Showing posts with label 1964. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1964. Show all posts

Friday, April 03, 2020

The records that made me (some of 'em): Meet the Beatles


Here's No. 5 of my magical mystery tour through the record albums that have influenced me greatly through the years -- "Meet the Beatles." DUH!

If one is of a certain age -- OK, Boomer! -- this one's probably on your list. And on the list of many in the generations that followed, even if indirectly. Why? It's because probably no rock band was more influential than the Fab Four.

My Beatles journey began in 1965, at age 4. My Aunt Sybil and Uncle Jimmy bought me "Meet the Beatles" for Christmas. I was hooked. Got my folks, I am sure against their better beatnik-hating judgment, to subsequently buy me some Beatles 45s from the record rack at the National supermarket in the Broadmoor Shopping Center.

Man, I was well on the way to wearing out those glorious singles by John, Paul, George and Ringo. Until. . . .

Until a British newspaper interview from March 1966 got reprinted in an American teen magazine in July that year. You probably know the one.

“Christianity will go,” John Lennon told journalist Maureen Cleave. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

Lennon was a notoriously complicated guy. Americans, for the most part, are a notoriously uncomplicated people with notoriously uncomplicated triggers for losing their shit. After what Lennon said hit newsstands in the United States, Americans' lost shit hit the fan. And how.

And then there was the South. Remember the South? I do; I'm from there.


RADIO STATIONS banned Beatles records. Radio stations burned their Beatles music. Kluxers were burning Beatles albums along with their crosses. Preachers were damning Beatles songs to the lake . . . of . . . fiiirrrrrrre.

No one was more outraged than Mama. Now, my parents weren't exactly churchgoers, but you had the principle of the thing. Or something like that.

So my Beatles singles and my copy of "Meet the Beatles" got busted up. Mama carefully explained how them Limey beatniks were sayin' terrible things about Jesus H. Christ -- who we weren't actually acquainted enough with to drop in on, like, ever -- but, you know, there was the principle of the thing.

Crack!


Rip!

Double crack!

Crunch!

Thunk!


HEY, IT WAS the Age of Batman. Who never disparaged Christianity or compared his popularity to that of Jesus Christ, who I am sure would have lost badly to the Caped Crusader, too.

But again, it was the South. One of the Southiest parts of the South. And I'm sure it didn't help that Paul McCartney was a "n****r lover." After all, in those same Beatle profiles that made John an Enemy of God, Paul showed himself to be an Enemy of the Southern Way of Life (TM).

“It’s a lousy country where anyone black is a dirty n****r,” McCartney told Cleave, the author of the London Evening Standard's original profiles -- a quote that also made it into the teen mag Datebook, the periodical that sparked the all-American freak-out. In the white, Southern working-class world into which I was born, them was fightin' words.

And Mama was fightin' mad. Or at least browbeating-your-5-year-old-kid-into-letting-you-bust-up-his-prized-Beatles-records mad.

To paraphrase a musical selection from Hee-Haw, that hillbilly artistic endeavor that came to CBS television three years later, "
Thppt! They was gone!"

It wasn't until years later, after I myself had become a certified beatnik, that I started rebuilding my Beatles stash, which decades later is considerable. Yes, I have multiple copies of "Meet the Beatles."

And I still love "I Want to Hold Your Hand," though I think the German version, "
Komm, gib mir deine Hand," on "Something New" is even better. I'm funny that way.



Wednesday, December 12, 2018

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Saturday, December 17, 2016

1964 Personal Role Radio, new







If you suffer from geek allergies, now is your opportunity to move farther along the Internet Trail.

This post, however, will get us much closer to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

What you see here is a brand-new Army "morale radio," right out of the box -- an R-1289 PRR receiver. Vendor: General Electric Company, Radio Receiver Department, Utica, New York, USA. Date of manufacture: September 1964.

The first wave of American troops in Vietnam would have gotten this from the quartermaster. I just got mine from eBay -- I was a little young to be sent to 'Nam in late 1964, being just 3½ years old at the time.

It's a strange thing, getting something that's 52 years old basically new out of the box. Call it a time capsule, which it is.

A TIME CAPSULE complete with an instruction manual, a schematic and an eight transistor radio in a moisture-proof canvas pouch. 

Moisture-proof is good for things being shipped to the jungle.

From what the Internet (and the eBay seller) tells me, this little GE model -- the P925 back in The World -- was the last of the military "morale radios," or "Personal Role Radio (PRR)" in Army speak. By 1964, after all, what young American didn't already have a transistor radio?

T.B. Player certainly did when he shipped out in '64.

This has been your Geek Minute on Revolution 21. We now return you to your modern, digitized programming.


Wednesday, May 25, 2016

The Great Society


I'll take 1964.

In 1964, folk music was a thing. A popular thing.

In 1964, hip-hop did not exist.

In 1964, the Republicans were running on "In your heart, you know he's right." Now, the GOP's running on "In your heart, you know he's Reich."

In 1964, the Democrats promised "The Great Society." Now, they're trying to avoid The Great Unraveling.

In 1964, LBJ ran the "Daisy ad," because could we really trust Goldwater with the Bomb? In 2016 . . . well, some things really don't change.

In 1964, you could buy this Brothers Four LP at Dayton's for $3.59. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $27.71 today.

Chalk up one for 2016. (And estate sales -- this cost me a buck.)

Saturday, June 08, 2013

The Weather With Cap'n Sandy

Yo ho! Yo ho!
What's the weather going to be?
Here's the man who knows,
Let's take a look and see.
Here is Cap'n Sandy with the weather he has found
For Savannah and for Chatham and the counties all around!
 
I'm of two minds on this, which means I may have lost mine completely and you might want to pay me no mind at all.

My one mind thinks that "Savannah Sunshine" may not just have been a weather forecast . . . if you get my smoke signals, kemo sabe. Then again, my other mind thinks, "This is freakin' great! What boring people we have become in the last 50 years."

If I were you, I'd listen to my other mind. It's less of an a-hole.

It laments the loss of eccentric hometown treasures like The Weather With Cap'n Sandy, and it mourns the passing of the men and women who became local legends. Theirs may not have been a better culture than the postmodern one we've created, but both of my minds say it certainly was a richer and more humane one.

Und I vood haff veys uff dealink vith ziss Calamity Clam, ya!