90's Baby: 1995

The Woodhead Anthology

A few months ago, at the end of February, I quit my job as a Tequila salesman and left New York City to spend the holy month of Ramadan at my grandmother’s house in Manchester. From a financial perspective, it was a horrible decision. On a purely spiritual level, however, I’ve never been richer or more sound.

The house where my grandmother lives was bought by my late grandfather in 1982, for a sum of approximately 45,000 GBP. He paid for the house with money he earned working as a chemist, first in the employ of others and later, at a small chain of local pharmacies he owned himself, before the consolidation of the big high street chains. The start-up capital was provided by his former employer, after finding the job in the newspaper. The house looks like this.

Many years later, he got all the money for the house back, through a scheme called an endowment mortgage which I don’t quite understand.

Growing up, I’d spend every other summer or so in England, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I was troubled by thoughts of what I was missing out on back home in Michigan, and the idea that it would somehow hinder my young friendships, which revolved largely around me going to their house to watch their cable TV. On the other hand, my grandparents had a much more sophisticated TV setup than my parents, and I was able to some degree to catch up all summer on shows like Beavis and Butthead, Ren and Stimpy, and many of the alternative/rock music videos I would have seen on MTV back home.

In England, they also had something called Teletext which felt very much like an early precursor to a web browser. It looked like this.

The only trouble, which also weighed heavily on my young mind, was that the charts in England are of course different than those in the United States. So while my friends back home were all listening to music I was interested in - generic alternative bands like Live, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Bush - the time allocated for rock music programming in England was all taken up by locally popular bands like Oasis, Blur, and Pulp, who I didn’t like as much. I was also confused as to why Bush, who were British, were not as popular in England as some of the other bands I’ve just named. I now realize that this is because they were a fake, corporate version of Nirvana which was being promoted by extremely sinister and nefarious forces within the music industry in America.

The other problem was that a lot of music I absolutely hated was coming out of Europe, so in practice I would have to hear it all summer, and then again for another cycle when I got back to the USA. Here are just a couple of the songs I’m talking about.

In 1995, another song which I hated, from the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack, was all over the British charts. I won’t even name it because it’s so bad. The video and the song were both really boring. It felt like every time I was allowed to watch TV they just played that video, “Cotton Eye Joe¹,” and Take That. It was like torture.

In the fall, however, I hit the jackpot. For some reason, I was in England for the release of the documentary series which accompanied The Beatles Anthology albums. I checked Wikipedia, and it was released during the period from November 26th to December 31st, which means I would have been there for both Thanksgiving break and Christmas. I can’t account for the two or three weeks in between, or why I would have been given almost an entire month off of school.

As I mentioned in a previous installment of 90’s Baby, I was single mindedly fixated on Nirvana and to a lesser extent, the Beatles. In the run up to the release of the documentary and the albums, the commercials for the series were all over the TV. Last month, while I was waiting for the sun to set so I could break my fast, I did a complete re-watch.

The series does a really good job covering the band’s early days in Liverpool, and the period they spent in Hamburg, which ended abruptly after Paul McCartney was deported for nailing a condom to the wall of a bar. It takes about four hours/episodes for the band to get to the USA. This is also the period I was most interested in as a 5th grader. I’m not sure if there is a causal relationship there, like I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate and retain information as the series went on. Or more likely, the simple nature of their early material was easier for me to get my young mind around.

I bought, or rather my parents bought me, the first CD collection in the Anthology series. It had all the corny songs from the first few albums, like “She Loves You,” “From Me To You,” and “Twist and Shout.”

Despite the fact that I was less interested in the later material, I also bought Magical Mystery Tour on CD. When the corresponding episode aired, I was at my conservative white grandparents’ house near Bradford. Two years later, during the 1996 General Election, they said they would have to “skip the country” if the Labour Party won. Tony Blair eventually became the Prime Minister, but my grandparents remained in the UK until their deaths in the 2010s.

My grandparents also liked the early Beatles material. I sat in their living room among all their palm crosses and books about creationism while the music video for “I Am The Walrus” came on the TV screen.

Then when John Lennon sang the line “you’ve been a naughty girl you let your knickers down,” they seemed really shocked, and my grandfather even repeated the line, to show everyone how upset he was.

The songs I liked the most from the album were the ones composed by Paul McCartney, like “Your Mother Should Know,” “Hello Goodbye,” and “Penny Lane.” I also liked “All You Need Is Love,” even though that one is a Lennon track.

To accompany the release of the Anthology, Apple Corps (the Beatles multimedia company) produced the songs “Free As a Bird,” and “Real Love,” which were based on recordings made by John Lennon, with additional instrumentation and vocals recorded by the other band members after his death. I distinctly remember the talking heads on British TV talking about how “bad” the songs were. As a young person with no critical thinking skills, I internalized this opinion as my own, and repeated it to everyone who would listen.

When I rediscovered the songs later in life, I found that they were not “bad” but rather, that they were incredibly beautiful. I’d encourage you to listen and decide for yourself.

As an adult, my favorite Beatles album is probably the Magical Mystery Tour.

1. A masterpiece.