Sunday, 20 September 2015

Recording the path to now

When I was very young, primary school young, I used to hear an old cousin ranting on about the Beatles. She even had a glossy, green beetle medallion  that I remember clearly on a chain around neck, but the Beatles were all a vague mystery to me until many years later.

The BBC News story "The Beatles' first record contract sells for $75,000" tells how the Beatles first ever recording contract was for the song that got the interest of Brian Epstein, who quickly became their manager and led the English group to success (2015). According to the story, the group were working in nightclubs in Germany at the time, the early 1960s, and that first contract has just sold for $75,000 in New York.

Although I studied the flute for a while, music has never really been one of my passions, and as primary and high school student, I was much more interested in science, mathematics, and literature: I just didn't have time for music, and almost never listened to it. I guess it made me seem a bit odd at school, especially in high school, when everyone around me would talk about their musical favourites, and it seemed especially cool to love the Beatles, also Bob Dylan and other now ancient greats like Cat Stevens. This was before the time of Micheal Jackson, Madonna, and all that modern stuff, and way before the rise of Lady Gaga, who is the last famous one whose name comes to mind. One of my oldest friends in Bangkok, who I got to know well years earlier in Sydney, is now the manager who brings mega-stars to perform in Bangkok - I notice on his Facebook postings that recent splashes have included Bon Jovi (I've heard the name) and some new group (?) called Stamp. At least I'm familiar with Madonna, whom he's bringing out next year. But I'll skip her concerts, too.

I guess towards the end of high school I started to become interested in music. Actually, that's not an accurate memory, because I when I was in primary school, I did love singing old Australian folk songs, and I remember being fascinated listening to The Seekers, a great Australian group, performing live on TV - and that must have been when I was still in primary school. In fact, when I just checked on YouTube, The Seeker's farewell concert, which is the YouTube clip I've added above, was in 1968 - so I must have been hearing and loving them before that. So, now you know what my earliest passion in popular music was, and The Seekers truly were popular: despite the break up in 1968, they reformed and went on to record a lot more. For comparison, here's another YouTube offering, this one almost 50 years (that's right, half a century) after the one above.


And as I wrote about it, I was also having series doubt about my memories of my trendy cousin's beetle Beatles medallion - maybe I've conflated that memory with my memories of the glossy winged beetles that flew around my parents' property at dusk when I was at collecting lots of memories decades ago. But YouTube is a very reliable way to bring back memories.
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Reference
The Beatles' first record contract sells for $75,000. (2015, September 20). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34306291

2 comments:

  1. I did warn you in my lead in paragraph that "the Beatles were all a vague mystery to me," although as I was writing my response to the BBC News article, it went way more off topic than I'd expected. (I was never actually planning to write much about the Beatles apart from the summary paragraph and a few links between the three parts of this blog post responding to the BBC News story.)

    I think I succeeded very well in not being limited to one topic here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And if you look at it, the URL link to this blog post also reveals that there was a different initial title. After I'd published it, it was so very different to what I had originally thought I might write that I also decided I needed to revise the title to better fit the finished response to the news story.

      But we expect these sorts of largely spontaneous pieces of writing to diverge, sometimes a lot, from what we started with. And this one certainly did.

      Delete

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