Archive for February, 2003

I have a suggestion for the Works Dep’t responsible for Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood. To understand this suggestion, you’ll need to see my barefoot walk over the famous Zebra crossing in November 2000. Not very impressive, eh?

Countless people have tried to recreate the Beatles’ crossing of Abbey Road in the last 30 or so years. Bear in mind that when the Beatles made their crossing, they had the traffic held up for them and, most importantly, the photographer was perched on a stepladder in the middle of the road. Not only had I not brought my stepladder with me on the plane from Canada, but I had to rely on the kindness of a stranger in my Beatles Walking Tour to take the picture.

Thus, even though I might have been willing myself to run into difficulties with the local constabulary in order to get a better shot, I couldn’t guarantee that this stranger would willingly risk his life for the cause of providing this website with a more authentic-looking photograph.

Instead, the stranger had to make his way to a rather small and distant island in the not-near-enough-by intersection. That, combined with his unfamiliarity with my autofocus, led to the poor result you have seen.

So, here’s my suggestion to the St. John’s Wood Works Dep’t or whomever it may concern:

Darren had the pleasure of touring the VW AutoStadt in Wolfsburg, Germany in the spring of 2001. Among many of the examples of historic VW’s on display was the VW Beetle on the cover of the Beatles Abbey Road album.

Since the locals who drive Abbey Road each day must surely by now be used to the crazy tourists constantly trotting back and forth over the famous stripes, barefoot, in white suits, black suits or jeans. And since this would include, for instance, North Americans who, not only don’t know how to use a Zebra crossing properly, don’t even know how to pronounce it. And since this is the most famous crosswalk in the world and these people aren’t going to go away even if the neighbourhood wants them to, couldn’t a small island with a raised platform be installed where the stepladder once stood? Sure, the tourists will be zipping back and forth across the road to get to it, but they do that anyway with the other unhelpfully located island. Just a thought.

And maybe while we’re at it, we could ask the museum in Wolfsburg, Germany to put the most famous white VW Beetle back in place.

Why it is possible that a boy born in England in 1959 came to be listening to the White Album for the first time only in his twenties I will describe some other time. But there I was, a university student travelling with the staffworker for the my university chapter of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship to a “retreat” weekend eight hours from my home in Thunder Bay, Ontario, (Canada). Grant had already turned me on to Dylan, whom I had previously and ignorantly considered only as a protest non-singer. But Grant, ten years older than me, I guess, grew up in the sixties and apparently actually remembered them. A lanky tofu-eating tree of a man with very little of his face visible in the middle of his bushy hair and beard, he considered me, I suppose, a likely convert to those hippy drug-smoking musicians I had somehow missed in my childhood Gilbert and Sullivan phase.

And so on the way to our Evangelical Christian retreat, he popped his double cassette version of the White Album into his car stereo, asking if I had ever heard it before. Frankly, I don’t think I’d even heard of it. At that point I was familiar only with the Red and the Blue albums and so such songs as “Dear Prudence” and “Honey Pie” (and “Wild Honey Pie”!!) revealed surprisingly new sides of the B’s to me.

I don’t remember every reaction I had (Hey it was a long time ago) but I do remember being confused, amused and I’d say spooked by “Revolution 9″. Over the years I have continued to be spooked by it, especially using my reversible turntable alone at night. It really does sound like “Turn me on, dead man”!!!

I do remember Grant (not a B’s expert) mistakenly concluding that “Why don’t we do it in the road?” must have been John’s song, because of its simplistic crudity, caricaturing John as the cynical, rude Beatle and Paul as the nice, cuddly one. Yeah, right!

I didn’t really “get” “Why don’t we…?” at the time or Rev. 9 or several other tracks. Actually, I was so naïf at the time that I’m not sure I knew what it was they were doing in the road anyway — playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand?” (Too much Gilbert and Sullivan.)

But here’s the thing: One of my favourite sections of the Anthology videos is the debate over whether the WA should have been condensed to only one disc (or perhaps to two single-disc albums). Now that I feel I do “get” Rev. 9 and “Why don’t we…?” I can think of too many songs I’d definitely want to keep in the WA to fit on one LP. Here they are: USSR, Ob-Bla-Di, Guitar Weeps, So Tired, Blackbird, Piggies, Rocky (of course!!), Why don’t we, I Will, Birthday, Yer Blues, Helter Skelter, Rev. 1 and 9, Honey Pie, Cry Baby Cry and even Good Night.

Now as you reel in disbelief over some of the cuts I’ve made, let me say that it’s not that I’d really want to lose completely some of the other songs, such as Glass Onion, Bungalow Bill and Sexy Sadie either.

I could live without Long, Long, Long and Savoy Truffle. Sorry, George.

Anyway, I’m sure that you would object to many of my choices and would have choices of your own. Not only that, I haven’t even begun to consider how my song choices might be arranged into two albums. (Not that they were likely to have asked a nine year kid living in Canada anyway.) And then there are your choices — and his choices — and her choices — and Grant’s choices — and —

As Paul says in Anthology with a dismissive wave of his hand: “It’s the bloody Beatles White Album. Shut up!”