The Best Gift of the Season

I've been waiting to see it, because the family wanted to see it. But with The Beatles, I didn't rush it because I knew it would hit pretty close to home. We moved to the new house we built in time for Christmas 1969, and dad's band started rehearsing in our new basement some of the time. And of course, they were picking apart the intricacies of these very songs in Get Back!, from the Let it Be album. While I learned tons of Beatles songs over the years, me the five year old knew that album first. The 45 - "Get Back" was the single, and 'Don't Let Me Down" was the B side. 

And tonight I watched both songs come to life before my eyes. I've been in that place, that collaborative chaos with all the tension and wild-eyed creativity and spitballing placeholder words and phrases all over the wall until something sticks. Those songs were born in a way that I inherently recognize. It's hard to even wrap my head around what a treasure I've been gifted to see them working. 

That little boy could read, and when he woke up one morning that summer and came out for breakfast, he saw the newspaper headline "Beatles Announce Break Up" and burst into tears. Tonight seeing "Get Back!" on the eve of John Lennon's murder brought a whole lot of that little kid sadness back too, along with a whole lot of gratitude for the experience. 

Music. It's our language, and it's life. It's the cells in our body, the electrical impulses running through our limbs and into strings and skins and amplifiers and recording devices. And in the end, music and creativity are the only things we can leave the world of any permanence. That, and the love you give... 

Parts 2 and 3 ought to really be something.

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