Gift: Magical Mystery Tour (1995) & The White Album (1995)

Discovering The Beatles is a kind of right of passage for many American teenagers, even forty years on. It certainly was for me. I had known about The Beatles my whole life, but for those first few years they were just the relics of a bygone age; Mom and Dad’s music. Kids my age had Counting Crows and Nirvana and Pearl Jam and R.E.M. and even those delightful troubadours of slacker-pop, the Spin Doctors. But by 1995, all those bands had started to wear a little thin for me and many kids my age. That was the year The Offspring and Nine Inch Nails were replaced on t-shirts by Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead. Even inside of that momentary fad that embraced all things 60s and classic rock related, I managed to stake out a unique reputation for myself as “that Beatles kid.”

It happened almost by accident. Early that fall I was excited for the new Greenday album, Insomniac. I had missed the explosion of their last album, Dookie, which was already widely known by half the school before I even knew who they were. Determined not to let such a thing happen again, I made sure to grab the new Green Day album the instant it came out.

What a mistake that was. Though Green Day has gone on to redeem themselves by releasing what will probably be recalled years from now as one of the most seminal CDs of the decade, Insomniac was crap. It was crap of such unfathomable caliber that I only listened to it twice before abandoning it forever. I needed something better, so I raided my parents’ CD collection. That’s where I found The Beatles’ “Blue Album,” a greatest hits collection spanning the later half of the band’s career; oddly enough I had gotten it for my mom for Christmas several years before. I was hooked right away. As so many before me have discovered, it only takes one listen of “I Am the Walrus” to change your life.

It didn’t hurt that 1995 put The Beatles back on the pop-culture map in a huge way with the Anthology project. It’s possible, almost likely, that unremembered marketing for that thing may have influenced my sudden Beatle fandom, but I remember it as a happy coincidence. The documentary gave me my first look at the entire Beatles story, and my first listen to many of the Beatles' most famous songs. My parents had plenty of actual Beatle LPs and 45s for me to go through, along with boxes of Beatle books and Beatle merchandise. I became an expert quickly.

At that point, I was so behind the technological curve that I didn’t even own a CD player. All of the albums I had were on cassette. That finally changed on Christmas, when I was given not only a CD player but my first Beatles album of my very own, The White Album. Later on that same day I got Magical Mystery Tour from relatives. Those two albums, actually back to back releases from the band, became my baseline for all the Beatle discoveries that would come after.
I’m not sure either CD still works—I long ago converted them to MP3s, which I hope to soon replace with the new remastered albums anyway, and lots of other Beatles albums have long since eclipsed both of them in my esteem. But more than any other, those two albums remind me of what it felt like to listen to The Beatles for the very first time. It’s something you only get to experience once.

Magical Mystery Tour is probably my least listened to album today. It contains a lot of songs even seasoned Beatles fans might be hard pressed to remember. How many people out there can hum “Flying” or “Blue Jay Way” off the top of their heads? The attraction of the album for me was of course “I Am the Walrus,” but it’s the lesser known songs that remind me most of that Christmas, perhaps because I’ve listened to them only a handful of times since.

Magical Mystery Tour, fun as it was, was a blip on the radar compared to The White Album. I plugged in my new CD player right underneath our Christmas tree, laid by the fireplace, and listened to both White Album CDs nonstop for days. I remember actually jumping out of bed days after Christmas and rushing downstairs just so I could listen to “Helter Skelter” one more time. It’s hard to believe The White Album came only a year after Magical Mystery Tour, so different are the albums. Gone are the mystical psychedelic Beatles of 1967, replaced by the even cooler raw and fragmented Beatles of 1968.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of nonsense on The White Album, and I can no longer listen to corkers like “Honey Pie” or “Long, Long, Long” with the same wild-eyed awe I did at age thirteen. The best tracks, (“Dear Prudence”, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “Back in the USSR”, etc.) on the other hand, hold up as among the best The Beatles ever made. I even had fun with “Revolution 9”—I would put it on whenever friends dropped by just for the sick thrill of watching them squirm with discomfort and confusion. Once it even caused the lights to blink on and off (or that might have been a coincidence, but never underestimate the power of “Revolution 9”).

I don’t think there’s been a Christmas since where I haven’t gotten some kind of Beatles product, ranging from the giant and at the time expensive Anthology VHS box set to magnets and posters and everything in between. I’m not quite the Beatles fan I once was—there are plenty of other bands and musicians I listen to, and as far as I know no one knows me today as “that Beatles kid.” 2009 has been another Beatles renaissance year with the release of the new remastered albums and The Beatles Rock Band game, so I’ve been thinking about that Christmas lately. New thirteen year old kids are bound to discover The Beatles for the first time this Christmas and become the Beatles kid at their own schools.

Today marks the 29th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder in NYC. Rather than take it as a time to remember that we live in a world where innocent and well meaning people can be taken away so violently, it’s much better to remember the music The Beatles gave us. That a thirteen year old kid in 1995 can have the same warm memories of sitting under their tree listening to The White Album as a thirteen year old in 1968 or 2009 is an achievement no murderer can ever take away. The Beatles’ music ranges from the silly to the sublime, but it will be with us forever.