NickCummings.com

This post originated on the Rock Band forums in a thread asking people to describe how they first heard and got into The Beatles. I ended up running with the topic and found I had a lot to say. It’s not my best writing by any means, but it felt great to finally have something to talk about in detail. I’ve reposted it here — hope you enjoy it.

I’m curious to hear how other people first started listening to the band, so feel free to leave a reply if you want to share.

I almost never got into The Beatles.

I grew up in a household where there were plenty of records and CDs but very few were ever queued up to play. My dad listened almost exclusively to talk radio or the classic rock station, and when he talked about his favorite bands (Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers Band, The Grateful Dead) The Beatles never came up. I’d heard The Allman Brothers’ double album “Eat a Peach” before I even knew what The Beatles’ White Album was.

My mom owned an impressive collection of Beatles records from her childhood, but we never had a working record player. They sat in a box in the closet for as long as I could remember. I’d leafed through them a couple times, laughing at their ridiculous haircuts and marginally clever album titles.

As a teenager I lumped them into the broad genre of “oldies” — a term that basically meant “music that has no business hanging around.” Their songs sounded overly simplistic, at times insipid (Drive My Car, Eight Days a Week, Twist and Shout) or just plain weird (Piggies, I Am The Walrus). It wasn’t until a few years ago that the band finally made sense to me.

There are only a handful of albums I’ve come across that were so powerful and consuming that I remember exactly where I was when I first heard them — Radiohead’s Kid A, The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, for example. My recollection of the first time I listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the most vivid of all of them.

A couple summers ago, I was driving back to school from Portland to Eugene with one of my best friends from grade school. We both ended up going to college at the University of Oregon, but we had fallen a little out of touch over the years. I was excited for the trip as a chance to reconnect and share some music.

Heat’s rarely an issue in Oregon — temperatures over 90 are uncommon, even in the summer — but this day was well over 100 degrees, and the air was thick with humidity.

So of course, my car’s air conditioning decided to stop working that morning.

The freeway was packed, the car was stifling, and I was sweating to the point where the seat was fusing to my clothes. Neither of us was bold enough to talk — the air tasted like a track meet.

It was kind of disgusting.

My friend began rifling through his bag, looking for some music to put on that would distract us from the fact that the ceiling was damp. He pulled out Sgt. Pepper and waved it at me.

I shrugged. He put it on.

What I heard wasn’t supernatural, or beyond belief, or maybe not even the best album in history. But it was audacious, adventurous; it was unlike anything I’d heard. It was convoluted and over-the-top one moment and heartfelt the next.

When the album ended, it was like awakening from a daze — not the best realization when you’ve been driving a couple tons of metal at freeway speeds for an hour — and I was struggling to think of something to say. The heat may have contributed to the surreal nature of the experience, resulting in something of a poor man’s spirit journey, but one thing was certain: There was something very important to be found in listening to the Beatles.

My friend and I had bonded over music when we were friends in high school, but back then his tastes (Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit) and mine (Blink-182, Sum 41 and…Limp Bizkit) were limited, to put it delicately. Thankfully, in the decade since we’ve both since grown a bit older and wiser — and hearing Sgt. Pepper was proof of that.

I must have listened to that album a hundred times over the last couple years. I sought out copies of the rest of the Beatles’ catalog and listened through every album. I became fascinated by the history and the mythology surrounding the Beatles and the people that were a part of it. Between the Beatles Rock Band instruments scattered around and the countless Wikipedia pages I’ve been scouring, my desk is beginning to look like that scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash’s wife stumbles upon his shack in the woods.

I’m sure I’ll eventually learn all I want to know about the Beatles, but I’ll never grow tired of their music.