Growing up in one of the vast suburbs of Los Angeles, I never really paid much attention to music. My parents were not musicians, nor did they listen to much music in their daily lives. My mother's temporary infatuation with Barry Manilow in the late seventies, sadly, did nothing to inspire me. Instead, I continued my quest to read every book in the school library, ride my bike, and play baseball.
But then on December 8, 1980, Howard Cosell announced during the end of the New England Patriots / Miami Dolpins Monday Night Football game I was watching that someone I'd never heard of before, John Lennon, "the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles," had been shot and killed.
If I didn't know who John Lennon was before December 8, 1980, I surely did after it. For the next two months, John Lennon and The Beatles were inescapable. The newspaper, the radio stations, every magazine by the checkout at Stater Brothers, the tv news, and even the weekly fictional tv programs were inundated with stories and the music of John and the Beatles. I was mesmerized by what I was hearing, and soon I was hooked.
I spent the next few decades hunting down and enjoying all of the Beatles and John/Paul/George/Ringo material I could find. When this undertaking was nearly finished, my mind hungered for another Beatles puzzle to solve, and I kept focusing on this -- what if The Beatles did not break up in 1970. What would their subsequent albums have sounded like? I created a first draft, but I was never really satisfied with it. And then through the wonder of the internet, I found, bought, and read The Beatles After the Break-Up 1970 -2000 by Keith Badman. And with the information taken from there, I created a second draft that feels to me, given the existing recorded music created by John/Paul/George/Ringo, exactly what those lost albums would have sounded like.
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