LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, They say that time flies when you’re having a good time! Looking at the calendar, I guess it does, and I guess I am.
Why the retrospection? It’s easy. I just read that George Harrison would have been 83 years old this week. Eighty three! When I first heard of him, he’d barely turned 20. And me? I was 13.
His was the third name in the magic Beatles mantra: John. Paul. George. And Ringo. I don’t remember it any other way. And if I say it any other way, it just doesn’t sound right. Although I always felt a little bad for Ringo because the “And Ringo” made him sound like something of an afterthought.
At the time, I had trouble telling them apart. All we had to go on in that first flush of what the newspapers and the DJs called Beatlemania were a few key photographs. There was the “blue” one on the front cover of their first album, “Meet the Beatles!” (As far as we were concerned, that other album, “Introducing the Beatles” just didn’t count. At the time, it didn’t have any songs we knew.)
My buddies and I talked a lot about that photo as we examined the album from every perspective at Woolworth’s record department. We just couldn’t understand why they looked so unhappy. As far as we could tell, they were on top of the world. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was riding the top of America’s hit parade. They were on the Ed Sullivan Show – three weeks in a row! Somehow, along with about four million other kids, I was able to scrape together the $2.97 I needed to buy the album. I think my Grandmother may have helped me a little bit with that; pocket change was a rare commodity among kids in my neighborhood.
To be fair, the photo on the back of the album caught the four of them in a better mood. There they were, standing in their official Beatle suits and pointy toed, Cubanheeled Beatle boots, smiling and looking like there was nowhere else they wanted to be. But as joyful as the picture was, it still seemed slightly off. The order was wrong. Instead of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, it was Paul, John, George, and Ringo. A small difference, but we noticed.
There was the same problem with the front cover of the record: it was John, George, Paul, and Ringo. And poor Ringo was on his own, pushed off to a bottom corner away from the other three. If they pushed him any further, he might have fallen off the cover completely.
As we debated what all of this meant – if it meant anything at all – we were also faced with the problem of which was the actual Beatles record. If imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, then there was a lot of flattery going on at the local record store. Flipping through the bins, we were faced with vinyl from groups that included the Liverpools, Beat-A-Mania, and the Beetle Beat.
Somehow, I was considered the expert because my Grandmother was from Liverpool (perhaps explaining her generosity when it came to helping me buy that first album). It didn’t seem to matter that she left England for the United States about 40 years before the Beatles were the Beatles. So I was actually considered “cool” for about ten minutes when I was in the eighth grade. With that distinction under my belt for the first and only time, my buddies looked at me to figure out which was the genuine article – which one was the actual Beatles record.
The poor record clerk wanted us to make a decision and get on our way. After all, it was Saturday afternoon, and she had other customers. Those were the days when the clerk would play your record over the store’s sound system before you paid for it to make sure it didn’t skip.
I insisted on being analytical about it. And that took time. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, but the team was relying on me. So I made it up as I went along. First, I picked up one album, probably the “Beetle Beat” – after all, it was by a band called the Buggs, and inspected the packaging closely. I focused on the track listing. A couple of the hits were there but so were far more songs that were mysteries to us. The clincher? When the record clerk played a cut, we heard nothing that resembled a British accent.
It was the same with the other ones – a few cover versions, some better than others and some, well, to be kind, not quite up to the job. But I had to be sure: three bucks was quite an investment. Finally, like Grampy coming up with an invention in a Betty Boop cartoon, a light bulb clicked on over my head: I checked the running time of the different singles and album versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Two of them matched, and it looked like they were by the same band – at least they spelled it the same way.
And the picture on the back of the album? They were the same guys, in the same suits, but in a different pose than on the single’s picture sleeve. We even figured out the names of the guys on the single by comparing their faces to the album version.
The good news? We didn’t get hoodwinked. It was an example of critical thinking at work – long before that was a “thing.” But it was more than that. This is where we get back to George Harrison, the Beatles’ lead guitarist. In that picture on the back of the album, all four of them are wearing the same suits and, to one extent or another, pegged pants, cut pretty narrow by the tailor. But George’s were pegged to what, at the time, was the perfect degree of “peggedness.”
Of course, being the rebellious 13-year-olds that we were, that’s what we all wanted. This was exactly what the principal and the sisters didn’t want us to have. Once the school switched to mandatory uniforms from a single source, they figured they had that problem licked. But one guy, my friend Pete, found a tailor that would sell us the uniform trousers and peg the pants, all at a price cheaper than the school uniform supplier.
You can imagine how that went over. The school wasn’t happy, but our parents loved the price. So the pegged pants? It wasn’t long before they were considered part of our official uniforms. And we can thank George Harrison for it. So, George, wherever you are, Happy Birthday!
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
