Confessions of a Fanboy

We’ve all got those time and place songs. I’ve written about several of mine on this site, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface. When I decided to start collecting a few of the Beatle solo records, I knew that George Harrison’s 1979 self-titled album was going to have to be one of them because of “Blow Away.”

I grew up in a small city in Iowa. My grandparents lived on an honest-to-God farm outside an even smaller town in Illinois — they still do. We used to visit them often, mostly on Sundays after church.

Our family being a larger family, and by that I mean in numbers and not girth — that would come later in my case, we drove larger, older cars. We owned a pair of Suburbans well before Suburban ownership was cool. We were ahead of our times. We didn’t have a vehicle with an FM radio until I was 16-years old. That meant a lot of AM, oldies radio as a kid.

I don’t have a good memory for how long that trip took. It felt like it took a long time. Most of the time, we didn’t play the radio in the car because we’d all bicker of what to listen to. It was AM radio in the ’80s in Iowa. There weren’t that many choices, but that didn’t stop us from arguing about it. I guess I owe a small piece of my disagreeable, argumentative nature to my siblings. Cool. I’m their fault. I can turn it around and blame them next time they give me noise about being… me. So what does all of this have to do with “Blow Away?”

You’ve probably put it together yourself, but I’ve taken the scenic route through this story, just like those trips to my grandparents. I was a music geek from a young age. My mom tells the story of me, as a toddler, being able to call out the names of the bands singing on the radio. I had an ear for it from the word go. I also had amazingly good taste as a child, because I loved The Beatles. I told the story of the picture of me as a kid, wearing a sleeper and big-ass headphones listening to Ringo’s solo record. Here’s another digression, if you’ll allow it.

As a kid, pre-kindergarten, I had an old Sears & Roebuck blue jean record player of my own. It was a portable record player with mono speaker on the front of it with a blue jean design. I used to kidnap my mom’s copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that copy of Ringo, and my Sesame Street records and listen to them down in our basement over and over and over. My renditions of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” were not to be missed. ::cringe:: The point is, I really did love The Beatles from a young age.

I don’t remember the first time I heard “Blow Away” in the car, but I vividly remember hearing it in the car on our way to my grandparents’ farm. All my mom or dad had to do – probably my mom; she was the music and Beatle fan – was tell me this was by George Harrison – yeah, I knew that George Harrison was one of the Fab Four at that age — and I was hooked. Most kids my age knew Bert and Ernie. I knew them and could also tell you about Paul, John, George, and Ringo. I’d often ask my parents to turn on the radio, hoping to hear this song. The odds were poor, and it didn’t always happen. There were some afternoons when it did, and I’d sing almost all the words wrong to it with a big, dopey grin on my face. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. I was insufferable as a child, too.

I did actually like the song beyond it’s originator. It was sunny and happy. I didn’t know what to call it then. I do now. It’s a cute, naïve, happy little pop song. Songs like this used to make up a segment of pop music. I miss that about radio these days, I really do. As much as I mock the crap on the charts today, I miss the days when that shit shared the dial with songs like this. Pop music used to have something for everybody. It was worth it to stay with one station because the next good song was never more than a few minutes away. Those days are dead.

Years went by, secular music became contraband in our home, and I forgot about this song. In my teenage years, these memories all came flooding back to me while watching the movie Nuns on the Run. I didn’t know this at the time, but George Harrison started a movie production company and said company produced a couple of Monty Python’s movies. Nuns on the Run stars Pythonner Eric Idle. Nuns was also produced by Harrison’s company. Synergy, baby!

Now I own the record with that sunny little pop song, and I can’t stop listening to it. I bet, if I were to look at myself in the mirror, traces of that big, dopey grin from my childhood can be found all these years later.

Thanks, George.

Filed under: Tags: Billboard Beatdown, George Harrison