It was 20 years (and 2 days) ago today

A week before my junior year of High School was over, my fascination with hippies (not being a hippie myself, ever) was at its peak. Seven months earlier I had come to learn that the entire Beatles catalog will be released on CD for the first time and on June 1, 1987 "Sgt. Pepper's" would be available in stores in all its remastered digital glory (the first, in a long line of remasterings).

Well, June 1st of 1987 was a weekday, so it would have to be after school and at the time I did not have a driver's license (I was 6 months too young) so my Beatles fanatic friend, who was licensed to drive, and myself made the 40 minute trek to the nearest record store (records were large plastic disks that held music that was extracted with a needle). Take it from me, when the town you live in is so small that music was something that you had to use a half gallon of gas to get to, you really begin to rethink about your current living location.

Needless to say it was purchased, and listened to many times. I still have it. The liner notes are a little battered but the CD is in great shape.

Why would somebody who was 35 years too young to really appreciate the magnitude of this particular Beatles album care? When I was four years of age I had a kiddie record player (remember those plastic disks?) and one day I rummaged through the house looking for something to put on my record player. I found Sgt. Pepper (with the yellow "STEREO" bar at the top). The needles of the kiddie record player and my lack of gentle touch were a bad combination for archiving sound recordings. I used to play it forwards, and backwards, sort of like the pre-hip-hop hip-hop of a 4 year old, while the needle, which was a large rock at the end of an arm, would scrape new grooves making each listening experience a new listening experience with the added skips and jumps.

I ruined my mother's first pressing Sgt. Pepper.

I bought it out of 12 years of guilt, at first. But the music overcame that feeling pretty quickly, and the experiences listening to the CD and what associated experiences going on in my life during the ownership of that CD are more powerful memories than that of a 4 year old's experimentation in noise making and destruction.

And it is, still, one of my favorites.