beatles

June 11, 2002 by krisis

I woke up from surgery almost exactly eight days ago, and at the time i couldn’t feel any part of my mouth. The state of affairs made it nearly impossible to talk much or open my mouth up too far. Furthermore, as i’ve found in the past, i am an absolutely headcase when i come out of anesthesia – i’m very sensitive to small stimuli.

There i was, Monday morning without a fairly useless body part that i had grown to utterly despise, unable to talk, and wearing a dotted dressing gown. From somewhere down the hall music wafted past, and my softened brain sucked it in like a sponge. “Here Comes The Sun” was recognized immediately, though i couldn’t even begin to approximate the process of humming along. Instead, i immediately turned to my somewhat distraught mother and exclaimed “It’s okay mom, George Harrison is here with me.”

My mother apparently took my accompaniment by a blessed Beatle to mean that i was moving towards the light, and thus became even more upset. Of course, being a mother whose sensitivity to art was washed away by the brutal reign of the television and trickle-through exposure to N’Sync singles, she had already forgotten that my secondary reason for being so upset the last time i was in the hospital for a procedure was that George had just died.

I explained it to her later: Obviously he’s become my guardian angel

Her response? Something about a flying Beatle.

Har har, mom. Har har.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85160576/

March 20, 2002 by krisis

There is a mutiny building in my fingers; a resistance is gathering between my knuckles and around my wrists. They are not used to this sort of treatment… five hours of playing songs that i don’t have the option to fudge … songs that sound only how they sound. Towards the end my fingers were on automatic, picking out strings without my even having to think of it, but in the middle they were clumsy and tired as the muscles in my arms sighed with exertion.

There was a power to it — to making other people’s songs sound how they were meant, and to making my own songs sound out like i hear them in my own head. Kat sat on the bed mostly non-plussed, pecking away at her laptop, but Laurel seemed to be in a mild form of shock. And i… i wasn’t even in the room. The songs had filled it beyond its capacity to hold me.

Fingers aside, my voice amazed me. After having barely mustered up enough of it to power through my jury last week, imagine my surprise as it rose to the top of the staff and i was still hitting clean notes, open throated and howling. Sometimes a song finds one spectacular note inside of itself that my voice is attracted to like a moth to flame, willing to burn itself around the edges just to hit that one note and hold hold hold hold it over the four chords in the progression.

There is definitely a Trio brewing around here, somewhere.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75024430/

December 5, 2001 by krisis

I have been hearing the Beatles my entire life — first on the record player as a baby, and then on long trips to the shore on our cruddy Past Masters tape, and then on shiny new see-through cassettes of Abbey Road and The White Album. There are constants in my life; everyone has constants. Even the most unstable and unable people i know have things they can always turn to, or that they will always turn to.

The parking lot at Kiddie City Toy Store, and Ringo sings “Octopus’ Garden.” I am playing “Name That Beatle.” We are crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge to New Jersey and Paul and Mom and I are wailing “Oh Darling” so hard that our voice is cracking around the edges as one. We are zooming down the Atlantic City Expressway and Lennon croons out from carefully nested speakers “I’m So Tired” as i lazily stick my feet out of the window.

“I’m so tired.”

The wind dug between all of my toes as i laughed and sank my head back into the seat. The drive to WildWood was always longer on the way there than coming back. I was always so busy trying to decide if it was John and Lennon singing that half the time i missed George. George: the quiet one. My mom loves Paul with all of her teenaged heart, but on the way home she would confess to me conspiratorially that she’s always had a soft spot for Mr. Harrison. “The ugly one?,” i would ask? “With those cheekbones?” “Does he play the second guitar?”

My mother denies the existence of Middle Beatles and will glare at you icily if you mention Let It Be, so she first was eyes at George Harrison with his bowl cut and then sliding around in the midsts of his delicate guitars as his songs grew more and more central to the end records. My entire life it has been just the two of us, and just the three of them: Paul, George, and Ringo — because we didn’t have poor dead John around anymore.

At fifteen i got my guitar, and it never occurred to me to play anything by the Fab Four. The Beatles were more than the sum of their parts, and to this day i still can’t quite distill any of their songs to a single guitar and voice. But, my guitar was a door to things i had never heard before. Paul’s deft bass lines. Lennon’s funky solos. Ringo’s amazing drumming on the back half of Abbey Road. George’s stunningly simple “Something,” and Clapton adding to the throb of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I listened to the Beatles for my entire life as a phenomenon … as if they would walk into a room and music would just happen. It wasn’t until i got to college that it occurred to me that they all brought their own distinct musical merits to the table, and that you could pick them out one by one if you listened closely. A McCartney song, but a Harrison Riff. A Lennon vocal with that twelve-string chiming in the background.

I never owned a Beatles record of my own before yesterday other than the sad red #1 that exists as a placeholder for albums i’ll eventually have to own as an adult, and for two albums i know as well as “Lucky Star” or “Still Rock and Roll to Me.” I know them: the songs, the lyrics. I never knew the music before, though. Yesterday i locked myself in an empty house, in an empty room, and i turned my headphones as high as they would go. And listened.

At twenty I heard the Beatles for the first time.

At twenty i have suddenly found myself with only two of them left. I will always remember sitting on Michella’s couch in July and seeing TWA 800 emblazoned across the screen of Good Morning America, and i will always remember sitting in admissions desperately trying to load up CNN’s website this September. And, i will always remember myself curled into a ball on that rubbery hospital bed, trailing IV tubes and sniffling back tears because i didn’t want anyone to think i was crying about me.

I wasn’t.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7656082/

September 18, 2001 by krisis

10. There is a bass throb just slightly slower than the shallow breaths of “Precious Things” and a guitar that sounds more like one tinny note being rapidly pitch-shifted than anything being humanly manipulated. First we are reminded of just what a gun is… to America, and (forebodingly) to John Lennon.

As a child i was never sure of what i was supposed to think of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” … it seems to be directed at a woman, but it is about one at the same time. Is she happiness, or does she have her hands on the weapon? Tori deconstructs this Beatles classic as she moves through the composition… substituting her own chords and changes as she trips backwards and then forwards through the lyrics, and just as suddenly launching back into the McCartney/Lennon arrangement verbatim. Lennon’s nonsense suddenly turns into a too-personal carnal kind of knowlege of this girl, who is impossibly well-acquainted because she hardly misses a thing.

The rearrangement here is probably the strongest on the album, and if you can get past the narration by Tori’s father, the George Bushes, and the radio announcing Lennon’s death, you might be able to enjoy the song; it is “Datura”-like in length and scope, but immediately more coherent because Tori keeps herself separate from the background so that it can really just be scenery instead of pulling focus. And, as Tori departs from the script on keys and vocally the guitar starts quoting the White Album lick until she is back in the saddle. She doesn’t even approach the waltzing “i need a fix” bridge to the song until nearly the end, and in this order it makes more sense… although the fix could be a fix on guns or just a fix for the narrator. She draws this familiar piece out across the trancey backgrounds and solid beats from Chamberlain until she finally launches back into the “mother superior” phrases that eventually lead the song to its end.

So, if happiness is a warm gun, have we already fired?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774179/

August 25, 2001 by krisis

My mother can be very amusing when not taken in large amounts, but if you introduce any sort of negative energy in between us it just bounces back and forth and eventually we’re just like an amplifier overloading with feedback and blowing out. But, the inbetween bits are more side-splitting than ear-spitting.

Specifically, there was the two of us sitting on the floor in front of our stereo singing the harmony to “Band on the Run” (even though she’s been a snob about Wings for as long as i can remember) (and, also, us doing the flip-out vocals to “Oh, Darling” later in the car because, yes, we are Paul McCartney addicts), my showing her how to operate the self-checkout lane in Superfresh (and saying “Okay, rolls, *dramatic pause* this is where it gets a little complicated”), watching her trying to coax my cat out from under my bed because he forgets who i am (“It’s Peter, the one who used to squeeze you and chase you and torment you a lot. You remember him, don’t you?” “We’re trying to get him to come out, mom.”), her shocked (and amusing) exclamation of “And exactly how am i supposed to make breaded eggplant parmigiana without eggs?” when i asked if we could have Rabi over to eat something credibly Italian, and especially this introductory exchange:

Peter – [incredulously] When did you get so… blonde?

Mom – [blithely] And your hair is so dark! And curly! Did you dye it?

Peter – [sweetly] Nice to see that you’ve managed to forget what i look like while you were down the shore for two months. Did you at least bring me back some salt water taffy?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5287048/