4000 Holes

It’s funny to contemplate how pop culture affects my g-generation. My g-generation was the first to grow up with a TV in the living room. We were the second generation to grow up with radio. I have a memory of—I think it was 1962—laying in bed, ready to sleep, but listening in the dark to my transistor radio. . . pop music, rock ’n roll . . . when, out of the darkness, I heard this: “She was just seventeen; you know what I mean, and the way she looked was way beyond compare.” As it turned out, that was only the beginning of a pop-culture phenomenon that would become a decade of chart-topping Beatles songs. In the annals of popular music, only the Elvis phenom of the ’50’s could compare with it. But these guys—the long-haired rockers from Liverpool. . . there were four of them. So it seemed that the cultural and musical impact of their songs was four times as potent as the Elvis phenom had been. The Beatles had an incredibly innovative—almost revolutionary—impact on of the music of the ’60’s. These guys were progressive; their fourfold lyrical presentation on the Ed Sullivan show was like nothing that ever happened before. As the 1960’s rolled on and on, their magical mystery tour of rock’n’roll innovation set a course of musical exploration that dominated the the pop music of the 1960’s, and contributed widely to the impact of the rock groups of the 1970’s. The entrance of their Sgt. Pepper’s LP into my teen youth was unprecedented in the history of 20th-century entertainment. Their impact dumped the love song requirements of pop music into the “been there/done that” barrel of history. I have a life-long memory of John Lennon, in ’67, singing these words: “ I read the news today, oh boy. . . the English army had just won the war. A crowd of people turned away; but I just had to look, having read the book.” The generation before us—our parents—now THEY were the ones who had the real burden. . . halting hitler’s assault on mankind. Our baby boomer experience was like a walk in the park compared to the world war they endured, from 1939-45. . . By the mid-’60’s, we were living in a fantasy land, an unprecedented magical mystery tour that- compared to what our parents—the “greatest generation” experienced when they defeated hitler and mussolini and their Jap allies in the Pacific realm. Compared to their ordeal, the 1960’s were a walk in the park, like growing up in a dream world constructed by Howdy Doody and Disney and Elvis and . . . and suddenly, there they were: the Beatles, appearing unexpectedly out of a Liverpool fog. By 1967, disguising themselves as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, this foursome had re-branded themselves as a new English myth that would rival Camelot, or the shire— a dream world that became our LP-spun magical mystery tour. An LP track or two past Ringo’s intro, it was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play; they been goin’ in and out of style, but they’re guaranteed to raise a smile. . . After a few minutes of breaking musical precedents, suddenly there’s John’s explanation: “I read the news today. . . four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire; and though the holes were very small, they had to count them all.” Say what? What the hell is he talking about? John went on to explain: “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I’d love to turn you on. . . “ Now I’ve been wondering about this for half a century. Recently, I came across something on the world web that explains John’s sketchy mention of the mysterious holes.

So now we know what the 4000 holes was all about. I had thought that it was Lennon’s lyrical criticism of rich people hearing music in the Albert Hall, at the expense of laboring people in Lancashire. But according this snippet, it was really about fixing road holes in the north of England. On the other hand, maybe it was really about four thousand seaside holes, which I discovered in 2019, in St. Andrews, Scotland:

Smoke