It was 50 years ago

It was only professional obligation and alleged expertise that forced me to pay attention to our presidential election, since I generally avoid that which will cast doubt on the ability of human beings to govern themselves.

But now that it is thankfully over (maybe), it becomes possible to turn to matters that matter more than which of the blowhard geezers gets to be president, including that this year marked the 50th anniversary of the breakup of the Beatles.

That it’s been 50 years is staggering, and a confirmation that I’ve now become an old man, almost as old as that fellow Paul sang about on the second track of the second side of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” A sense of perspective can be acquired by realizing that that album revolutionized pop culture precisely a half-century after Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and their Bolshevik colleagues brought revolution to Russia, and that 50 years also separated Teapot Dome from Watergate.

One of my earliest memories is of playing with my toy trucks while the adults watched “Ed Sullivan” to find out what all the hoopla was about.

My best friend’s older brother Danny played his Beatles albums wherever we went on his tacky portable record player, thereby providing the soundtrack for my youth. Whenever and wherever we were playing, the Beatles were playing too.

We all pestered DJ Danny to play our favorites. Mine were “Love Me Do,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Rock and Roll Music” (the Chuck Berry cover), and “Think for Yourself” from “Rubber Soul,” still my favorite Beatles album.

Each of us had our favorite Beatle to go along with our favorite songs, of course. Danny, with intellectual pretensions, favored the intellectually pretentious John, most of the other kids the “cute Beatle,” Paul. Just to be different, mine was George (that early strain of non-conformity also included buying “Paint It Black” when everyone else bought “Paperback Writer”). Every kid I knew had a pair of those goofy flamenco-style “Beatle boots” with the pointy toes, and one had somehow found a brown suede pair that made him really cool.

Danny took us to see “A Hard Day’s Night” when it came to town, and decades later I read somewhere that the movie program was a valuable bit of Beatles memorabilia. During a trip home to my mother’s I dug into a chest of forgotten belongings (which included lots of old copies of Rolling Stone, Creem, Crawdaddy, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the Sporting News) and was thrilled to find it, and just as quickly deflated when I saw that all the photos had been cut out (my mother reminded me that I had pasted them on my bedroom walls).

The first album I owned wasn’t a Beatles album, however, but The Rolling Stones’ “High Tide and Green Grass,” which Danny gave me as a birthday present. The Stones were the Beatles’ only real competition in our neighborhood (The Beach Boys were twerps, and bands like Herman’s Hermits and the Monkeys were dismissed as “bubblegum”), but if memory serves, we listened to them at least as much to hear the swear words as for the music. (Perhaps the most startling thing of all about the passing of those 50 years is that the Stones are still playing those same songs in concerts that people still pay ridiculous amounts of money for tickets to.)

Honesty compels, though, to admit that I wasn’t as upset when learning of the death of John as I should have been. I’d long since stopped buying ex-Beatles albums due to accumulating disappointment (the last worth purchasing for me was Paul’s “Band on the Run”) and had certainly given up any hopes of a reunion (although the $500 facetiously offered up by Lorne Michaels apparently, unbeknownst at the time, almost pulled it off).

And that was fine by me since it would leave their discography unblemished by the subpar music that would have likely come out of any such gimmicky resumption.

Ihaven’t listened to much pop music since about my late 20s or so, but still get inspired to binge every few years on Beatles albums (I’ve repurchased them all several times over). They sound as fresh as ever, as if they could have been recorded last week (kudos to George Martin!), and I have a hard time grasping how anyone could possibly prefer the dreck that’s out there these days to “Abbey Road” or “Revolver.”

But then, again, I wouldn’t recognize Jay-Z or Taylor Swift if they knocked on the front door, and don’t at all care that I wouldn’t, as an interest in pop stars and pop music becomes unseemly with middle age and beyond.

We try to make it over to Walnut Ridge every year for Beatlefest, and it seems I bring back another book or two every time, which I then put on the shelf with lots of other books about the Beatles, and never get around to reading.

But I just purchased Craig Brown’s new book, “150 Glimpses of the Beatles,” and definitely feel one of those Beatles binges coming on.

To help me forget about Pennsylvania and Michigan and Donald Trump and Joe Biden.