The Beatles: '88

With the release of remastered albums and entry into the world of music video games via RockBand there's renewed hype about a band that broke up over thirty years ago. The Beatles are all over the radio and TV once again. Back in junior high school they were my favorite band. I don’t remember exactly how I got into their music, but it must have started with listening to oldies on AM radio, and hearing about the British invasion that started in the sixties with their clean cut suites and Mod hair cuts. As a kid I was drawn to them because they did not fit into my world. They were foreign on every level. They were white, English, and before my time. I wasn’t even born when they broke up. Mine was a working class neighborhood that had slowly turned from all white, to mixed, to all black by the time I finished high school. The album "Thriller" came out when I was in the fourth or fifth grade and was all anyone talked about. My fifth grade teacher even tried to teach the dance sequence for the video to the class. Everyone wanted one of those tacky red leather jackets. You know the one I’m talking about. I’m certain I was the only kid, black, white, or blue who didn’t give a shit about Michael Jackson.

Listening to The Beatles was a strange way to rebel against life in the inner city. I lived in a world of corner stores and boarded up houses. Starting with the first grade, like must inner city kids I was bussed to an all white neighborhood to attend elementary school. At Ralph Waldo Emerson racism trickled down from the parents of the white kids whose neighborhood us black kids were shipped to. We were not welcome. It was made known that we needed to adjust to their semi-suburban world.

If you did not speak standard English the white kids had a habit of pointing out your mistakes and letting you know that your way of speaking was substandard. I resented that, and made a point to learn to speak like them and better than them. I must admit I was jealous that I didn't get to walk home for lunch and see my mom in the middle of the day much less see her after school.

Much of my time after school was in fact spent alone in the living room listening to records. I’m old enough to have owned records and I still miss putting the needle to vinyl and my ear the speakers to catch the warm crackles and pops, the stray guitar licks and coughs. I felt like I was the only one in the world who heard all that. Just as I was the only black kid in my classes. Music is tied to memory and all of my memories of the Beatles are tied to memories of time spent alone trying to figure out the lyrics to “I am the Walrus.”

I sold all of Beatles albums when I reached high school and discovered punk and alternative. I outgrew their over produced sound. "The White album," "Rubber Soul," "Abbey Road" and "Revolver" among others were happily turned over to a used record store for cash. Years later I bought "Revolver" on CD just for the sake of nostalgia. It wasn't the same. A large part of the process of listening to the music was handling the records, moving the needle back and forth, examining the cover art and flipping the cover back to front trying to find something new. That's when I regretted selling those records.

SKETCH BOOK

The line at the bottom says: They feed off of each other's insanity. It's a work in progress about the nature of cults and their leaders.

Here's two drawings of a strange piece of clay I found in the scrap bin at MIAD. I started drawing late, but always wanted to be one of the cool kids who could draw anything.