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-What To Live By-
Four young gents from Liverpool once told me, "The Love You Make Is Equal To The Love You Take." And in retrospect, they couldn't be any more right. Many people try to live by one philosophy, like "Give and you shall receive," or "There are no foolish questions, only foolish people." Bt, in reality, this is not a soap box article about philosophies to live by, but how one rock group changed my life forever.
-The Early Stages-
Rock music has never been a stranger to me, since I have experienced it since my dad first blasted Springsteen on my way home from the hospital. I can sing you lyrics from "The Rising", "Born in the USA" and countless others. But, even though I spent the early years of my childhood belting out Joe Cocker and Elvis, I never felt like I discovered rock music until I entered Junior High. By that time, I was discovering more and more bands. A friend of mine who had moved from California, introduced me to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and AeroSmith. I was amazed at the pure joy of the music. This is what grew my foundations for rock.
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Paul McCartney can lay claim to being the greatest ever songwriter to come out of the UK. Born in Liverpool on June 18th, 1942, McCartney, along with John Lennon, wrote songs which will surely last as long as popular music itself.
Whilst Lennon and McCartney songs had both names in the credits, it was often obvious which songs were mainly John's, and which were mainly Paul's. 'Yesterday' was, when Beatlegate was at its most bitter, mentioned by John Lennon in his withering 'How Do You Sleep?' attack on Macca, as the only good song McCartney ever wrote. Paul responded later with: "I was sleeping very well at the time." Most songwriters would have died happy having written 'Yesterday' - it was voted the Song of the Century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts, musicians, and listeners.
Both McCartney and Lennon lost their mothers when they were teenagers, and that no doubt created a common bond, and gave them an unusual depth for young men, which would surface in songs such as Paul's 'Eleanor Rigby', and John's 'In My Life'. While John had a certain, understandable bitterness because of the loss of his mother, Paul mostly seemed to be...
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Poetry, song and autobiography have been interlinked for millennia. In my pioneering life, beginning in 1962, the music and words of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the culture of the sixties and my own autobiography come together in an interesting cross-fertilization. Bob Mason's unpublished PhD Thesis on 'The Dialogue Between the Beatles and Bob Dylan'1 illumined, for me, this triangle of relationships. To take but one of many possible examples, the very month I decided to pioneer among the Eskimo, October 1965, The Beatles' hit "Nowhere Man" was released, said Mason. Most of their songs were about their coming to terms with autobiographical issues, about changing society, about drugs(after 1965) and about a dialogue between these megastars. Paul McArtney said, in a song he wrote in the 1990s, that the members of his group, The Beatles, always came back to the songs they had been singing because these songs told them, and everyone else who was interested, where they were at. This is quintessentially true of my own poetry: they tell of where I was at. When I reread them I orient myself and my life. -Ron Price with thanks to 1"Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 16 January...
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