1 January 2021
On New Year’s Day I discovered a secret collage to happiness, through a unique alchemy of the senses.
It started on New Year’s Eve. Here is the recipe.
Make a sonovabitch martini. Make sure to eat, to prevent the gin from getting up to no good. Marinate the soul overnight.
Sit around in pajamas all morning. Eat carbs. This soaks up the sin, while powering up what happens next — and it tastes good. Talk on the phone most of the day.
When the the poison has disinfected the spirit but the bloodstream is purged, when most of the day has gone, when the white winter sun is verging on yellow, shed pajamas for running clothes.
Admit that no news is good news, pretty much ever, and the next 364 days will be filled with an orgy of mostly bad information, and conclude that these afternoon hours will be free of everything that matters. And decide in the waning light that you will take some time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.
In this spirit, I asked myself: what is the most indulgent, no shame, pure-fun, listening that I can possibly imagine for my jog? It was a rhetorical question, really, for there was only ever one answer: My Beatles playlist. The clarity of this inspiration relieved me of all dilemmas, and that was how I found myself toe-tapping down the block in the damp cool of my seaside town in winter.
Apparently my body willed it so. “Till There Was You” rang into my ears, and the synapses fired. Optimism sprang forth — I heard bells ringing, saw birds winging! — and each chord change plucked tendons in my legs, which leapt forward for a kilometer I never noticed, until they reached the beach, carrying me.
The battery pack feeding my chest and legs surprised me even before Abbey Road appeared next on my playlist. It occurred to me that I haven’t listened to the whole album, start to finish, since the age of digital music. By that time my attention span had long since been destroyed. Who listens to whole albums anymore?
But it was New Year’s Day, I reasoned. Take the challenge: what would happen if I listen to it start to finish, no skipping or stopping, even every minute of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” — would I get bored? Or would I experience something the creators intended?
Now, you may never have considered a dusky Mediterranean sunset spread out over the horizon with an orange fireball in the middle as the setting for Abbey Road. I am here to tell you otherwise.
You may also never have considered Abbey Road to be running music, but the truth was revealed to me. Among the top reasons is something I only began to notice about three songs in — though perhaps others have glimpsed it somewhere beneath the darkness of “Come Together.” But the critical point emerges fully in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and it is this: the album is hilarious. It is simply a giggling, smirking, quirky, cheeky, silly, surreal riot. Those boys were horsing around right there in my ears, and I could hear them laughing, while the music was deadly serious (or, in Maxwell’s case, seriously deadly). One simply has to laugh, except that one can’t laugh while running, so the laughter goes into the legs.
Once when I was a teen, a morning radio announcer roused sleepy New Yorkers with the teaser that this next song will make you want to wail aloud along with it — “Oh!-ho Darling,” and she was right. But you can’t do that while running, so you wail through your legs.
“Octopus’s Garden” is made for children and it’s made for me. The first tracks were recorded on my birthday (I was simply born three years late). Melody and harmony bounce over and under one another, bubbling over the surface like my legs as they skimmed the path. Thinking of children makes me think of my six-year-old niece, who once told me about a secret place called Teddyland (sorry sweetie), which happens to be underwater. In a New Year’s Eve heart-to-heart video-call, she gave me an update about Teddyland, which she assured me was “a very peaceful place,” and I in turn tried to explain to her why it’s dark outside my windows but daytime in New York City, which meant we were very far away.
Thinking of my niece makes me so happy that I run faster and it’s about then that the medley starts. Like every time I’ve heard the medley pretty much since childhood, I swear on my life that any one of the songs is truly, really, the best one. “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam” are top runners this time (so to speak). The precise orchestration is so complex and so riveting that it dominates everything, the layers of music merge with the horizon, they wrap themselves around me in a nearly physical surround-sound experience. Each crescendo is exquisite, but the boys inject musical humor and lyrical absurdity every few bars which seem to keep my feet on earth. The medley is a riot of styles and key changes, a mash-up of primal screams and orchestral strings; a freakishly disjointed, free-association of images so wild it’s as if someone had a thought, which exploded into a huge cloud of sound, and let the fragments fall like musical dust into a pattern that is — yes, it truly, magically, impossibly is — perfect.
To conserve energy, I use supreme mental restraint throughout the medley not to sing along (save for an occasional “yeah yeah yeah” or a muttered “oh look out”). The silence in my throat makes the songs stronger and closer until I have the feeling the boys are all alive, singing right beside my ears. But by the time it’s over, I’m on my way home — no more need to save energy. Next the playlist serves up irrepressible singalongs: “Bungalow Bill,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Mother Nature’s Son” — and so my own singing propelled me back along the beach as darkness fell.
By that time there was only an ink-blotted sky with a barely visible stain, like dried blood, across the horizon. My mind was empty, my heart defenseless. “A Day in the Life” appeared as I returned through darkened streets, and suddenly the year now behind us flashed through my mind not as events but as feelings, and I thought I might cry.
The final chord crashed down at the very moment my key opened the door to a place I was never happier to see: home.
Bless the righteous scientist who in 2021 has no more covid research to do and nails the neuro-muscular connection between music and physical energy. At yesterday’s pace, six Abbey Roads and I’ve got a marathon in, well, still over four hours (I’ll break four one day).
And if you ever find yourself on a beach on New Year’s Day towards dusk, and you see a strange apparition running-flying towards you with fat earphones, singing bars of Abbey Road that are distorted with each thumping step, dancing at red lights with a beatific look on her face as the sky fills with diamonds, well — be forgiving. It’s a new year.
