NaBloPoMo Has Me Writing About Crushes. WTF!
The prompt for today has me thinking back to when I was, hmm, let me see… Revolver came out in what year? 1966. August 5th to be exact. So I was 9 years old. I’d listened to other Beatles albums and 45s at a fairly well off friend’s house.
I know I listened to Rubber Soul there in her family’s rec room that abutted the furnace room and would have been called a basement in anyone else’s home, except for the long bank of windows that gave an amazingly expansive view of a beautiful deep lake in Northeastern Indiana. It wasn’t a basement in the typical sense as if you took the stairwell to the north side of the room it took you down past an entrance to a racquet-ball court at the bottom just before you exited the house at the base of the hill out of which the house seemed to grow. It was really a house that was on the top of a very big hill on the shore of a lake with one side of the basement wall exposed.
I also listened to Leaving on a Jet Plane, and Ballad of the Green Beret with her there. I played there several times and attended slumber parties there. Her mom was really nice and told me that she had once been a concert pianist in Mexico City. These people were so out of my league socially and economically that it was only the small size of our public school that allowed me to ever cross paths with them. But I liked the girl and loved the music collection that had probably been put together by her older siblings. Back then having a well off friend to visit was the Baby Boomer version of having an mp3 player.
So that is where I became acquainted with the music of the Fab Four.
I knew of them much earlier. I remember being in the living room and looking up over the top of my toy box at the TV Nightly News and seeing them descend from a plane after landing in the United States. They were special. I could see it.
The first album I ever saved enough money to buy, and was allowed to purchase, was Revolver. How my mother would not let me buy a copy of Two Virgins is for another day. I spent so many afternoons alone in my room in the upstairs of an old farm-house daydreaming about the future while listening to this album play on a little old record player, it was NOT a stereo, as the needle scraped away against the vinyl.
So it had to be around this time that I had my first erotic dream although I didn’t know enough about anything to really have it be erotic. In the dream, I was at a lake, a different one from where my friend lived; It was green, calm, and there were beautiful trees with mossy, low hanging branches. There was a row-boat, an old-fashioned, wooden, row-boat. It was not big enough for the Fab Four and me, but we all climbed in any way, and floated about the lake as though we were in some Victorian painting. It was so pastoral, romantic, and polyamorous. There was nothing overtly sexual about the dream, unless you consider Freudian symbology to be sexual. But it shall we say switched on the romantic circuitry in my brain.
I never did make up my mind which Beatle-boy I liked best, but John was my favorite bad boy. George was my political crush. And Paul’s cuteness was well… dreamy.
Later on when I was much older, like in 6th or 7th grade, I developed a thing for Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders. And my first crush for a real boy, well, that is for another post, maybe. It’s complicated.
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