Spring 1969, London, Ontario. Grade 12, Oakridge High School
A friend named Chris Turnbull had somehow inherited a car. Probably his parents handed over this dilapidated vehicle when he turned 18.
His decrepit Dodge was something of a jalopy.
But it was equipped with an 8-track cartridge player:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge
You inserted a clunky music cartridge with a “thunk” into this box-like protuberance.
Each morning, Chris, whom we mysteriously called Gube (short for Lugubrious) or Hoss (because he was deemed to resemble a character from the popular tv show Bonanza), would drive four or five of us hormonally challenged pubescents from his house to the high school, which was only about a kilometer away. (Chris made a lot of detours.)
And we listened over and over again, on an endless loop, to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour.
https://genius.com/albums/The-beatles/Magical-mystery-tour
These were moments of wonder and hope, of adventure and of fleeting and gratuitous freedom. We smoked menthol cigarettes and felt weirdly empowered.
Ah, but it was the music that transported us beyond the constrictive confines of a cookie-cutter suburb, providing an ineffable sense that we were teetering on the threshold of a brave new world where discoveries and revelations beckoned…a Magical Mystery Tour. Life itself.
The Magical Mystery TourIs dying to take you awayDying to take you awayTake you today…
Your friend,
Robert
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