Skip to main content

The Beatles in our Living Room


The Beatles in our Living Room


When I was just a tyke, somewhere around first grade, my family and I would gather in our living room on Saturday nights for our weekly television watching ritual. This included some cartoon shows, like The Flintstones and such but it also included the Ed Sullivan show.

My parents sat in their comfy chairs towards the back of the room and I always sprawled out on the floor directly in front of the T.V. I still remember how Ed would start the show by saying he had ‘a really big shoe’ for us that night. I can remember some of the regular acts which included Lamb Chop and the little Italian mouse Topo Gigio.

So you can imagine our shock and surprise when, one night in 1964, Ed introduced a musical band from Liverpool called The Beatles. I had only a faint notion of what rock ‘n’ roll was, from listening to my little turquoise blue transistor radio. My mainstay in music, to that point, had been Beethoven and Bach.

I really could not make heads or tails out of what The Beatles were doing except that all the girls in the audience were screaming, something I found bizarre and amusing.

When I turned to my parents to register their amusement over the spectacle, such was not the case. One would have thought a bomb had gone off in our living room from the horrified looks on their faces and their utter silence. They obviously understood it no more than I did.

Much, much later in my life, I would find out that my father, being an aerospace engineer and working on defense contracts had a high security clearance and the employees had already been indoctrinated with the idea that sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were being used by the communists to undermine our great western democracy. I suppose there was some truth to this, given Chairman Mao and his Red Guard who were young people on a mission to destroy all establishments.

Nevertheless, from that point on, there was no escaping The Beatles. They were a hot item for discussion, even among my little first grade girl friends Genie and Mary who would argue over which Beatle was the cutest or said the funniest things. It was deep stuff, to be sure.

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learn Music

You Can Learn Music Perhaps you’ve gone to a concert and fantasized about being able to ‘shred’ on a guitar, like the lead guitarist you were listening to. Or maybe you were listening to some artist on the piano and you wished that you could play the piano like that. What usually holds the average person back is what I call the ‘myths’ that abound in and around music. They mostly exist around learning music, since anyone who has succeeded in mastering an instrument has learned the falsehood of these myths. One of the most prevalent myths is that you need to have ‘talent’ to play an instrument and, if you don’t, well, just forget about it. The other very prevalent myth is that you need great sacrifice and must spend years and many hours a day to learn an instrument. The third thing that really messes people up is tying into some really bad teaching ideas. What do I mean by this? Well, learning an instrument is really no different than learning any other sort of skill. I like to compare...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Manage Returns Efficiently while maintaining Profitability

Why is Managing Returns Important? Returns can have a significant impact on your ROI (return on investment) if you do not manage them efficiently. As of August 2024, the average eCommerce return rate was 26.4%, according to CapitalOne Research . Customers returned $248 billion in online sales in 2023.  In this post, you will learn ways to manage returns efficiently while maintaining profitability and also how to turn this into a winning situation for your eCommerce company. How a company manages its returns immediately affects its relationship with its customers and can determine whether they become repeat customers or go somewhere else to buy. This is why customers return time and time again to companies like Amazon; because of their transparent return policies and strict adherence to them. How Returns Affect ROI Obviously you are looking at the profit lost on the item being immediately returned but you must also factor in all other related expenses such as return shipping, proces...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Is Alternative Rock?

What Is Alternative Rock Music? This is a rather interesting case history as Alternative Rock was a direct response to what was seen, at that time, as the commercialization of Rock and Pop music. I have previously posted articles on this blog having to do with what was originally a counter culture effort being seized and utilized by business interests. This was simply big business recognising that a market existed in the supposed youth culture and effectively attacking it to the point where the youth culture reigned supreme and other age groups became marginalized. Alternative Rock can properly be considered a subgenre of basic Rock n’ Roll. It began in the nineteen seventies and became more popular in the eighties and nineties. Some of the groups that got the ball rolling, so to speak, were R.E.M., The Smiths and Nirvana. Wikipedia has a very detailed article about this era.  In defining what they were doing, Alternative Rock groups introduced different other musical elements int...
Post a Comment
Read more