We Love You Beatles (Oh, Yes, We Do)

Personally, I have to rate the blog a success thus far; because of it, I’ve already gotten back in touch with a couple of friends, been virtually leered at, sparked some interest in Alice Coltrane, and provoked the claim that the Beatles stole everything from the Monkees. (Incidentally, I am a big Monkees fan). So I’m glad to have gotten in on this whole internet thing while it’s still on the ground floor. (Here I allude to the late-90s Simpsons episode in which Homer decides he needs to start a dotcom, and at one point looks up from one of many books on the topic piled before him to exclaim, “Wow, they have the internet on _computers_ now!!”)

A recurring theme in responses to yesterday’s first post is the role the Beatles played in people’s childhood imaginaries, and the people bringing this up cross boundaries of gender, straight/queer, generation, and probably numerous other, less articulated lines of difference. What’s interesting about this to me is not any homiletic suggestion that the Beatles bring us all together, above our differences; it’s how different each of these relationships no doubt were, and all the different things they might have done for those involved. I would hazard to guess that sexuality and, less abstractly, sexual feelings played a role in the vast majority of these childhood experiences; also that these feelings involved some highly complicated and titillatingly tangled web of desires and identifications illegible to standard categories of sexuality, and different in each case. I remember reading one of the Hernandez brothers (of Love and Rockets fame—the comic book, not the 80s band) say in an interview a long time ago that when someone would put on a Beatles record when he was a little kid, he would feel that he had to leave the house, because the sheer amount of feeling it generated in his small body, however pleasurable, was simply unbearable. That struck a loud chord with me. As an expert in repression, I don’t have many memories of childhood sexuality or autoeroticism. But I do remember that when the Beatles were playing, I would feel my body in a way that I never had before. It was like the inside of my body suddenly became real, all at once took on depth. And I’m talking about being five or six here (among the many great advantages of having much older sisters is being initiated into good music at a young age). I also remember that the most intense moments of this feeling came in response to the vocal harmonies. Hmmmm. . .