is a megastar and a three disk recording of an Allman Brothers Band concert from New York’s Beacon Theater is close to musical nirvana.
If there’s anything that I’ve missed because of the odd offhand dismissal of some major artist as overrated, irrelevant or unworthy, it’s my loss.
Trust me, I’m utterly and totally comfortable with that.