Post by JoJo on Apr 17, 2004 11:50:00 GMT -5
From The Wall Street Journal (of all places) June 19, 1987
I remember hiding it in a brown paper bag on my way home from the record store because I didn't want the inquisitive kids in the neighborhood to find out I had purchased "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." I was afraid they would think I had "betrayed" my black friends and classmates by buying a Beatles album. That was 20 years ago this month. I was not yet 14 and living astride two different worlds -- one white, one black -- each populated by closed minds. As for my mind, "Sgt. Pepper" left it permanently stuck on open.
The Beatles, of course, had been immensely popular ever since they burst on the scene in 1964. But none of my black classmates, who were in the minority in my junior high school in the north Bronx, would admit that this music existed, much less made a difference.
A black kid's social order then could not include anything white -- no Beach Boys, no off-brand sneakers, no Robert Frost, no polyester, no singing along to love songs written by white boys like the Beatles for white girls. There were better things to have: the Four Tops, for instance, or the jump-shot or, for a few, the first unfocused stirrings of black pride and black rage that would pour forth in some city every summer.
The white kids' social order was just as distinct, of course. Though I think I was popular, I was invited to the home of only one white classmate in three years. I never saw the inside of the beach club on Long Island Sound that I heard some of them speak about on Mondays.
When I became friend and math tutor to a white classmate, my black classmates hurled taunts and reminders about who my friends were supposed to be. And when my white friend turned me on to the Beatles, and I defended them, I felt the hostility of some of my black friends and received the accusation that meant excommunication: white boy.
They couldn't abide my listening to a different drummer -- especially not Ringo Starr, who played music you couldn't dance the Boston Monkey to. Ringo was my second-favorite Beatle, after Paul McCartney, who was No. 1 with me because he wrote many of the lyrics I would soon turn to when I needed a friend.
One day in late spring shortly before the release of "Sgt. Pepper," I was taking more than the usual ribbing for my clothes, which, try as I might, never conformed to what was "fly," what black kids today call "fresh." It was my hat that was all wrong this time. It was a secondhand version of the then-required cashmere cap -- only mine wasn't cashmere and, worst of all, had a snap where there wasn't supposed to be one.
To put me in my place, my chief tormentor, a boy who could become enraged by my use of precise English, snatched my unacceptable cap from my head and threw it on the tracks as we waited for the train. Other kids urged me to retaliate in kind, but of course I didn't. I was afraid of the boy and he knew it.
Humiliated and near tears, I watched the Lexington Avenue Express roll over my hat. It hurt as much as all the invitations I never received from my white classmates. For the first time, I didn't follow the crowd onto the train and I resolved that I would always have somewhere to retreat to any time I had to get away from such dull-minded cruelty. I found such a place that very month, with four minstrels in psychedelic garb.
And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong
I'm right,
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong.
See the people standing there
who disagree and never win.
And wonder why they don't get in my door.
Looking back, I see that I took the world and myself pretty seriously for an almost 14-year-old. Other Beatles fans who also find this 20th anniversary poignant probably were well into high school or college, along with shaving, sex and cigarettes in 1967. All I had done was puffed some Kools. But when I went home alone from school and put "Lucy in the Sky" into orbit with the amplifier cranked to full blast, I was in the same space as my elders in Berkeley and Greenwich Village. And I swear I knew immediately what the Beatles were saying, and what they were predicting about our time.
I knew there was alienation and miscommunication so profound that we'd all be leaving home one day, just like in the song. Some of us might visit lands of "tangerine trees and marmalade skies," and decide that dreams are as valid a place to dwell as anywhere else -- for a while, at least.
And yet I knew that while many things in my world might change radically, some things -- leaden intolerance, for example -- would persist. "A Day in the Life" told me that I was going to have to live with that knowledge. Twenty years to the day of the album's release, while brushing my teeth, I heard that the prime minister of Lebanon was blown up in his helicopter. The State Department handled it with a press release.
I read the news today, oh boy. . . .
He blew his mind out in a car. . . .
A crowd of people stood and stared
They'd seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.
Then the Beatles chanted, "I'd love to turn you on" -- to the chagrin of moral authorities world-wide. But I knew that with that phrase -- the last one of the last song of that trip-taking album -- the Beatles were only being polite. They may have turned me on, but they couldn't reach enough of the world's intolerant to prevent Martin Luther King's murder the next year or Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami's death this year.
The white girl I tutored in math now teaches in our old junior high. She told me, just as I suspected in 1967, that not much has changed. Oh, the school is home for a lot more black and Hispanic students now, as is the neighborhood. And most everyone says it has "gone down," as they said it was going down when I was there, maybe because I was there.
Her white students defend themselves with heavy-metal rock, she says, and fearsome costumes to match. The blacks use rap and hip-hop music. The music on the radio stations is still neatly categorized by race. Because these kids ignore each other, one day one of them might mistake another for a criminal on the subway or an easy mark for mugging and shoot before getting acquainted.
We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth -- then it's far too late -- when they pass away.
Still, after all these years, I cling to the notion that "Sgt. Pepper" held out a promise to anyone who would listen. Anyone could join the band, even if there was only one black face on the famous album cover (Sonny Liston in the left corner). It's like Christianity, where black Jesuses are few and far between but everyone is presumed welcome.
"Sgt. Pepper" was Western as a seaside cottage on the Isle of Wight; Eastern as the atonal droning crescendo of George Harrison's sitars; urban as Lovely Rita, meter-maid; timeless as the hope that someone will still love us when we're 64 -- if we don't get killed first.
I was only almost 14 but I knew that if I lived, unlike my junior high tormentor who I'm told died in the street, I would always opt for change inside, even if the world persisted in staying the same.
"Fixing a Hole" and "A Day in the Life," words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; "Within You Without You," words and music by George Harrison. 1967 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada and Mexico controlled and administered by Blackwood Music Inc. Under license from ATV Music (MACLEN). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
---
Mr. Wynter is a reporter in the Journal's New York bureau.
I remember hiding it in a brown paper bag on my way home from the record store because I didn't want the inquisitive kids in the neighborhood to find out I had purchased "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." I was afraid they would think I had "betrayed" my black friends and classmates by buying a Beatles album. That was 20 years ago this month. I was not yet 14 and living astride two different worlds -- one white, one black -- each populated by closed minds. As for my mind, "Sgt. Pepper" left it permanently stuck on open.
The Beatles, of course, had been immensely popular ever since they burst on the scene in 1964. But none of my black classmates, who were in the minority in my junior high school in the north Bronx, would admit that this music existed, much less made a difference.
A black kid's social order then could not include anything white -- no Beach Boys, no off-brand sneakers, no Robert Frost, no polyester, no singing along to love songs written by white boys like the Beatles for white girls. There were better things to have: the Four Tops, for instance, or the jump-shot or, for a few, the first unfocused stirrings of black pride and black rage that would pour forth in some city every summer.
The white kids' social order was just as distinct, of course. Though I think I was popular, I was invited to the home of only one white classmate in three years. I never saw the inside of the beach club on Long Island Sound that I heard some of them speak about on Mondays.
When I became friend and math tutor to a white classmate, my black classmates hurled taunts and reminders about who my friends were supposed to be. And when my white friend turned me on to the Beatles, and I defended them, I felt the hostility of some of my black friends and received the accusation that meant excommunication: white boy.
They couldn't abide my listening to a different drummer -- especially not Ringo Starr, who played music you couldn't dance the Boston Monkey to. Ringo was my second-favorite Beatle, after Paul McCartney, who was No. 1 with me because he wrote many of the lyrics I would soon turn to when I needed a friend.
One day in late spring shortly before the release of "Sgt. Pepper," I was taking more than the usual ribbing for my clothes, which, try as I might, never conformed to what was "fly," what black kids today call "fresh." It was my hat that was all wrong this time. It was a secondhand version of the then-required cashmere cap -- only mine wasn't cashmere and, worst of all, had a snap where there wasn't supposed to be one.
To put me in my place, my chief tormentor, a boy who could become enraged by my use of precise English, snatched my unacceptable cap from my head and threw it on the tracks as we waited for the train. Other kids urged me to retaliate in kind, but of course I didn't. I was afraid of the boy and he knew it.
Humiliated and near tears, I watched the Lexington Avenue Express roll over my hat. It hurt as much as all the invitations I never received from my white classmates. For the first time, I didn't follow the crowd onto the train and I resolved that I would always have somewhere to retreat to any time I had to get away from such dull-minded cruelty. I found such a place that very month, with four minstrels in psychedelic garb.
And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong
I'm right,
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong.
See the people standing there
who disagree and never win.
And wonder why they don't get in my door.
Looking back, I see that I took the world and myself pretty seriously for an almost 14-year-old. Other Beatles fans who also find this 20th anniversary poignant probably were well into high school or college, along with shaving, sex and cigarettes in 1967. All I had done was puffed some Kools. But when I went home alone from school and put "Lucy in the Sky" into orbit with the amplifier cranked to full blast, I was in the same space as my elders in Berkeley and Greenwich Village. And I swear I knew immediately what the Beatles were saying, and what they were predicting about our time.
I knew there was alienation and miscommunication so profound that we'd all be leaving home one day, just like in the song. Some of us might visit lands of "tangerine trees and marmalade skies," and decide that dreams are as valid a place to dwell as anywhere else -- for a while, at least.
And yet I knew that while many things in my world might change radically, some things -- leaden intolerance, for example -- would persist. "A Day in the Life" told me that I was going to have to live with that knowledge. Twenty years to the day of the album's release, while brushing my teeth, I heard that the prime minister of Lebanon was blown up in his helicopter. The State Department handled it with a press release.
I read the news today, oh boy. . . .
He blew his mind out in a car. . . .
A crowd of people stood and stared
They'd seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.
Then the Beatles chanted, "I'd love to turn you on" -- to the chagrin of moral authorities world-wide. But I knew that with that phrase -- the last one of the last song of that trip-taking album -- the Beatles were only being polite. They may have turned me on, but they couldn't reach enough of the world's intolerant to prevent Martin Luther King's murder the next year or Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami's death this year.
The white girl I tutored in math now teaches in our old junior high. She told me, just as I suspected in 1967, that not much has changed. Oh, the school is home for a lot more black and Hispanic students now, as is the neighborhood. And most everyone says it has "gone down," as they said it was going down when I was there, maybe because I was there.
Her white students defend themselves with heavy-metal rock, she says, and fearsome costumes to match. The blacks use rap and hip-hop music. The music on the radio stations is still neatly categorized by race. Because these kids ignore each other, one day one of them might mistake another for a criminal on the subway or an easy mark for mugging and shoot before getting acquainted.
We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth -- then it's far too late -- when they pass away.
Still, after all these years, I cling to the notion that "Sgt. Pepper" held out a promise to anyone who would listen. Anyone could join the band, even if there was only one black face on the famous album cover (Sonny Liston in the left corner). It's like Christianity, where black Jesuses are few and far between but everyone is presumed welcome.
"Sgt. Pepper" was Western as a seaside cottage on the Isle of Wight; Eastern as the atonal droning crescendo of George Harrison's sitars; urban as Lovely Rita, meter-maid; timeless as the hope that someone will still love us when we're 64 -- if we don't get killed first.
I was only almost 14 but I knew that if I lived, unlike my junior high tormentor who I'm told died in the street, I would always opt for change inside, even if the world persisted in staying the same.
"Fixing a Hole" and "A Day in the Life," words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; "Within You Without You," words and music by George Harrison. 1967 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada and Mexico controlled and administered by Blackwood Music Inc. Under license from ATV Music (MACLEN). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
---
Mr. Wynter is a reporter in the Journal's New York bureau.
