On my way home last night the radio played Hey Jude and I just can't stop hearing it....not a problem, I put it on this morning and listened through my headphones, beautiful....
Folks have heard "Hey Jude" so many times now, over these past ~45 years since it was released, that many are tired of it. Not me. I remember when it was released--the first Beatles single on their new Apple label. It looked so cool when you bought it, in that glossy black record sleeve with simple lettering. (And it couldn't be bought on any LP at the time, until Allen Klein got his greedy fingers on the Beatles' catalog and released the
Hey Jude album of odds and ends in 1970--no longer available.)
My mother, who was in her early 30s when that single came out, used to play "Hey Jude" as often as I did, if not more. I'd come home from the 8th grade to a home smelling of Pine-Sol and perhaps the furniture rearranged (as she used to do every few months, just for variety)--after one of her frequent house cleanings. And "Hey Jude" would be playing on our big wooden TV/stereo console she had bought at the local Firestone tire store (yes, tire store!) a few months earlier--over and over again, using that 45-RPM spindle that, when left "open," allowed the record to play repeatedly. Those were the days! (Ooh, another Apple single release that came out about the same time.)
So, I never get tired of hearing it. It brings back many memories. And it's a great song, to boot!
BTW: there is an anecdote in the 2013 book,
Beatles vs. Stones, by John McMillian--which I am currently reading--at p. 1, when Paul McCartney strolled into Mick Jagger's birthday party at the new, trendy Vesuvio Club in the summer of 1968. The club's loudspeakers were playing an advance pressing of the Stones' new LP,
Beggars Banquet, and everyone was dancing along to it. Paul passed the club owner an advance pressing of "Hey Jude"--which no one outside of the Beatles' close inner circle had ever heard before. The crowd was floored and demanded that it be played again and again. Then the B-side "Revolution" was played. "When it was over," [club owner Tony] Sanchez said," Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him."
