The Beatles, Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby
I wanted to write about a Beatles song. The band dominated my teenage listening habits, so if I am indeed ‘shaped’ by songs then about 80 percent of me would probably be Beatles. So I thought about all the unbelievable songs, the ones I rate most highly, songs like Hey Jude, A Day In The Life, Penny Lane, Something, Blackbird, Piggies… ok, maybe not Piggies… But when it actually came to the song that has most shaped me—I mean actually changed me in the most tangible and long-lasting way—I’d have to plump for something that’s technically not even a Beatles song at all. Just a Carl Perkins cover, sung by George Harrison, that they banged out at live shows and then slapped on the end of Beatles For Sale.
I should start by explaining that I’m half-Japanese, on my mum’s side, and so every few years during my childhood I would get to fly halfway around the world to visit relatives. We’d stay in my grandparents’ house, a traditional wood and paper walls affair, that was unfortunately located in a small industrial village by the East China Sea called Arao. If you can picture a sort of Japanese version of Port Talbot, you’re more or less there.
On one of these visits (I must have been about 12 or 13), we went to see a friend of my uncle’s who lived in the nearest big city, Kumamoto. Shamefully, given his importance in my life, I can’t remember this friend’s name. For the purposes of this account, I’m going to call him ‘Jiro’. Anyway, Jiro lived in a small apartment near the main rail station. I say small only because it felt small (it was probably quite large for a Japanese apartment), and this was mainly due to the quite staggering collection of a) musical equipment and b) Beatles records and memorabilia that Jiro had amassed over the years.
Jiro was a serious Beatles fan. The sort of guy who’d happily spend his Sunday afternoons hunting down bootleg Meet The Beatles out-takes interspersed with the sounds of John Lennon sipping tea. Or recordings taken from appearances on Swedish radio. In a way, the next six years of my life were basically an attempt to achieve the same level of obsessive monomania, but ultimately falling miles short.
The only reason we were visiting Jiro in the first place was that he wanted to meet my dad, who had once played rhythm guitar in a short-lived pop group called Grapefruit, which had signed to Apple in the late Sixties. So my first memory of Jiro is of a middle-aged bespectacled Japanese man almost uncontrollably delirious to be shaking the hand of someone who had, in turn, shaken the hands of John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Neither my dad or I knew much Japanese, and the only English phrases that Jiro knew were Beatles lyrics. So once he’d asked us if we liked Back In The USSR and Help! (we nodded politely) it seemed any further conversation was dead in the water. But after an awkward pause, I remember Jiro getting astonishingly excited when I showed a passing interest in the large collection of keyboards stacked against one of the apartment walls. As it transpired, he wanted to play us a song. And so we were treated to the sight and sound of a Japanese man singing (badly) Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby accompanied by a large silver Yamaha keyboard. This was every bit as weird as it sounds, but it broke the ice in the most extraordinary way. And for some reason it made me want to be more like Jiro. Not exactly like him, perhaps. Maybe less out of tune and less socially awkward. But definitely as enthusiastic and forensically dedicated to a band and their songs.
When it was time to leave Jiro disappeared briefly, re-emerging with a bundle of cassettes (all stuff by The Beatles) and a portable keyboard which he insisted I take with me. In this small but hugely generous act Jiro changed my life profoundly. For the rest of the holiday, I listened endlessly to The Beatles, messed around on the keyboard and, most importantly, started to write songs. The first songs, in fact, that I ever wrote. Predictably bad songs—appalling songs actually—mainly derivative, but songs nonetheless, that led to more songs, and more songs, and more—until a point where the songs were no longer appalling, perhaps occasionally even vaguely respectable.
We saw Jiro a couple more times that holiday. Each time he would present me with an armful of cassettes—usually homemade mixtapes of extremely rare bootlegs—and on the final occasion a large grey Beatles t-shirt (circa Sgt. Pepper era), which I wore so regularly that large sections eventually wore down to nothing at all. I thanked him profusely at the time, but if I could have seen how big an impact those acts of generosity would have in shaping my older self, I would probably have broken down in tears, or something similarly embarrassing.
And I firmly believe that, without that terrible rendition of Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby, all those kind gestures—the tapes, the keyboard, the t-shirt—would not have followed. I imagine I would still have gotten into The Beatles, but certainly not as deeply, and I probably would have written songs, just not as many of them. So, thank you Jiro (if that was indeed your name)—we’ll always have Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby.