I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together…
It’s impossible to properly describe the delightful (and disorienting) effect this song had on my nine-year old mind. I didn’t understand it; I understood it perfectly. It took me to a place I never wanted to leave and, to a certain extent, I’ve created an existence to ensure I leave “that place” as seldom as possible.
Life is all about timing, of course, and it was the late ’70s when “Beatlemania” (the album) was all the rage, and I –at the most impressionable time possible– got swept up in the Fab Four vortex. Obsession ensued and, as most of my friends of a certain age will recall, this was an era when one simply…did not get immediate access to an artist’s catalog, particularly if you were not yet 10 years old and didn’t have money. So it was one treasure trove at a time (the “Blue Album” became my Holy Grail and acquiring that vinyl remains among my all-time favorite memories) and then it was one album at a time (back in an era when one waited for holidays or birthdays, or the accrual of allowance money, which could take *months*). A ‘Revolver’ here, an ‘Abbey Road’ there; stealing my old man’s copy of ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ making a cassette recording of my best friend’s parents’ copy of ‘The White Album,’ etc.
Coincidentally, it was right around the time I was reading Edgar Allan Poe for the first time, so being preoccupied with this song, which mentions EAP, was about as cool and mind-blowing as it got, at least for me, circa 1979. I had no idea what psychedelic meant (I had no idea what anything meant) but even I could identify that these sounds, those words, that *feeling* were different; like it or leave it (my sister and long-suffering parents mostly left it) you knew –you still know– this is art from and for another place. It still confounds, challenges, and delights me. And proof that art acquits itself and is its own best spokesperson: I can listen to this, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and especially “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and the impact –apprehending what avant-garde means even if descriptive words are unsatisfactory; the ears never lie– still disorients and delights me. It still sounds impossibly fresh, even ahead of its time, because it exists outside time, like the most perfect art does.
Eternal props to Paul McCartney and oft-underappreciated maestro George Martin for helping compile these bits and pieces into something far greater than the sum of its surreal parts; sonic colors shot through the spectrum.
As I got older I realized that Lennon was (at least partially) taking the piss, deliberately singing gibberish to F with the fans and critics, but it’s almost beside the point. A non-genius can do the same thing (indeed, non-geniuses do it as a matter of course) and it will be uninteresting, flat, forgettable.
There is NOTHING forgettable here, and as the tension ratchets up (“man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe…”) it *still* gives me a shiver of delight and surprise. And maybe even a bit of fear; awe of a place only the greatest amongst us can access –no matter the cost to their minds– and how fortunate we are to receive the gifts of their brilliance. Their art. I think of that, and many other things, on the sad occasion of Lennon’s passing, 45 years ago.
