Blame it on the Beatles

Who says the past is past?! It was for baby boomer Jim Potter but it’s not any more. A couple of years ago he not only resurrected it, he reproduced it! And he blames it On The Beatles.

Blame it on February 9, 1964! Like many baby boomers, watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show was a turning point in our youthful lives. The Beatles and other bands in the British Invasion gave us an immediate love for R&B and pop music. We were inspired to take up guitars and drums and sing our hearts out.

My brother Don, our friend Nic Baker, and I formed a band based in Nic’s Salt Lake City basement. We covered countless songs from such bands as the Kinks, Rolling Stones, the Animals, and (most of all) the Beatles. We started writing our own material, composing songs over the next two years….. songs we rediscovered in 2003.

During the heady years of 1964-1966, our basement band NB3 (Nic Baker Trio) wrote more than a dozen songs. Fortunately we kept the lyrics and chord progressions (recorded for posterity by Nic, the group’s designated typist) in a bright-yellow plastic binder.

On June 22, 1967, the Potter brothers left Salt Lake City, Utah. Around noon on that bright sunny day, Nic walked up the street, his dog’s leash in one hand, the yellow binder in the other. Nic gave us the song file; we reciprocated with our aluminum trash can (I suppose one man’s trash is another’s treasure.) Somewhere deep inside me, I knew this file of Baker/Potter pop songs would someday have a profound affect on my life. Since this was the only written record of our musical odyssey, I always stored these transcripts in a safe place. I never knew why, but I still kept them.

Throughout my years in high school, then college, then a 28-year career with an international telecommunications company, plus marriage, kids, dogs, and day-to-day life, I kept the song folder in trunks or boxes that followed me from place to place, residence to residence, state to state. They were safe, but not always easy to pinpoint. I would occasionally reflect fondly on the songs inside while subconsciously whistling a familiar melody from long ago. Somewhere in the house (and in the back of my mind) was a treasure neatly packed away and stored in some basement or attic. Throughout the years and eventually the decades, I would occasionally still think about the old song file, reflecting back on Nic’s goodbye present.

Fast forward to December 2003. My career had surprisingly ended with a company-wide initiative offering generous volunteer early-retirement packages as part of a “reduction in force.” But what would I do in my spare time that had previously been dictated by a career that followed the principle that “the management clock has no hands?” Immediately, two thoughts came to mind: (1) find that old song folder, and (2) find Nic Baker. The first would prove to be the simpler of the two.

I found the file neatly stashed away in a large box in the garage. I carefully thumbed through the lyrics, which were fast approaching their 40th year. When I told my brother Don about this rediscovery and showed him the lyrics, he commented that their antiquated state made each lyric sheet looked like Papyrus! After all, Nic had typed them on an aged (even then) Smith Corona typewriter.

My great memory and fertile imagination have always compensated for my feeble academic skills. As I combed through the archive of the Baker/Potter “hit parade” of pop songs written when we were 13 and 15 years old, all the melodies and harmonies, chord progressions, and drum rhythms surfaced. I thought, “Hey, these songs are really good,” although I must admit bias. I asked Don if he would be willing to resurrect one of the songs and record it professionally. We’d try to recreate the sound of pop music in 1965. Don agreed, so in a long one-day session in August 2004, we recorded “When I Met You.” But we agreed that only if we could achieve the sound we strived for as kids would we record the remainder of the dozen songs. What we found was, we could. As it was, the recording process required 20 months of diligent planning, performing, editing, and polishing these sounds that once captured our adolescent imaginations.

The search for Nic, however, took even longer. Thanks to the internet, we found him after 18 months, discovering that he lived just a few hours from us, not halfway around the world as we had begun to believe.

To say that Nic was surprised to hear from us is an understatement. But to learn that we were revisiting all the old songs from our past was, well, shocking! Don and I recruited Nic’s musical services for piano accompaniment. We had come full circle, bringing our dreams to life and completing what we had started almost 40 years earlier.

If not for that fateful handoff on June 22, 1967, this project would have never seen the light of day. And the magic of 1965 never would have been reborn.