10 Albums in 10 Days; Day One. Abbey Road

Wow, almost 4 years since I last posted. That's sad ;)

Let's try this one more time...

I started this 10 albums in 10 days challenge on Facebook recently. I'm having so much fun with it that it has become 20 albums in ... you get the idea. I'm going to stay away from albums that a lot of people are familiar with, i.e. Zepplin IV, etc.

There may be a few exceptions to that if the album hit a particular milestone, such as this one.

This is where it all started for me. I was 12. Some friends were starting a band and I wanted to be included. They turned me onto some Beatles' stuff and I had just seen "A Hard Day's Night" twice in a row thanks to a screw-up at one of our local TV stations.

I didn't know anything about the Beatles, except that I occasionally caught "Help" on TV and a babysitter had taken me to the theater to see Yellow Submarine when I was 4. My memory of that was sketchy, to say the least.

I grew up in a strict, religious household, so rock and roll was verboten. My dad would listen to stuff with horns as he fancied himself a horn player, so there was some Chicago and Three-Dog Night, The Carpenters, and The 5th Dimension, etc., but that was it. No Beatles.

Eventually, my parents divorced and one night I asked my mother to buy me a Beatles' album. I didn't even know what titles to ask for. She came home that night with two: "Meet the Beatles" and "Abbey Road" - the bookends to their U.S. catalog. "Meet the Beatles" was more of what I was expecting: short pop tunes reminiscent of what I'd heard in "A Hard Day's Night." I hadn't heard of any of the songs on "Abbey Road."

I didn't know where to start. So my 12-year-old brain did the most logical thing and started with "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window." I liked it. Then I started at the beginning. "Come Together" changed my life. I listened to it over and over. That bass line... those lyrics... It made me feel like I was sinning. All sorts of things came alive in me that I didn't know were there. My mother begged me to play something else.

I was in love with that record. It opened doors to all kinds of other music that I had never known about: Yes, Genesis, Zappa, and on and on. It's still my second favorite Beatles' album. (My next purchase was "Revolver," my favorite.)

I could go into a long, track-by-track analysis, but if you don't already know this record by heart, my analysis won't do it justice. Just buy it and listen. I will say that my favorite Beatles' track is on this album: "You Never Give Me Your Money." I think that song is the start of some great stuff McCartney would do later, like "Uncle Abert/Admiral Halsey" and "Back Seat of My Car."

Speaking of which, "Ram" will definitely make this 10 album list.