Verwandte Artikel zu Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles

Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles - Hardcover

Smith, Peter

 
9780618251452: Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0618251456 ISBN 13: 9780618251452
Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Before seven-year-old Sam Smith discovered the Beatles, he and his father had little in common. Like so many other kids his age, Sam was drawn first to the Fab Four by their trivia as much as by their music and personalities. Peter Smith was content to point Sam to all the clues of Paul McCartney’s putative demise, to reveal who "Julia" was, and so forth. But soon the Beatles opened the two Smiths to each other, and to a harmonious new friendship. They found themselves using the band’s songs and exploits to fuel discussions of life’s splendid complications -- friendship, teamwork, romance, art -- and its inevitable sorrows -- failure, betrayal, and mortality.
Music fans will delight in this singular celebration of the Beatles’ history and continuing cross-generational appeal. Smith takes us everywhere the Fab Four took him and Sam: from the boy’s Beatle-drenched bedroom to the circus of devotion that is Beatlefest to Paul McCartney’s childhood bedroom in a Liverpool row house. Ultimately, the two Smiths come to realize that the object of their affection transcends any facts that could ever be amassed about it. The Beatles’ essence isn’t in Liverpool or London or in heavily annotated lyric sheets. It is, of course, in their songs, and in how they help us understand ourselves and connect with each other.
With a wit and clarity reminiscent of of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, Smith limns the intensity of an obsession. And he evokes with wry intelligence the love a father and son can share.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Smith is a contributing editor for O, the Oprah Magazine and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, and Harper’s Bazaar. He has also written three novels, most recently A Good Family.

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1.
Meet the Beatles

My son—handsome, kind, tall for his age, with a stickler's way of talking and
a supernatural memory for raw data—was in the grip of his first-ever love
affair. Not with his homeroom teacher. Not with the little dark-haired girl down
the block. It wasn't a crush; crushes flowered in private, then wilted. It was
less creepy, surer-footed than any obsession. Nor was it exclusive—other
kids, I knew, shared his preoccupation.
No, more than three decades after their 1970 liquidation, Sam had
fallen in love with the Beatles, a band that had burned out less than a decade
after its founding, that had released only ten hours of music. In retrospect, it
was easy to see why Sam's seven-year-old mind had locked onto the
Beatles franchise, with its boyhood friendships and grownup squabbles, its
rivalries, love affairs, submarines, octopuses, silver hammers, newspaper
taxis, piggies, raccoons, meter maids, bulldogs, and shadowy Paul-is-dead
clues. Making lists—compiling and comparing by letter and category a little
slice of the world—has always seemed to me an especially male
preoccupation. The uninterrupted dream that is the Beatles universe lends
itself to endless poring over and mapping out. For Sam, it served as a way to
bring coherence to something elusive and overwhelming: music, and how it
made him feel; and life, as he was starting to understand what it gives and
grabs away from you.
Nowhere were the Beatles more obsessively alive than in Sam's
conversation, beginning first thing most weekday mornings and ending at
eight or nine at night. At around 7 a.m., he would pad into our bedroom, wrap
himself in a blanket, and lie stiffly breathing at the end of the bed, patiently
rehearsing and rearranging various lyrics, characters, and VH1 Behind the
Music storylines in his head. Then finally, it came out: "Dad—did you know
what Paul called 'Yesterday' when he was writing it?"
"No, I'm not sure," I said, still half asleep.
"'Scrambled Eggs.' He wrote it with the words, 'Scrambled eggs /
Oh, baby, how I love your legs.' Then he changed the title to 'Yesterday' later
on."
"Wow. I'm not sure 'Scrambled Eggs' would've worked out."
"Why would somebody love somebody else's legs?"
"It . . . happens."
Just as I was drifting back to sleep, the voice would blurt
again: "Dad?"
"Uh-huh . . . ?"
"You know John and Paul?"
"Uh-huh . . . ?"
"How many songs do you think Paul wrote, and how many songs
do you think John wrote—of all the songs the Beatles sang in all?"
"I don't know. Paul wrote thirty and John wrote thirty- five." Or the
other way around. Or not.
"Dad, you're wrong." A note of small-town-parade triumph in his
voice. "Paul wrote eighty-four point five-five percent of the Beatles songs.
John wrote seventy-three point six-five percent." Silence. "George wrote
twenty-two point one-five percent."
"Poor George. Third place again."
"How do you mean?"
"I just mean that sometimes the other Beatles weren't all that nice
to George."
"Why?"
"Age difference, mostly." George was younger than the others, I
reminded him, nearly two years younger than John. And George had
worshipped John back when the boys were teenagers in Liverpool, even trying
to tag along when John went on dates. "Remember, all four of them grew up
together, and when that happens, you get caught up in certain roles. No
matter how old you get—I bet you'll see this someday with your own sisters—
you don't ever forget who's older and who's the baby." Sam had two sisters,
ages six and four. "Your roles in your family don't really change over time,
even if you've changed. And the Beatles were kind of a family."
Already there were lessons Sam had picked up from the band.
Things I could teach him, or my wife, Maggie, could, using the Beatles as
real-life characters, stand-ins for guys everywhere.
But in the end, he would teach us more than we could ever teach
him: names, dates, working song titles, even the Liverpool bus routes Paul
and George took as adolescents. An excellent though reluctant piano
student, Sam's ears picked up little things in Beatles songs that my own
ears trampled and crushed—a near-imperceptible rattling at the end of "Long,
Long, Long," caused, Sam told me, by a half-drunk bottle of wine vibrating
atop the Leslie speaker in the Abbey Road studios ("Blue Nun," he clarified);
the swirling, geyserlike sound effects in "Yellow Submarine" deriving from
John blowing bubbles through a straw while George swished water around in
a bucket; the barely audible percussion in "Lovely Rita" caused by the
Beatles dragging metal hair combs through sheets of toilet paper; the
symphonic crescendo that caps off "A Day in the Life" culminating on the
chord of E major. I knew none of these things.
Eventually Sam would roll off the bed, and a few minutes later
from his bedroom, I'd hear the opening strains of "Taxman," the genial hook
of "We Can Work It Out," or John Lennon's elegantly acid vocal from "A Day
in the Life." It was like being sawed awake, and for the umpteenth time since
this had all started, I experienced a few tormented moments of self-doubt:
This was our fault, wasn't it? And it was OK, right?
"Could you turn that down a bit?" I'd yell, coming into his room to
help him mobilize. As he dressed for school, Sam casually explained to me
that Paul McCartney had written "Getting Better" during a walk in the park
with his sheepdog, Martha, and that John Lennon wrote "I'm So Tired" in
India, when he couldn't get to sleep. Oh, and did I know that Father
McKenzie from "Eleanor Rigby" was a stranger's last name that Paul swiped
from the London phone book (though he composed the song using the
working name "Father McCartney"), and that it was Ringo who came up with
the line "Darning his socks / in the night"?
It wasn't just Beatles data he knew cold. He was also casually
acquainted with the group's sidemen—Billy Preston playing the keyboards
on "Get Back," Eric Clapton donating a guitar solo as a favor to George
Harrison on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"—as well as with assorted
Beatles' cameo players, girlfriends, wives, and children: the Stu Sutcliffes
and Pete Bests, the Cynthias, Yokos, Maureens, Pattis, Lindas, Julians,
Stellas, and Heathers. He also knew the solo work each Beatle had put out
after the band dissolved, from Ram to All Things Must Pass to Sentimental
Journey to Double Fantasy.
His third-floor bedroom wasn't an all-American room. It was an all-
English room, lacking only a three-pronged outlet and a draft. Fab Four
memorabilia rushed at you as the door swung open. A Beatles '65 LP hung
on the near wall next to a faded print of Klaus Voorman's intricate Revolver
cover. An antique Beatles lunchbox sat hunched on his windowsill. Directly
across the room from his bed hung a two- by-three-foot blowup of the zebra-
crossing on the Abbey Road album cover. Taped to its bottom rim were two
dozen or so postcards of the Beatles in various incarnations: nervously
endearing in their first suits; martial-looking in Sgt. Pepper regalia; seedy-
looking and estranged for The White Album; and finally, lost in their own
bickering thoughts as they jammed on a Savile Row rooftop during an
overcast London afternoon in Let It Be.
In Sam's dresser drawer sat a Blue Meanies T-shirt and a Beatles-
faces necktie; on the room side of his door hung a Beatles calendar he could
glance at when he wasn't telling the time with his Yellow Submarine
wristwatch; on one of his...

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Verlag
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0618251456
ISBN 13 
9780618251452
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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