The Day The Beatles died

 

I cried when we heard of The Beatles break up just as we got ready to hit the road, our red white and blue 1959 VW van huffing and puffing, waiting to get on the LA freeway heading East Arizona first then to Mexico and briefly because Louise needed to meet an old lover again Denver before our planned big plunge North to Alaska
No death of a band hit me so hard as this one did, as bad maybe or worse than when my grandfather died when I had to force out the tears that would not come any other way, as if I needed news as deep as the loss of The Beatles to uncork me and let the tears flow.

They were more than family as close to blood is any stranger, and losing them said more about the future than any headlines could, ending something we didn't know we needed until it was gone innocence maybe that mop top love we kept hid in the closet as if to silly in the sophisticated 1970 to admit four of them moving on.
Just some other aspect of their lives that did not include each other, a flashback to the old neighborhood gang who drifted apart when it got a career or a girlfriend (later wife) became focus of our Lives rather than our pals, the mop tops bearded and independent growing up, growing older, asking us to grow up, too, when it was the last thing we wanted, but like them was exactly what we needed to do, we shedding tears long every mile, listening to the early albums on an 8 track, the mop top albums and later the other ones, the one's full of color or the ones simply all white, all songs all filling our heads as the last of their songs filled the radio airways like a dirge, me thinking the death as temporary, me hoping they might change their minds by the time my birthday came. all the time knowing they never would, and knowing I would wait a lifetime for something that would never happen, wishing and hoping as miles turned into years and even now with two of them dead I still hope and still shed tears.

For a long time, I didn’t even remember the date Paul McCartney announced the Beatle break up (April 10, 1970), only what I was doing at the time, fixing up that old VW bus in order to hit the road, still on the run from the police for a robbery I had done back east, looking for a place to find peace, needing desperately to abandon the phony hype of Hollywood for some more natural setting, some place north, we, envision some place in Alaska because it was the one state Louise had never visited with her parents when she was young.

I clung to Beatles music because it reminded me of home, and that innocent time before I had become hunger, before my first puff of pot or hit of acid, before Louise discovered the modeling office on the Boulevard where photographers wanted her to do more than just model, before we became homeless, and hearing the news of the breakup severed ties I had with those old days when I wore a mob top and fancied myself looking a lot of like John Lennon, under the constant threat by my blue collar uncles who promised me a crew cut for even the smallest infraction, the barber on the Paterson side of Vernon Avenue all too willing to accommodate, my look changing with each phase of the Beatles, their music making up the sound track of my life with me wondering at that moment in April what might serve the same purpose in the future without them, we playing the 8-track tapes as we drove out of LA, no longer full of high hopes, only a desperation to find some place where we could hide, knowing the world as we had known it had come to a crashing end with the death of the Beatles.

 

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