I am a fierce Beatles fan and have been since about 9th grade when my best friend, Marci, and I started listening to the double record my folks had. We didn’t have a record player that even worked back them. I remember my Dad borrowed one from the library at the high school (he teaches school there). Marci sat in my bedroom and listened to it over and over and wrote down the lyrics in an attempt to memorize them. We also started a list of all the songs we had. Hey, we had to start somewhere.

We were poor teenagers and couldn’t afford to buy music. We spread the word around school that we wanted Beatles music. Our friends brought us the records their parents had left over from their youth. We were bad and totally copied the records onto tapes. The quality was horrible, as you can imagine, but for some reason we felt this was the only “correct” way to hear their music. I guess sort of like the way it was intended.

Over the years we gained quite a collection of Beatles music, as well as Beatles posters, Beatles t-shirts (that we made in my Dad’s Graphic Arts class), and read any book about the Beatles we could find in our small town library. We liked to think of ourselves as “Beatle Experts”. We knew all about how their manager, Brian Epstien, had fallen in love with John and about how Paul lived with his teenage girlfriend, but never married her. We knew about the hidden messages in their songs and what you heard if you played them backwards. We totally bought into all the hype and loved it.

(As I type this post, “Eleanor Rigby” started to play on my random setting on my player. Perfect timing.)

I am a Paul fan, through and through. Marci was the John fan. But I know that there is no Paul without John. They were amazing together. (The proof is in their solo work…yuck!)

And although The Beatles broke up before I was even born (my Mom was pregnant with me when they broke up, but Marci WAS actually alive while The Beatles were together, a fact that she held over my head all the time), I love them. They define me and my high school years. The definitely define my relationship with Marci(who I am still close with today).

In case you live in a cave, you might have missed that today is the 25 anniversary of the day John Lennon was killed. I will be thinking of him today, better yet, I will be thinking about Marci and high school and the good times I had because of The Beatles.

And to steal a line from ABBA, “thank you for the music.”