When the Beatles recorded the album containing “Twist And Shout” at Abbey Road studios in London in February 1963, John Lennon had just come off the road with a wicked cold. At the end of a 12-hour session, though he’d been lashing it with milk all day, his voice was shot. They got the song in one take just before midnight. It was all he had left. He never liked it. Raw and rough, smooth and fluid, incredibly powerful, it’s a lava milkshake, like the fire that touched Isaiah’s lips but didn’t burn. It’s one of the greatest vocals ever.
So when “Twist And Shout” came up on the radio this morning as I drove to work, I knew it would be a good day. Every hearing triggers the sensation of the first one 61 years ago. Paul and George singing backup. The layered ahs, screams, and George’s D9 chord at the end. Lyrics expressing a romantic fixation that was beyond an eight-year-old’s ken. Plus I remember the Beatles trading cards and bubble gum.
I roared into St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park singing along. And it was indeed a good day, though not perfect or uncontaminated by stress and anxiety. Are they ever? But my inner toe was tapping throughout, just like Ferris Bueller’s dad in his office in downtown Chicago as Ferris lip-syncs “Twist And Shout” in the parade downstairs.
That being said, I didn’t mind one bit when I roared away at the end of the day, only to have my progress home blocked by a flock of baby geese making their way across Park Ave., heading from Echo Park Lake down Lemoyne St., past Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s parsonage, a route that would’ve put them on Sunset Blvd. in about 400 shakes of a tail feather.
I pulled over to join the other passerby taking pictures. It only occurred to one of us that humanity may have had a responsibility to the geese and their parents besides curating their cuteness, namely keeping the dusk-colored critters off the streets at dusk. He waved them back toward the lake. Who knew what was better for the them, shepherd or flock? “You were only waiting for this moment to be free,” Paul sang a few years later in “Blackbird.” But maybe not quite yet, little ones.