John Beeler is a professor in the history department here at UA. He specializes in British naval history but also teaches a class on British pop culture and music inspired by his youth and the year he lived in London.
Q: How does a naval historian begin teaching a class on British Pop Culture and Music?
A: I’m now a full professor and I can teach anything that I want to teach as long as it does not infringe on anyone else’s territory and there’s nobody to point to me and say “Hey Beeler! You’re not an expert in that and you have no business teaching it.” I’m not trained to teach British Pop, obviously. My sole qualification for this is that I lived through it. I have a personal identification with it and I’m still passionate about it and why not teach a course on something that I’m fascinated with and passionate about. But the pragmatic reason is, I’d been involved with the Alabama at Oxford summer program for years and years and years and years and those courses, the courses that are taught on that program, have to draw well because we have to somehow have the program run in the black and all of the money for it comes out of student fees so you want to attract as many students to your class as possible. I wanted to teach something that was attractive. My original course for that was called Britain in the World Wars because a lot of students are interested in war- the Civil War class here always fills to capacity- and then I thought “Hey I can teach something even better. I could teach a course on British pop music and culture” and that was the pragmatic reason for taking it on. But I’ve come to enjoy it so much and it’s such a good draw
Q: You always bring a large stack of records with you to class. How did you amass a collection that large?
A: Oh it’s scary. I’ve got a whole a garage full of records. I’ve got tens of thousands of records. Thrift shops over the years. I’m an thrift shopper. Some of them were purchased new in record stores. Some of them were purchased used in record stores. I go through Oz Music’s used stacks every now and again and it just warms my heart to see vinyl making a comeback as it has been in the last several years because that’s my preferred medium and I’ve got, in addition to the guitars and the amplifier so I strum along to Alice Cooper records, I’ve got a turntable along with a tuner and a CD player and a cassette deck. I love records. I’ve got thousands and thousands of records that I’ve never listened to in my life. I just found them in a thrift store and I liked the cover and they were cheap so I bought them.
Q: Have you ever stumbled across a record in a thrift store where you were like “Oh my god, I can’t believe I found this!”?
A: Oh yeah. More than once. The first Velvet Underground album had a cover by Andy Warhol, the pop artist and it was a cover of a yellow banana. The first edition, you could peel the skin off and underneath was the banana flesh except it was pink. I found a copy of that. And I can tell you exactly where. It was at the Salvation Army thrift store on Main Street in downtown Champaign–Urbana, where I went to grad school. Now there’s mildew damage to the bottom of the cover so it’s not very valuable but it hadn’t been peeled. The banana skin was still on. I have not found a copy of the Beatles butcher block album cover, I probably never will. People are on the lookout for things like that.
