It was early fall 1969, my senior year of high school, and the guy sitting in front of me turned around and asked whether I’d heard “Abbey Road” yet. I’d known Charles for two years, but not well. I was surprised to find out he was a major fan of The Beatles.
Charles and I quickly became friends and discovered another couple of Beatlemaniacs in our class, Mike and Jimmy.
Being seniors, with all our tough courses behind us, we basically were cruising through that year, just marking time at Athens High School until next year, when we’d go across town to the University of Georgia.
So, we worked a scam where the teacher in charge of the hour of study hall we had each morning thought we were going down to the ROTC department to “work on records” (we were all officers in the cadet corps).
Instead, we’d head out to Charles’ car to listen to The Beatles.
One day, while walking down the hall on our way to the parking lot, we got caught by one of the assistant principals. She and the teacher didn’t entirely buy our explanation, so, after that, we were forced to go down to the ROTC office and actually check in. Of course, then we would sneak out and go to the parking lot, so Charles could play us his growing collection of Beatles 8-track tapes.
Remember 8-tracks? Was there ever a worse format for listening to music? And yet those clunky cartridges were all the rage that school year, with car units a big thing. Stores devoted entirely to 8-tracks had even sprouted up. In fact, it was at such a place, called Tape Town, that Charles had found our favorite tape of the moment — a “bootleg” called “Kum Back,” consisting of songs from The Beatles’ unreleased “Get Back” album.
We quickly became addicted to this collection of rough mixes taken from one of Glyn Johns’ acetates that had escaped Apple Corps.
As I recall, it didn’t take us long to settle on “Two of Us,” “Let It Be,” “Teddy Boy” and “Long and Winding Road” as our favorites. I particularly liked “Two of Us.” When Charles would come by my house to pick me up to go record hunting, he’d have that song cued up on his car tape deck when I got in — because he was that kind of friend.
Athens didn’t yet have a progressive rock radio station, where the “Get Back” tapes generally were played, but the two local Top 40 stations recently had started weekly progressive programs, where they aired acts like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin late on Saturday nights — “Electric Circles” on WDOL and “96 Dimensions” on WRFC.
We started calling them up to request they play some of our unreleased favorites — particularly “Two of Us” and “Let It Be,” which a couple of weeks later we got to see The Beatles doing in advance clips from the “Let It Be” movie on Ed Sullivan’s “Beatles Songbook” special.
When the finished versions of the songs finally came out that spring as the “Let It Be” album, the 8-track of that album got major playing time during our “Beatles study hall,” too.
Charles and I also went to see the film when it hit town in May. (Earlier, we had caught Ringo and Peter Sellers in “The Magic Christian” and became big fans of Badfinger, the Beatlesque band on the soundtrack).
One Sunday afternoon in February, one of the local stations held a Beatles vs. Elvis marathon, where you could call in and vote for your favorite. Knowing all the rural areas the station reached, Charles and I figured we were justified in voting about a dozen times apiece for The Beatles — but Elvis still won.
Meanwhile, we didn’t take the release of a John Lennon solo single, “Instant Karma!,” as any sort of sign that The Beatles might be in their last days. The British music weeklies had been covering the disintegration of The Beatles, but we didn’t see them; nor did we see Rolling Stone, which wouldn’t show up on our local newsstands until that June, when I bought my first issue — the one focusing on “Let It Be.”
So, we weren’t aware of how close the band was to breaking up. After all, John had put out a couple of other singles, plus those avant-garde albums. Those were just sidelines, we figured.
Besides, there was that surprise Beatles album that suddenly had shown up in stores!
Charles called early in the morning on the last Saturday in February to say he’d seen it the previous night at Woolworth’s and that it wasn’t the “Get Back” album.
I ran out and, pooling two weeks’ worth of lunch money (my only source of income since my part-time sports rewrite job at the local paper had ended), I bought the $5.98 list LP on sale for about $3.98. It was called “The Beatles Again” (later “Hey Jude”) and was a strange collection of tunes ranging from “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Paperback Writer” to “Hey Jude” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
I called up the DJ on the air to find out what he knew about it.
“That’s a bootleg,” he said, thinking I was talking about “Kum Back.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said, reading him the track listing.
“Wow, that’s far out. We don’t even have that yet at the station!”
Charles and I decided that what local radio needed was a proper audio history of the Fabs, and we were the ones to do it.
Unfortunately, we never got any farther than a title. We called it “The Beatles Anthology” — a name that would resurface some 25 years later. Oh, and we decided to call ourselves Goody Productions, after our nickname for our ROTC teacher, Col. Gooding H. Bean.
Charles was a much more diligent ROTC student than me. We wore uniforms and drilled a couple of days a week and, as the public information officer my senior year, I kept the battalion scrapbook and wrote up ROTC events for the school paper, the Thumb Tack Tribune, where I was a staff member.
The rest of the time, ROTC students mostly listened to lectures on military history and watched old training films (which usually revolved around a fictional Lt. Hanley), as well as episodes of the Army-produced TV series “The Big Picture.” Charles and I were among the cadets who made fun of those films when the teacher was out of the room.
So, for the issue of the school paper that came out the last day of the school year, I wrote a column satirizing those outdated films being shown to the slumbering students in the ROTC department’s basement auditorium.
Col. Bean wasn’t too thrilled with me when I made it to ROTC class that day, but the main upset in the Battalion was one of the more gung-ho students, whose girlfriend had misunderstood a couple of the “senior predictions” that another staff writer and I had compiled for that edition of the Thumb Tack.
He loudly was threatening to take me outside after class and exact his revenge. The colonel took me into his office, and I explained our attempts at humor. He surprisingly seemed cool with it.
When class started, he told everyone that he thought they should hear what I had to say, so I stood up and explained that the wordplay that had the upset student’s girlfriend (who thought we were implying he’d been unfaithful) meant nothing of the kind. The senior listed before him in the predictions was a girl whose last name was May and we’d simply written that she “May or may not.” To continue the pun, for the student listed next alphabetically in the predictions, we wrote that he “definitely does.”
That just happened to be the angry cadet who now was threatening me. But I explained that it was just random luck that the joke was part of his prediction. And the colonel told everyone he thought my explanation was satisfactory.
At his urging, the angry guy shook my hand, and that was the end of it.
Shortly after class, when Charles and I left campus to treat ourselves to lunch at a nearby steakhouse, he still was chuckling. “You talked your way out of another mess,” he said. “I thought sure you were going to get your ass kicked.”
Then, high school finally was over, but because of problems at the printer, we ended up not getting our yearbooks until midsummer, so we missed out on the mass signing sessions that traditionally were held in the gym.
Charles brought his yearbook over to my house and I signed it. He signed mine, and since his was the only entry, it took up an entire page.
In part, it said that “listening to tapes in my car was fun not only for the listening but because we fooled [the teacher] and got her in a lot of trouble.”
As for ROTC, he wrote, “I guess there will still be sleeping masses in the basement, but will Lt. Hadley still excite them as much as he did us?”
As we headed to UGA that fall, Charles and I continued our Beatles listening sessions. One night, he called me excitedly about a new bootleg LP he’d found in one of those here-today-gone-tomorrow local hippie record shops that tended to pop up in college towns.
I rushed down to get a copy, and it was quite a treat, since it included The Beatles’ fan club Christmas messages (which we’d never heard before) and some of the band’s terrific BBC radio performances (which I believe were mislabeled by the bootleggers as the “Decca audition”).
From there, our respective bootleg collections grew as we ordered various LPs from dealers in the classified ads section of Rolling Stone, our new favorite magazine.
Eventually, through one of those ads, I discovered that there was such a thing as Beatles fanzines. But before I’d learned about them, I already had started playing with the idea of a Beatles newsletter of some kind and would photocopy prototypes. I always sent them to Charles, who was very supportive.
That eventually would become Beatlefan, and Leslie and I named our company the Goody Press, inspired by that name Charles and I had picked eight years earlier.
Although everyone had called him by his first name, Charles, in high school, his family used his middle name. So, when I’d call his family home and ask to speak to Charles, whoever answered would say, “Sure, hold on a second” and turn from the phone and holler “Leonard!”
Eventually, he started going by Leonard in general, but to his high school chums, he was always “Charles.”
Once we were out of college and working in the adult world, with me in Atlanta and Charles still in Athens, we didn’t get together nearly as often, but we attended each other’s weddings, and I took Leslie over to Charles’ house one night for one of our bootleg listening sessions.
However, as our lives and careers developed, we only saw each occasionally, usually at class reunions, where we’d always make sure we shared a table.
Then, one Sunday in 2010 or 2011, as my brothers and I were chatting with our Dad, who moved to an assisted-living facility after Mom died, I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up.
It was Charles! It turned out that, not only was his mother in that same facility, but she also was one of Dad’s daily meal companions, as they’d ended up being assigned to the same table.
After that, Charles and I used email and social media to communicate on a semi-regular basis. I was amused that, instead of signing emails “Charles” or “Leonard,” he used “Izzy,” a play on his last name, Isbell. To me, though, he was always Charles.
Sometimes, when I wrote articles or columns about high school or college or UGA football, Charles would contribute memories.
We spent a lot of time chatting together when the Athens High School Class of ’70 finally had our pandemic-delayed 50th class reunion in May 2022. And we continued to message. That’s how, in February 2023, Charles told me he wasn’t well, but he was undergoing treatment and was hopeful. I called him up and we had a long conversation, laughing about our past misadventures and our old classmates, and updating each other on our grandchildren.
I was looking forward to our 55th reunion and getting to see Charles again.
Then, I got a call Sunday from another longtime friend, who told me that his wife had heard that Charles had died the day before. I searched for an online obituary and, to my dismay, found that she was right. My old Beatle buddy is gone.
Of course, I’m at the age now where Charles certainly is not the first friend I’ve lost, but that doesn’t make it suck any less.
I smile, though, at the memories. I’m really glad that Charles turned around that day in homeroom.
