Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles have never done that much for me. When The Muse asked me with surprise a couple of years ago, "You like the Stones better than the Beatles, don't you?," I said "Yes" without hesitation. Maybe it relates back to when I was a kid, when my parents listened to 92.9, what was then a new oldies station in Fresno, and the only Beatles song they really played were stuff like Love Me Do. That early Beatles stuff very well may have been pretty revolutionary at the time -- after a few years of Frankie Avalon and Dion, particularly -- but it sounded kind of lame to me. Add that perceived lameness to the fact that the Beatles were on all . . . the . . . time and I didn't like them much.

The Muse has always been a big Beatles fan and now the kids, The Mermaid in particular, are big Beatles fans, so we are listening to the Beatles a lot these days. We have lots of homemade Beatles CDs. We have Beatles posters in multiple rooms in our house. We all have favorite Beatles (mine is John, The Muse's George, The Mermaid's Paul and Enthusio at least was Ringo, but that may have changed). Accordingly, I have a specially-made Beatles CD that the kids want to listen to when they are in my car. And, lo and behold, I have found that I find one Beatles song to be just brilliant.

Strawberry Fields Forever, to be specific. There are others that I like a lot (e.g., Help!), some for which I have great affection (Yellow Submarine, which The Must and I used as a lullaby for The Mermaid when she was a baby), but Strawberry Fields Forever is the only one that I find to be really great.

Basically, that song was at least 25 years ahead of its time. I don't know what album Strawberry Fields Forever was one, but it's from about 1966, before Sgt. Pepper's, which was released in 1967. I don't think that any well-known band really made anything like it until maybe Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991 (not that I have an encyclopedic knowledge of 1967-1991 popular music).

To me at least, in Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon used strange, confused lyrics to show how he (and maybe the other Beatles), or maybe society generally, were very confused, not sure where they were going. "Always, no, sometimes think it's me, I mean I know when's it's a dream." "It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out, it doesn't matter much to me." "And I forget just what takes, and yet it makes me smile, I find it hard, it's hard to find, oh well, whatever, never mind." Similar stuff, man.

It's not exactly a brand-new thing to do in art, to use confused language to express confusion. William Faulkner wrote at least 1/4 of The Sound and The Fury in the voice of a 33-year-old retarded man (although I only got through about four pages of that because it drove me crazy). But Strawberry Fields Forever seems pretty revolutionary to me because it incorporated that into the most popular music. Most popular music tells stories, usually pretty simple stories. That just doesn't work that well when you're trying to get over that you're really confused, though. The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds is a brilliant album (I listened to Wouldn't Be Nice? about 15 times in a row today), but it has this song "That's Not Me," which, well, sucks. That's Not Me was kind of trying to get over the same feeling as Strawberry Fields Forever, but it has lines like, "I miss my pad and the places I know, and every night as I sit there alone, I would dream." It's too direct. By being explicit, That's Not Me recites cliches and feels dated. Strawberry Fields doesn't feel like that. It feels weird, but that's the feeling that John Lennon was trying to get across in the lyrics.

Now, when you pile the lyrics on top of the music in Strawberry Fields, you really get something brilliant. If Strawberry Fields came out today and someone told you it was Beck, would you be surprised? No, you wouldn't. It has all this mixed up, un-pop-y stuff, horns and what sounds like a record being played backwards and all kinds of stuff. But it mostly sounds just this side of confused. You add that up with the lyrics and you just get a great, great song, one that doesn't sound like anything before and not much after for 25 years or so.

So, after years of not thinking much of the Beatles, I have discovered that they -- or at least John -- could be pretty brilliant after all. So, when I make up my 60's playlist on the IPod that I'm getting for my birthday, along with Marvin Gaye, Martha & The Vandellas, The Stones, The Beach Boys, Frankie Valli, The Kinks and The Hollies, I'll have at least one Beatles song. Maybe the first song.