Clay City

Shortly after my rough introduction to judo, I had a somewhat less violent introduction to the Beatles.

By the end of my sixth grade year, I had fully caught Beatlemania.

Here’s how I described what happened:

Sitting in history class and watching Beatlemania: the Movie probably isn’t how most people have been introduced to the Beatles, but for the first time in my life, I was truly drawn into a band—hypnotized, even— and my life had just been changed forever, even if I didn’t quite know that for sure just yet.

It wasn’t just the music, either. The Beatles were a creative force of nature, practically creating new genres of music from whole cloth. Not only did they constantly push their sound forward, but they even stopped touring and completely changed their sound right as their popularity was at its peak.

I was a very, very creative kid. I don’t say this to toot my own horn—I do plenty of that here already, thank you very much—but instead to focus on the constant need to create. Whether it was drawing every day, planning a D&D campaign, making a zine, writing programs so I could see Paula Abdul’s song lyrics in real time, or building transforming robots from paper and tape, I simply could not sit still.

I saw this same compulsion in The Beatles. I became aware of Paul’s maniacal drive to get everyone else to get projects done, and I think I unconsciously began to identify with him the most. I was drawn in to the group’s astounding output of songs—nearly 200 originals, and 25 covers.

Now, at the time of this budding obsession, I was living in what has become the suburban neighborhood in my memory. From the outside, you would drive down a road with trees on either side, so it was like we were hidden from the world, in a way. We could play sports in the street since there weren’t any cars cutting through, and some of my most vivid memories from this time center around adventures in the streets.

While we were living there, the vast open spaces on either side of that road leading in were beginning to be developed. The neighborhood was off to the right toward the end of the long road, but before the ‘hood was a giant space we kids called “the pit.”

The pit was almost certainly an undeveloped area that was behind our house, and behind all of the houses on our street. I could hop the fence, head down a little hill, and I would be surrounded by sand and clay. Clearly, this was a much harder area to develop than the flatter, greener areas above.

I had a lot of adventures in the pit, and I promise to tell those stories some time soon. Today, though, we need to look the other way on our way in, to the left. Here, there were canyons made of clay. These canyons had been eroded by water, so they were fixed in place, but the substance was malleable.

I mean, it was clay, so that makes sense.

“The pit” was a well established nickname for that enormous zone behind all our houses, but this other spot didn’t really have a nickname. A few friends and I dubbed it Clay City, and that moniker has stuck in my mind ever since.

I’m sure that I had lots of adventures with other friends at Clay City, but I also spent a great deal of time there all by myself.

Remember that book I told you about, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today? Well, in addition to being an awesome nonfiction read (according to 11 year old Andrew), this book had lots of photos of the Beatles. I found a few I really liked, and almost certainly practiced drawing the Fab Four.

As a budding artist, I was into all sorts of media. I had an art teacher in sixth grade who really encouraged us to experiment with more unconventional art forms like batik (I still have this and promise to share a photo), and we got to do sculptures from clay. The class was pretty well-equipped for a middle school art class, and while I probably didn’t know how good I had it, I still appreciated all the different supplies and media.

Since I had a little practice with sculpting clay, and since Clay city was… well, made of clay… I decided to give a big project a shot. I would sculpt the faces of The Beatles into the side of this little cliff.

If you’re thinking this was overly ambitious, you’d be right. At the age of eleven—or maybe I was twelve by now—I was not going to create realistic carvings that would closely resemble George or Ringo, but the drawing I chose to copy was a caricature, so the features would be much more easily identified. I had a chance.

Off I went, carving over a period that must have spanned weeks, though I don’t remember any of the specifics. At the end, I had something that I thought looked like The Beatles, and I even got other kids to verify that the carvings looked somewhat like the drawing, since nobody my age knew who The Beatles were. I might have even had a few adults take a peek, and while they may have been charitable, I think I probably did an all right job.

Was I mimicking The Beatles when I went off in isolation to create something? I can’t be certain, but I think this group of four was one prominent template I was given right at the start of puberty, when complex thoughts were beginning to bud in my little brain.