Believe it or not, but once upon a time, particularly when I was in high school, I was a Beatles fanatic. Music was my refuge, and the Beatles spoke to my heart. However, I didn’t stick merely to the Beatles in my music choices, but expanded to a lot of British Invasion music, as well as the music of the “rock’n’roll” era in general.
Back then, if I was on the prowl for new music, one of the things I’d do was that I’d go to Best Buy to see what they had. Mind you, this was in the day when Best Buy not only sold music, but many had a pretty decent selection as well. The one that I’d go to – which was a nice, two-mile trek if I had the time to walk – ended up being the top store for music sales in the entire chain for 1995. One of the things I got was a boxed set of the first four CDs in the Rhino Records “British Invasion: History of British Rock” series. It’s probably the most in-depth British Invasion collection made, and it made me much more familiar, thanks to liner notes, with bands that I’d heard of, but it also caused me to fall in love with artists like Donovan and The Seekers.
Mind you, it probably took me a year to finish off the set, between having money available (and not something else I wanted more) and the CDs I was missing actually being available. In any case, I got the ninth volume fairly early on, and one song that hit me hard was Marmalade’s “Reflections of My Life”.
Now, I don’t know if I got the CD before or after my 16th birthday, but even then, it seemed to speak to the chaos of the world and trying to make one’s way amidst that. In many of the Beatles’ later songs, there’s this idea of trying to go back home but not being able to (Cry Baby Cry, Golden Slumbers, Get Back, for starters) and this song hits that same place. It’s funny that in some sense, it’s so nostalgic, but on the other, they were very young singing this, and I carried that as well, even being younger still.
I remember I had a journal for one of my classes my senior year of high school, and I started picking songs of the day for the entries. This was the song for November 4, 1995 because it was the day that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. I don’t know; at the time it just seemed like there was progress for humankind – after all, it had only been a couple of years prior that the unthinkable had happened, and Germany had reunified and the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Yes, I was an international relations geek even then, even if I hadn’t even heard the term “international relations”. Back then, I believed a lot of what the news was feeding me as far as framing of issues and such, and… it would be Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s death a year later which would eventually end up causing me to lose a lot of trust in the media.
In any case, in those days before Amazon, I ended up searching for a CD of Marmalade for a long time, and I never was able to find one. Even when I went to Germany for the first time in 1996, I searched for their music there as well, knowing that they had been bigger in Europe than in the US. No luck.
“Reflections of my Life” only made it to #10 on the US charts in 1970, but it’s interesting because every once in awhile, I’ll hear it randomly, like in a store or something. Most recently, I’ve heard it in rotation for Mark Belling’s bumper music for his radio program. I always think I’m “in the know” for recognizing it. More than that, though, it always takes me back to my senior year of high school and the tumult that was going on in my own life and in the larger world.
Breath of Hallelujah 