40 Plays
Day 6: A Song That Reminds You Of A Best Friend
“I’m Looking Through You” by The Beatles
In second grade we traded pencil top erasers shaped like anthropomorphic fruit. If anyone ever asks, that’s how you make a friend for life.
These days, he’s a high-level corporate executive for the nation’s largest healthcare staffing provider. I’m “between jobs.” He wears an expensive suit and travels around the country trying to motivate employees and assuage shareholders. I’m in my boxers at the moment, but I did slip on a pair of shorts earlier to go outside and let the dog take a shit. Along with his wife and two children, he lives in a newly built mansion with a guest house and drives a Porsche. I live in a one-room studio apartment by myself and drive a tree sap-covered Honda Civic with a big dent in the passenger side.
On the face of it, we don’t have a ton in common. But we “get” each other in a way nobody else does. That’s why you don’t judge people on superficial qualities. Jobs? Clothes? Cars? That shit is meaningless.
Musical taste, too. Remember that part of “High Fidelity” where Rob realizes the same? “It’s not what you like, but what you’re like that’s important,” I believe it goes.
My buddy has terrible musical taste. I mean just plain awful. He listens to Bon Jovi, you know? Late-period Aerosmith. Obvious, artless, throwaway shit like that. The most adventurous thing I ever remember him owning was a Letters To Cleo CD, for god’s sake.
This strikes me as incredibly weird, because the person I credit for my own musical taste is his dad.
As I’ve mentioned before, my parents weren’t exactly big music fans. But at my friend’s house, unless “Star Trek” or “Dr. Who” was on, there was always music playing. Usually, the Beatles.
His dad had all the albums, and we played them incessantly. We even listened to the impenetrable musique concrète of “Revolution 9” so many times that I could chime in with “the watusi … the twist” or “you are standing still” right on cue.
My friend’s favorite Beatle was Paul McCartney. Mine was John Lennon. Go figure.
Despite our differences — he’s logical, calculating, pragmatic, maybe a bit uptight; I’m lazy, apathetic, probably a bit complacent and tend to fly by the seat of my pants — we were inseparable. Which was good, because like Paul and John, we were at our best when we were together.
When he started dating a sophomore cheerleader during our senior year of high school, I went ahead and started dating her friend just so we could continue to hang out all the time.
When she eventually broke his heart a couple of years later, I hopped in my beat-up 1982 Toyota Corolla SR-5 hatchback and made the two-hour trek from Gainesville to Tallahassee to console him. (He’d decided to attend Florida State, while I went to rival school Florida — go figure.) For most of that weekend, we listened to The Beatles.
Especially to this song.
I’m looking through you, where did you go?
I thought I knew you, what did I know?
You don’t look different, but you have changed.
I’m looking through you, you’re not the same.
It’s always been one of my favorite McCartney songs, right up there with “Helter Skelter” and “For No One” (which we also played a bunch that weekend). Everyone still thinks of Paul as the soft Beatle, the guy who wrote all the “silly love songs,” but to this day “I’m Looking Through You” remains one of the best break-up songs ever written. The lyrics in the verses are downright surgical, but then the chorus comes along and stabs you in the face with that barbed guitar and a two-note keyboard vamp that couldn’t say “fuck you” more explicitly if it actually said “fuck you.”
It’s not the kind of sentiment most people would associate with Macca, the doe-eyed romantic who wrote “And I Love Her” or “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” But like I said before, that’s why you don’t judge people on superficial qualities.
We are large. We contain multitudes.
I thought I knew you …
… what did I know?
Not long after that weekend, McCartney played his first U.S. performances since 1976 and my buddy’s parents picked us up and drove us to Atlanta to catch the show at the Omni. While they sat in the front seat, smoking cigarettes and listening to Super Gold with Mike Harvey on the radio, we sat in the back seat and talked about how awesome Steve Yzerman was and how stupid our professors were. It was like junior high school all over again. Stuff like girlfriends and romance and heartbreak seemed a million miles away.
Or a few more years, at least.
