Experiencing the Beatles | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Sounds fascinating.  It also puts me in mind of the change in technology.  If only people in the now could imagine what it was like to have what seems to be old fashioned technology experienced as NEW and the LATEST THING.  Like radios, and those monaural record players.  That was all they had for the most part.  Then when rarely once in a blue moon Elvis or the Beatles would appear on TV, it was all the more magical.  And then, even more fantastic, when the Beatles actually came to one’s home town.

Technology can be bewitching — for good or for ill.  If we constantly look back and think how “backward” they were before they had what we have now with our “progress”, I would say we are missing out on a crucial dimension of respect and appreciation.

S. B. Fields said
Summer camp in Maine in late August of 1966…
I’m a 16 yr old counselor-in-training…
Every cabin has a couple of transistor radios…
We only listen to WBZ from Boston…
I’m out in the middle of the lake teaching a ten year old how to sail a sunfish…
The BZ jockey spins the new Beatles single …
In a rousing rush of joy, our buddies back on land are belting out the chorus, “We all live in a yellow submarine” …
It bounds out of the woods from our camp, crossing our bow…
The kid and I, in the doldrums, our sail is limp, we dangle our feet in the coolness, we laugh and sing along, too…
Then, an amazing audio wave washes us from the stern…
An angelic group response, also singing the song’s chorus, is wafting out to greet us…
It is flowing from the girls’ camp on the other shore…
Both chilling and warming to remember this…natural stereo…with the speakers separated by a mile of open water…
Radio, and the Beatles, were the uniting glue for us all…
———————————————————————–
I hope all of you forum members appreciate the above recollection. The experience was striking as a result of the speed of sound. Because we were closer to the boys’ camp, than the girls’ side, the sound of the female “choir” was just a beat later.

Both populations were hearing their radios, and singing along, at the same moment, but the singing reached us at slightly different moments. From our position, I heard it as a boisterous guy-chant being chased by an ethereal echo. I know this site is visited by a lot of music recording aficionados (is it ok to call you “geeks”?). It would be fantastic if someone could figure out how to replicate the effect, a capella, then we can all truly live a life of ease, and every one of us will have all we need.

I love the avatar, S.B. Fields! MMM-MMM good strawberry!

S. B. Fields said

 

Von Bontee said
Cool recollections, S.B. (hey those are my irl initials too!)

Love your avatar! Not nearly enough love for old W.C. these days. (Hey he’s on the cover of SPLHCB , look him up!)

As a new member, I knew I had to come up with something cool, and checked out dozens of avatars on this site to see what was going on. My intention was to concoct a rebus puzzle.

Von Bontee, it was YOUR Magritte-based apple headed moptop mother’s son that really hit me. Since SFF has always been my absolutely, undeniably, favorite Beatles song, I wanted to work with a surrealistic strawberry theme. The “fields” part was easy >>> As you noted in your comment, W.C. Fields is one of the images in the SPLHCB artwork. The Sergeant Pepper album cover’s collage is a veritable Rorschach test. I can almost hear the shrink saying to his patient, ‘look at this, Tell Me What You See ?’ I saw them all, and studied them too…as millions of us did while listening to the album for the first hundred times, whether under the influence, or not.

Anyhow, the W.C. Fields image on the top row is what I wanted to use, but could not find a high resolution image…they were all very grainy when zoomed, so I opted for a stock photo of WC…of course, it had to have his trademark hat…and a straw hat was perfect (nice parallelism to strawberry). The apple in Magritte’s portrait eliminates the face, but I needed to show who it is, so I only hid the mouth with a giant strawberry…but that may change soon.

(stay tuned for further improvements…I need to squeeze “forever” in there too…maybe I can print it on his hat band?).

— glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks, again, Von Bontee, for the inspiration.

Wow! That’s very clever! I hope that you’ll be able to further refine the design. I love it!

vonbontee said
Wow, I like your avatar even more now! Excellent execution and explanation all around, there. (And yeah, I had Magritte in mind when I created my own, and the variation on it.)

Thanks for the tribute!

Exactly how i felt, @vonbontee!