My son turned 18 and I didn't feel any different, but I heard recently that Paul McCartney turned 70 and suddenly I feel old. That's messed up, right?
I think I know why this happened. Before my son turned 18, there was plenty of pre-birthday talk to prepare me. The topic of his turning 18 had been first brought up, I believe, the day he turned 17. So when it finally happened I was fully ready for this milestone occasion.
On the other hand, Paul McCartney's birthday snuck up on me. There was barely any warning when suddenly, poof, he's a 70-year-old man. He's retirement age. He's how I viewed Chuck Berry: as an old time rocker from a bygone era.
The problem is that the bygone era for Paul McCartney was my era. The era of my youth. Now that he's older, it simply means that my youth is that much further in the past, too.
I didn't watch the Beatles on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964. I wasn't 3 years old yet. But I was alive. As a youngster in the 1960s, the Beatles were on the airwaves constantly, their music emanating from my tiny transistor radio speaker. And later, the music came from their records I would play.
For those too young to remember vinyl records, they were these large flat discs that had a single, long, spiral groove etched on each side. (Picture a CD, but one the size of a cold cut platter.) (If you are too young to remember what a CD is, just skip down to the bottom where I mention Justin Bieber.)
To play a vinyl record, a needle from the end of the record player's stylus arm was set inside the groove. There it ran while the record turned, translating each bump and nick inside the spiral groove into electrical impulses, which in turn came out of the speakers as music.
Looking back at what I just wrote, I realize now that there is no way that vinyl records could have worked. It is completely implausible. Bumps and nicks turned into music? They magically become "Love Me Do," or "Hey Jude." What a ridiculous concept.
How gullible were we?
In hindsight, it is clear that some secret, advanced alien civilization had come to earth and, unhappy with the limitations of the player piano, provided earthlings with a highly sophisticated digital music device disguised as vinyl records. It wouldn't be until decades later before the aliens told Steve Jobs how to fit all our music inside tiny, little boxes. He got one of them drunk, I suppose. Little known fact: When a space alien gets drunk, they can't keep a secret.
By the way, that's also how we got HD televisions and Keurig coffee brewers.
It's also where we got nuclear weapons and Starbucks from. (The name should have given it away.)
Oh well, we must take the good with the bad, I suppose.
At any rate, I grew up listening to Paul McCartney and the Beatles. In the 1960s, the Fab Four, the Lads from Liverpool, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or whatever nickname people gave them, they embodied youth culture the way Justin Bieber today embodies hairstyling products.
Someday Justin Bieber will turn 70 years old and the kids of today who will be older then, will hear the news through their implanted iBrain device (thanks again, space aliens) and think: "Wow, he's 70? Thank God we have anti-aging pills, so we all still look and feel perpetually 23 years old."
It's true, if the right space alien gets drunk, we might be the last generation that has an old age. So when a 70-year-old Justin Bieber plays in concerts, he will look and sound as if he is still a few months away from getting his driver's license.
On the other hand, no one would ever again reach that blessed stage of maturity when you are no longer asked to help a friend move. So there is a downside to perpetual youth.
Lee lives in Medway. Email him at lee.online@verizon.net.
