And the Beatles just kept on evolving and evolving….

A few weeks ago in this space I mentioned a new musical friend I’d made a couple of summers ago at the Kingsville Folk Festival. I had the good fortune to become acquainted with Gurf Morlix, who calls Austin, Texas home but summers up on Georgian Bay and has since he was a tiny lad. I travelled up to Gurf’s summer place that same summer and we had a pretty good chance to chat about stuff, including music. And we hadn’t been chatting for very long before we agreed on something – there’s a lot of great music out there but the Beatles and Bob Dylan are somehow special and they both created remarkable catalogues of material…..Dylan has been doing it his whole career – the Beatles did it in about eight years.

I was not much of a Beatles’ fan back in the old days. In the early days, even though they were perhaps bigger than Christ, I paid them little attention. I liked some of their stuff, but wasn’t exactly blown away. Remember buying a Beatles’ 45 at Knipes’ TV and Radio back in that other time. It had Hello/Goodbye  on one side and I Am the Walrus on the other. Played it on our old Electrohome record player when I got it home and really didn’t care for it. Likely only listened to it a couple of times. Really didn’t get what all the excitement was about. Later in life, these would become a couple of my favourite Beatles’ tunes, but didn’t get it at first.

Sergeant Pepper, of course, caught my attention, as it did the attention of pretty well everyone who was into music back in those days. It’s sort of a brilliantly put together piece of work. And it was sort of impossible to ignore. As was the White Album….when it came out, it just sort of shook the rafters of the music world, so brilliant in its sheer diversity of genre, stretching across all kinds of musical types. Years later, I heard the late, great Gord Downie, front man of the iconic Canadian band, Tragically Hip, on an interview show on CBC radio. The host asked Gord what one album he’d take if he got stranded on a desert island….he replied immediately that he’d take the Beatles’ White Album. The host asked him why that album and he said he hadn’t really appreciated the Fab Four until he became a well-known rock celebrity himself and was doing a lot of recording. It was only then that he became aware of the genius of the Beatles and just how incredibly great they were.

I really loved the White Album for sure, but then sort of lost track of the band for the last couple of albums they released. Didn’t really discover Abbey Road until fairly recently. I bought a brand-new copy of it a while back and was totally dazzled listening to it on a big honkin’ stereo. It is a wildly good record with some truly great tunes. I’ve also bought new copies of a number of the other Beatles’ records in recent times and have really, really enjoyed rediscovering them now that I’m an old guy. They are just such a good band.

Remember when they did burst on the scene in the mid Sixties, and there were a whole lot of bands that were part of the so-called “British Invasion”…..the boys from Liverpool certainly became hugely popular fairly quickly, but I didn’t see them really standing out from most other bands in the early days and, actually, was more of a Rolling Stones’ fan back then. The Stones had a far more unique sound in those beginning days…they were really bluesy and gritty and, well, different. The Beatles sounded a lot like the Dave Clarke Five or Herman’s Hermits or a lot of other bands – at least that’s what I thought. But unlike nearly every other band of the era, the Beatles evolved and by the time even the “Help” album came out, you could just tell these guys were somehow different. And they just kept right on evolving throughout their relatively short time in the recording studio.

I’m like a monster Beatles’ fan these days. I’m still not into the minutia of their lives and career, but I really, really like listening to their music. I find it so innovative and somehow refreshing when I put one of their records on the turntable. I just think that while there is a lot of really good music out there and some really good bands, the Beatles are sort of in a class by themselves. In my opinion, it’s brilliant stuff. And It makes me feel just a little validated when that thinking lines up with that of a master musician like Gurf Morlix…..