Sir Paul slows down March 12, 2026

 

We got the news this week that Sir Paul is cutting back on his public schedule, finally acting his age.

Over the last few years, he’s run around like – to coin a phrase – a spring chicken.

Still, this is an alarming report because we realize that he is reaching the age when the next bit of news could be heart breaking.

This is a man who wrote “When I’m 64” when he was 14 years old and became something of an anthem in our lives as we aged as well.

Hank used to sing it as a mantra for a future he predicted for the four of us, him, me, Hank and Garrick. Hank was taken by one of the Beatles images as Renaissance men, putting our faces where their faces were, Hank and Pauly having the most talent of the four of us.

But ultimately, when we reached our 40s, Hank envisioned the four of us sitting as old men in rocking chairs on a porch somewhere, a vision that ended abruptly with Hank’s untimely (but not expected death) in 1995 (a few days prior to the release of new Beatles recordings from the BBC).

The four of us, however, were not “the band” (the history of which I’ve written in notebooks and will likely post as some point now that most of the members of the band have passed on), only Pauly was, a very talented, very Lennon-like character, whose recordings I treasure.

The four of us – Pauly, Hank Garrick and I – did a number of our own projects of which only a handful of tapes remain. Jane, Pauly’s long time romance, has promised to send me the reel to reel recording we made in the summer of 1972 and sent to her in San Francisco, played only once when she received it, and then on a machine in a local headshop for an unsuspecting public.

Most of our recordings were done drunk or drugged out, with the exception of “Dead Horses,” on which Pauly and Rick performed one of my early songs.

Everything we did was inspired by the Beatles and ironically echoes some of the Beatle mythology. The band started in Nick Romeo’s basement in 1966. He was a rich kid whose parents bought him an amazing amount of band equipment. Everybody gravitated to that basement and eventually evolved in the band – which in various formations – performed its last gig in Cedar Grove in 2004.

As with my hopes for the Beatles and a reunion (that died with Lennon) in 1980, I continued to hope for some resurgence of the band, but unlike with the Beatles, the last performance in 2004 actually brought back many of the original members of the 1966 version.

The news about Sir Paul only makes me ache all the more for Pauly, who passed away in early 2020 (from a heart attack not COVID), at a time when he was still writing original songs and sending them via the internet to his long-time guitarist to polish off.

Pauly and I recorded a lot together during the 1970s and 1980s, but never as polished as what he did after that.

The same cannot be said of Sir Paul. While I think he only occasionally achieved Beatle-like quality in his later work, he carried on – and more than once I convinced the band to play some of Sir Paul’s work, the recordings of which I still have.

The problem with Sir Paul’s announcement is that it only stirs up fears of my own mortality, at a time when I am desperate to transition from guitar player to musician the way most of my friends have before me.

What is the old saying: Better late than sorry.

I sincerely hope Sir Paul remains with us for many years to come, and perhaps his slowing down will keep him thriving.

 

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The price of immortality March 11, 2026

  

Yoko claims John Lennon was gay.

For long time Beatles fans, this was not a surprise, since questions about his sexuality have been in the air for decades, more secretly during those early days with Stu, more recently in documentaries reporting on his relationship with Brian, and that trip John took with Brian after which he allegedly admitted having an encounter.

In this day and age, John’s sexual preferences mean far less than during the height of Beatlemania when this news might have been a train wreck.

But it is one more piece in a very tragic story, the rise and fall of The Beatles, as sad to me as any Shakespearian play.

On this, Garrick (one of my three closest friends growing up) and I disagree.

He sees this as a story of four working class lads making it big – bigger than anyone of their class might ever have expected. Perhaps to some degree, this is true. But like all tragedies, the story comes with very flawed characters (John and Paul) in particular, carrying the seeds of their demise from almost the start when they first got together.

John apparently longed for the early Hamberg days, when they were wild and free, but also burdened with their own fatal flaws that they would carry with them into their success.

John was right when he said nothing matters but the music. And yet, following the threads of their career, how they were exploited, and became enslaved by their own popularity, I cannot help but pity them.

We – Garrick, Pauly, Hank and I – always envisioned ourselves as the Beatles, Pauly becoming a clone of John, equally as great as a musician with fine art very closely resembling that which John did in art school.

Our story was just as tragic, although we did not reach the same heights as the Beatles did, making me think this is much too common an issue, as our personal flaws grow along with the success we so crave.

The more I learn about The Beatles, the sadder I become, as if looking into a mirror at all our lives, and realizing that people rarely get what they want most without carrying the burden of our own demise.

How do we manage to survive the impact of actually achieving our wildest dreams.

Both Paul and John tended to be cruel, maybe more than a little arrogant, and to a lesser degree the same might be said of George and Ringo.

But how do you become Gods and now feel that way? Did they all realize that their rise to fame (and few in the world have become so famous as they) would come at a terrible cost?

As I learn their songs, I come to agree with John even more. What they accomplished, what makes them stand out in time, isn’t the fame they achieved, but the art they left behind.

And thinking this, I wonder, would it have been worth it had we managed to get even a little of that fame, to gain immortality despite all our flaws.

 

 

 

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Degrees of Beatle separation March 9, 2026

 

Yesterday, I wrote about my degree of separation with the Beatles, leaving several elements.

In particular, Ginsberg.

This was because I met Ginsberg for the first time in 1979 at the Great Falls Festival in Paterson, where, drunk as a skunk, he attempted to pick me up.

I was as shocked as the Beatles must have been when they encountered him as a far-out party where he stood naked except for a door hanger on his dick saying: do not disturb.

I would meet Ginsberg a number of times later, once confronting him when he sold the rights to his earlier works, and we featured him on the cover of our underground literary magazine: Scrap Paper Review.

He was a frequent performer at the Dodge Poetry Festival before it became utterly woke, and got gobbled up by a university in Newark.

Ginsberg also helped of my friends establish Long Shots magazine out of Hoboken, which I frequently wrote about during the 1990s.

We all gathered in Paterson to celebrate Ginsberg’s legacy after his death.

I never connected Ginsberg to the Beatles, even though I later learned of how huge an impact on them he had.

The Beatles were part of my day to day life growing up, something recollected during an interview I did with Cousin Brucie many, many years later.

They were the sound track of my life, the echoes of which frequently came from the band I did sound for during the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Although I had heard Magical Mystery Tour on the radio, I did not fully connect to it until I got to LA and bought a reel to reel copy of it – an amazingly clear production, and for some reason , felt the impact of Blue Jay Way – partly because I was on the run from the police at the time. Oddly enough, Paul Simon wrote two songs in the same house that came out on  record about that time.

Pauly, my best friend, routinely claimed the Beatles ruined out lives, since it set up expectations we could not attain. Pauly lived his life as if he was John Lennon, even down to creating the same kind of art. With the band, he did many Beatles covers. Our recordings together never managed to achieve anything near that level. Even his originals with more professional musicians were slavishly Beatle-like.

During an interview with a local newspaper when still working as a library director, Pauly’s response to questions about his favorite band said it all: “The Beatles of course. Is there any other?”

This is something of an exaggeration since Pauly was among one of the most versatile performers, adept at Stones and many other bands. But his renditions of Beatles tunes stand out, even our drunken version of Twist and Shout.

In the 1990s and early teens, I managed to interview a number of musicians I admired as a teen, but the closest I came to interviewing a Beatle was Pete Best, though I saw a number of those who played with the Beatles at the annual Festival for Beatles Fans here on the East Coast.

It is unlikely, I’ll ever get the chance.

 

 

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Beating the Beatles

One of the Great regrets of my life is having never met any of the Beatles.
Or even seen them live except on television that fateful night February 9th 1964. 
Certainly they changed my life.
My wife of course actually got to see The Beatles at Shea stadium.
I have come close, having known Abby Hoffman and David Peel at by dear friend Sid Bernstein.
Sid long before his death promised to say hello to Paul for me when Paul invited him to a concert in Philadelphia.
I do not know whether he actually did so or not. 
Sid met me in Hoboken years ago when he came there to promote something. I don't remember what and after which he frequently visited me at my office or called me on the phone to proposing one idea or another .
At some point the mid-90s I rehookedhim up with an old band who had played the arts festival.
There are times when some of these secondary connections to The Beatles seemed to overlap such as when I saw David Peel and his band in Thompson square Park trying to get Sid Bernstein to sign them.
I knew David Peel since 1968 in Washington square Park, a somewhat annoying character who got the ear of John Lennon who helped produce some of his later albums.
Of course that same year. I had met Abby Hoffman for the first time who also got John Lennon's ear .
The founder of festival for Beatles was also somebody I knew from 67 68. having gone to his record store in the garden State plaza often for sheet music and 45s 
I'm pretty sure now that I'm never going to meet any of the Beatles in real life. although my goal now is to play their music I mean perform their music myself and somehow get inside their heads.
This mean at my late age I must become a musician 
I have played guitar since the '70s but not as a musician. I wrote songs and things but not really knowing what I was doing.
It's an interesting concept and one of the things I learned recently is that paul wrote most of his songs music first, something I supposed he did because it's so very hard to take a poem or written lyric and then that music for it. 
I hope I live long enough to be able to get through the entire beatle catalog and perhaps even the solo stuff we shall see

An apology to Springsteen

 

 While I’m not going to go out and become a Springsteen Tribute band, I’ve decided I’ve been unfair to him in previous posts.

I let my political objections interfere with my honest appraisal of him as an artist, and committed the worst sin possible in condemning him for having an opinion that differs from mine.

While his doing the Philadelphia concert for Hillary Clinton still irks me to no end, our position on how ICE raids are being handled is not too different, although I do not see ICE agents as stormtroopers. I do not believe Trump is a tyrant.

But Springsteen has every right to express his opinions in what is still a free country.

I was most disingenuous in regard to his music, falsely accusing him of stealing his ideas from other well-established performers such as Van Morrison and the Beatles.

We all steal our ideas from those we admire most.

I’m a piss poor musician, but the reason I try to perform his music as well as that of other artists is because I admire them and want to learn how to do what they do from the inside out.

Much of my own music is influenced by Dylan, the Beatles and Springsteen, and as John Lennon once pointed out about the silliness surrounding the end of the Beatles, the real thing is about the music.

I come to all this after having gone through Springsteen’s albums recently. While I still love most his first two albums with the E-Sting Band (because they tell a tale of life at the time when they began), his other albums still intrigue me, and I’ve come to admire the structure of his songs –  Point Blank being curious in that he started out with a typical verse and chorus, then did three straight verses to conclude with the chorus.

I’m never going to be a great musician (which he is). The most I can ever hope for is to learn enough from musicians like him to perform a respectable cover.

But I was wrong in judging him for his moral stand. We all have to do what we need to do, and I might not like it, I have to respect his right to do what he thinks is right.

 

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Woke grammies again

 I normally don't watch the Grammys because they are boring

the people who are putting out music are pathetic in general with a few exceptions 

But last night we knew that this was going to be an anti ice rally and so it's important to pay attention to what these spoiled little twits are doing

None of them actually help anybody but they all had their little out ice pins which said they were on the right side of History 
Of course they are rather useless people who pontificate a lot but don't help anybody and you have to wonder how they can sleep at night knowing that all they did was put a pin on their outfits and really made no difference in any respect

Celebrities like Bruce Springsteen Cher bad Bunny are people who really are so selfish and self-centered that they think being on the right side of History, putting a little pin on their lapel is going to make them somehow morally superior to the rest of the planet 

Of course that's why watching Grammys or the academy awards or the Golden globe is an entertainment because you get to see brain dead people doing brain dead things and they feel good about it when they are actually not helping anybody 

The entire event yesterday was a fashion statement not a protest 

Unless you have that little pin on your lapel you are not important you're not significant. you're like the idiots on the line outside club 54 who are too ugly or badly dressed to make the in crowd 

so these other idiots like jelly roll rant and rave about how bad ice is while sitting in the luxury of a auditorium full of cheering brain dead people 

That's the entertainment, knowing that these celebrity types mean nothing. do nothing, have no real opinions. they just need to know that they are fashionably dressed and have the right pin on the lapel.
 I think Melanie wrote a song about them wearing the same button back in the 60s it was just as pointless then but now it's even more ludicrous 

You have to love how these people celebrate themselves while out on the street there's a real conflict going on, none of which any of these celebrities know anything about except filtered through really questionable media 
 in the end we all have our little pin and we all can feel very self congratulatory for having worn out pin during this amazing event, while on the street people are freezing and shooting and dying and being assaulted 
And none of these celebrities are doing anything to help anybody but themselves.

Springsteen goes for woke

 Springsteen silliness is not the biggest disappointment of my life but when a one-time hero goes off the rails the way Springsteen did, I feel a little betrayed.

 you have to wonder who he's been talking to and how he can come up with the Ludacris notions as claiming ice agents are Trump Stormtroopers when his hero, the president that gave Bruce a freedom medal, deported more and put kids into cages with not one peep from the boss of Jersey shore 
This disappointment goes back before Bruce recorded his woke anthem this week. his performance in Philadelphia for Hillary Clinton in the closing days of the 2016 election turned me off on a man I once admired, much as I got turned off when people like Abby Hoffman -- a friend of mine at the time -- twisted John Lennon into a woke idiot
 it's not the same.
 Lennon was vulnerable to that whole collection of users, starting with Yoko, and so his demise was no surprise.
 I assumed Springsteen was stronger than that but apparently he is so desperate for attention he leaped onto the woke bandwagon, spouting all the usual crap that we hear coming from the mouths of woke influencers.
 of course my favorite radio station in Jersey City is playing the crap out of Bruce's crappy song. It is like putting rock salt on a belly wound, testifying to Springsteen's possible success in becoming yet one more celebrity full of stupid notions.
 he will win over a lot of woke people, who in the past looked down on his blue color persona, seeing him perhaps the way the British did Benedict Arnold after giving over West point to them.
But none of the woke people will love him the way working people did and now we don't