Dee-Li-Vah De Let-Tah

I mailed something other than a bill yesterday. I sent a small birthday present to a friend of mine. Chances are, with her living just across town, that she received it today. I hope she does, today being her birthday. When I stopped to think about the process yesterday, once again I was amazed by the U.S.
Postal Service. Despite all the technology, and despite the fact that the package is only traveling a few miles, it still wows me that you can put something in a slot one place and within a day or two it arrives exactly where it's supposed to, with nary a problem. I mean, how many times have you had serious problems with the mail? Once, maybe twice in your lifetime? For all the mail you've sent and received? Say what you will about the federal government, but can you imagine the hassles that would ensue if something like the banking industry took over the mails?

Sadly, I can't remember the last time I actually mailed something other than a bill. Multiply me a few million times and I guess it's no wonder we keep hearing about the financial problems of the Postal Service and how it's in danger of going under. What a pity. Is there a greater inexpensive thrill than seeing a letter or package in your mailbox? Is there better nervous excitement than waiting that day or two for something you sent someone to arrive and hear back from that person? I've never been a consistently prolific letter writer in my time, but I've had periods when I sent and received a lot of personal mail. It's a singular sensation that is vastly different from a telephone call (which has pleasures all its own) and one that emails and texts and tweets and such can't even touch.

Now I'm not here to rant about the disappearance of letter writing; times change blah blah blah. But, but. Maybe if we had a national day of letter writing/mailing, people might be reminded of the pleasures once again, and then maybe make the effort a bit more frequently to do so, and then maybe the Postal Service will survive better. And maybe pigs will fly and the Cleveland Browns will make the Super Bowl too. But I'm going to do it, dammit. I promise to mail a letter this Friday, November 18th. I don't know to whom I'll write or what I'll write about, but I'm going to do it because I love the USPS. Join me, won't you?

And while we're on the subject, I'm wondering what are the five most famous letters in rock music. Actually I have wondered for some time because I'm admitting a kind of defeat. I've long wanted to actually write those famous rock letters. It would be a great exercise in imagination and voice. How would the body of Paul's (it is Paul, isn't it, Beatles fanatics?) letter that ends so famously "P.S. I Love You" read? Or what kind of heartfelt sweet things did poor Elvis write in that letter that kept getting returned to sender/him? When you think about it, the words in the Box Tops' "The Letter" must have been pretty hot. I mean to send adolescent Alex Chilton scurrying to an airport because he "ain't got time to take a fast train," and not caring about the cost of it all, phew! All we get of the letter is that "she couldn't live without me." There must be more than that in the missive, no? What? I want to know.

So those three are among the top five most famous letters in rock history, we all can agree, right? The next one on my list is perhaps the most intriguing--the letter that appears at the end of  Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row." After verses and verses and verses and nine minutes, thirty-four seconds of Bob describing the weird goings on in/on Desolation Row, he pulls back a bit and begins the last verse talking about a letter:

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the doorknob broke)
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name ...

God almighty how much for years I've wanted to write that letter! But how to do it justice? And how to solve its various conundrums (conundra?)? That parenthesis is used in the official Lyrics 1962-2001 book (which is hardly definitive, I know), but even then it still poses the question I've long had--was the letter concerning the time the doorknob broke, or did it arrive around the time Bob's doorknob broke? (Trust me, in the glorious world of Bobarcana, no small point to ponder). And "all these people that you mention"--specific to the letter, or are they the people (rearranged/renamed) Bob has just told us all about? How can one even attempt to write this letter with these questions unanswered? God I love it.

The fifth letter in my all-time Top Five Rock'n'Roll letters (and these are not in any kind of ranked order--I think you can tell what would be my #1) is one you're all probably saying, well of course, get to it, after all it's chronologically the first one your list. Ah, but there's a catch. Is there an actual letter in the Marvelettes' marvelous "Please Mr. Postman"? No, there isn't. She's waiting on/hoping for/begging for a letter from her "boyfriend so far away," but nothing (for all we know he's run off with the girl who keeps sending Elvis's letter back). Now isn't that sad, the poor girl pleading with the postman to look one more time in his bag to see if maybe there's a letter? Just like all of us in these days of no-more-letter-writing. So, do your part--not only for the USPS but for that someone pining near the mailbox. Someday soon write and actually mail a letter to someone. You'll make their day. And maybe inspire another great song--by my reckoning here, there hasn't been a great song about a letter--real or imagined--in nearly 45 years. Name me one.

If I Were 64 (The Beatles and Me)

If I were 64, then maybe I could have truly reacted to the Beatles. As it is, I was not yet one when the Fab Four made their Ed Sullivan debut. I was always--we're talking just about all of my conscious life--somehow aware of the Beatles, as some kind of cultural entities, but I can't say I really started listening to their music until I was about 12 or 13. One of my first exposures to their actual music was singing "Let It Be" at so-called hippie masses in the early 70s. The upshot of it is, after all these years, that I guess you can love, admire, etc. a museum piece, but you can't really live it.

If I were 64, then the Beatles would have hit when I was about twenty, significantly I believe, roughly the same age I was when the bands that have meant the most to me over the years--Husker Du, The Replacements, R.E.M., The Meat Puppets, and Elvis Costello (a few years earlier)--were starting to make their marks. I lived those bands: waiting impatiently for a new release, absorbing it when it came out and constantly adjusting my judgment upon further listenings, seeing all their shows over the years (in R.E.M.'s case, from a small club--with the Replacements opening up, by the way--to a couple of huge "hockey arena" venues). Those bands and others were indeed my life (Minutemen, too, naturally).

A guy I knew in college, a couple years younger than I, even, worshipped the Beatles and went to crazy ends to exhibit his worship. I remember being in the same room with him as he read the Rolling Stone review of The Replacements' Let It Be album. "How can someone have the audacity," he proclaimed like some constipated Luther, "to name an album Let It Be?" Cooly, as, um, always, I replied, "Because it's a much better album than The Beatles'" Well, if I were Mark David Chapman, I don't think I would have received a more despicable look. Anyway, that night, after some fun, I took my genuine Apple label copy of The Beatles' Let It Be LP(which could probably fetch me a few quid these days) and Frisbeed the whole thing--disc and sleeve and fold-out cover--against my dorm room wall a few times. When such activity resulted in a sleeve-full of vinyl crumbs, I took the album down the hall and shoved it under the guy's door. A bit cruel, perhaps, but I'll go to my grave defending the intent.

I love the Beatles. I own all the music, have read all the pertinent books, know all the stories and arcana, still hunt down alternate takes and demos. But they've never really come down for me from the pedestal they've been cemented on MY whole life. I never knew the crazy mind games listening to Revolver or Sgt. Peppers for the first time, in real time, must have been. The first Beatles album I ever bought was the blue greatest hits one (though I never bought the red one--I started accumulating the actual albums instead--I'm sure now I'd prefer that one, though at the time, the long-hairs on the blue one looked a lot more fun than the squarish ones on the red album; see, I'm too young to even think the mop-top `dos were anything special).

I never had to honestly react to the Beatles. They were always great; I was supposed to like them, and upon hearing them I did. I knew the lore and mystique of The White Album before I ever bought it or heard it. How do you react to seeing the Mona Lisa--you've known it your whole life. I remember a friend of mine asking me how I liked the Rolling Stones' Some Girls album a couple weeks after its release (the first new Stones album since I started listening to/buying music). I said I liked it, he said he thought it was a bit of a bullshit album (he had older brothers, or maybe his reaction was wholly his own; we were both right, I think--it is BS, but thirty years later it still sounds good). To me, the only significant "Beatle" issue of new music in my listening lifetime (1976 on) was Lennon-Ono's Double Fantasy, and by the time the John is Back hype started to die down a little, he died, and thus it instantly became another museum piece. Whenever you see one of those roped-off chairs in a museum, don't you just want to hop on it and fart into the big cushion? You can't fart at the Beatles, because once you do, some Beatlemaniac gets all offended (fine) and starts lecturing (not fine). The Stones, the Replacements--music you can fart to, no problem.

Anyway, the point of all this bunk is that with all the new Beatles hype happening presently, with re-issues and video games (the last video game I played was Pac-Man in a bar around 1987), I can't get excited. It's just another re-packaging job on music that's been re-packaged in Teflon (albeit great Teflon) since I can remember. I love the Beatles, but it's always just a history field trip when I hear them, never a visceral, this matters to me moment. And what else is music fanaticism about than "this matters to me"?

That's why my favorite Beatles' songs are the ones that don't really hang in the museum's main hall: "And Your Bird Can Sing," "Dr. Robert," "Long, Long, Long," "Bad Boy," "If I Needed Someone." Those ones I discovered myself, in a way.

That's why my answer to the standard, Who's your favorite Beatle question, is Brian Epstein: the first meaningful fan, the one whose visceral reaction made it possible for millions to react. Without him...

That's why, when it comes to the Beatles, I wish I were 64.

The Del McCoury Band-When I'm 64