strawberry fields

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Strawberry Fields’ Fortieth

The song Strawberry Fields refers to a park where John Lennon used to play as a child, although to me, forty years ago, it suggested breaking out of my conservative world to explore the unknown. As a gesture, since I was trapped in a religious girls school, I bought blue cotton fabric with tiny red strawberries and white blossoms, and made a dress that simultaneously followed the dress code and looked alluring to the boys across campus at the Boys’ School. By then I was making up my own patterns from pieces of others, since McCalls did not have a lot of variations on the theme of maiden/vixen. This constant challenge honed my creativity, but produced some odd results. This one featured a skirt with just enough gathers to pass, but still sit closely to the body, a fitted bodice, and what I thought were fetchingly fashionable bell sleeves. I threw on lace to cut the glamour, so my date to the winter informal didn’t think I was a hussy. I did not look too hard in the mirror, since Living is easy with I closed. Later, after graduation, I realized the Beatles really wanted me to wear jack boots and polythene bags, or at least all white like John and Yoko. I settled on “no shoe shine” and never wearing red on dates with Paul. I didn’t want to make him “blue”.

I remember Feburary 1964, a cold night in Pennsylvania, when a black and white ten inch, out of focus screen ushered in the harbinger of liberation to my sheltered mind, along with millions of other kids raised in post war, suburban America. The adorable boys in suits hooked me into thinking they had the answer to mydilema: how to be everything my parents expected: well behaved and civilved, but also an individual with the courage to experiement with the fat, prosperous world that had been handed to our generation.

Its amazing to me that so many people my age who are radically diverse in politics and beliefs from one another mutually recall the Beatles as spokesmen for their youth. The car mechanic thought “Baby You Can Drive My Car” was about him as much as aspiring actresses thought that its lyrics were talking about their dreams of fame. Red necks believed the group was strumming their lives with their fingers when they heard “Run for your Life” express dominance theories of love, while flower children heard only messages of free love in “The Word”. Ok, there might be a dividing line with the advent of Rubber Soul, but few fiftiesh survivers fail to identify with Beatles music of some sort. Ambiguious lyrics left the door wide open for jocks and yippies alike to use them as an excuse to do what they wanted.


Other Beatle inspired fashions which influence my choices even today include: wearing pajamas for my press conferences, high heeled shoes and low necked sweater when I want to “get back”, and large bags when I want to eat chocolate cake. Sometimes when I want that military look and too look much older, I wear a cap and a bag across my shoulder, but with over 200 songs, the Beatles gave surprisingly few hints about how to dress. They set a lot of fashion standards in what they wore, however, and I still have a paisley shirt and pair of round glasses to prove that. It was an attitude of experimentation they were advocating. The Sgt Pepper uniforms certainly had a say in my design for my husband’s wedding outfit: a satin tie dyed peasant shirt, velvet vest with tails and matiching bell bottoms.

In the sixties I went to England and visited the famous Carnaby Street, by far the coolest shopping place in the world at the time. Flashy satin prints, Indian style shirts, neru jackets, every kind of mini skirt and hots pants, hip boots, wide belts, huge hoop earrings, and poor boy caps lined the narrow street where you could catch a glimpse of Marriane Faithful or the equvilent. It was a clothes candy shop for youth who wanted to join the Magical Mystery Tour. I got a translucent shirt with six inch long collar lapels, wide cuffs, and fitted darts in a psycodelic paisley design. Then my babysitting money was gone. But it did the trick, and I became a virtual Apple Corp member, although the chaperones of the trip would not let us camp out at Abby Road or climb in any bathroom windows.


These years paved a new vista for our generation, a road that few of us ever veered from. Many may have and bought business suits in the years following, but most have never have gotten the spirit of the 60’s out of their blood. Proof of this is the popularity of oldies radio stations, and the refusal of jeans and t-shirts to go out of fashion. Most pot-bellied attorneys put these on every off duty chance they get, whether they are off to pollute the countryside with snowmobiles or to a “Save the Environment” fundraiser. Neither will change the radio station if “Penny Lane” comes on.

Since the Beatles seemed to be telling me in 1967 to quit college and travel the country in a beat up VW van, I thought it was only fair of them to write my college thesis for me when I suddenly realized at age 45 that I needed a degree to get by in life. How I managed to get them to do it was a trick, but first I had to convince my liberal minded but academic professor that the Beatles were a significant force in history. From there, it was a matter of cut and paste with lyrics and press releases, and I had a convincing argument that the Beatles not only replaced Jesus as the most powerful influence for my age group, but were the cause of the computer industry (see George Martins book on the mechanics of producing Sgt Pepper) and a powerful catalyst to the self-help era of the eighties (“Help!”).

Thirty years after their heyday, I tried to capture the feelings the Beatles evocted in my heart by doing an academic study of their influence. I found I was not the first to do so and discovered dozens of studies concerning their music, in some of which musicologists compared them to Beethoveen, insisting they ushered in a new genre of songwriting. Sifting through the many tell all books about John and Yoko’s eating habits and Paul’s personal grooming, I found serious works that tracked the changes in society they effected, and linked shifts in everything from philosophy to ecology to the phenonomen of the Beatles. Did their ambiguous “ count me in, count me out” stance on revolution cause political groups to rethink their tactics? Could John’s househusband phase be the reason men quit jobs and asked for paternity leaves? I couldn’t deny that my own decision to marry an Asian was a tiny bit influenced by the peace alience of John and Yoko’s public coupling.

About ten different philosophies can be gleaned from the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Nothing is real reflects Hume’s skeptisism, misunderstanding all you see expresses Kant’s ideas about pure reason, and I think I know I mean a “yes” but it’s all wrong, that is I think I disagree might have been a direct transcript of a conversation between Kirkegaard and Confuscius. And Sarte agreed that it’s definitely getting hard to be someone, although may have doubted it would all work out. The song is a virtual Cliff Note for philosophy minors, and majors need only to study up on “Tommorrow Never Knows” and “I am the Walrus” to get the rest.

The universality of the Beatles is undeniable. Ambiguity plays a big part in that, and the variety of themes in the songs makes their work seem like a mirror to almost anyone. The range of boyfriend types was there, and although I loved Paul best, grew into George for a while, John was in the end the best choice of styles. Not that I wanted to marry John, although being adored wasn’t a bad option, but it was John I dressed up as for my final thesis presentation. He embodied the ideals of creative freedom and standing up for ones beliefs that are the qualities I strive for. I showed up in a white jacket and hat and the ubiquitious glasses for my presentation, three more items of clothing that only got worn once and then waiting in the pile for the next trip to the thrift shop.

Identity crisises never really end, and as I have tried on everything from radical feminist to earth mother, the clothes follow in a heap behind me. The Beatles gave me permission to keep trying to figure out who I am and then buy the outfit to express that to the world, to see if it works out. I read in one of those books that John and Yoko had a huge room where they kept their many clothes, although many were variations on black and white, and you can’t tell me that their impact would have been the same if they had posed in Sonny and Cher outfits. They were trying to say Give Peace a Chance, not I got You Babe, although they certainly got each other, too.