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

Sptingsteens Trump derangement syndrome

 I finally got to hear Springsteen's new song about Minneapolis protest 

Needless to say I was appalled although caught between two conflicting ideas 

Springsteen appears to have caught the Trump derangement syndrome and has one of the worst cases in history, obviously failing to wear a mask when told to and did not get his booster shot.

The other conflicting idea is that he is exploiting the deaths of two people on the streets of Minneapolis in order to become relevant again, a pretty standard reinvention technique he has perfected over the years.

 

Nonetheless he is lost all credibility with this song because -- unlike really classic protest songs like imagine, blowing in the wind, and blackbird, he does not use metaphor to make his point but blatantly calls Trump a Nazi and the ice agents Stormtroopers.

This of course is an invitation for parody which I did as soon as I heard the song and realized it does not have anything original to offer but a regurgitation of all of the anti-ice anti-trunp propaganda that he has digested over the last 8 or so years.

The song really made me pity Springsteen on every level, partly because it fails to meet the basic standard of art as opposed to propaganda, but also shows a real problem mental illness that he apparently has caught from all of the newsreels he's been watching.

On the other hand, he May simply be trying to make money -- which seems to have been a bigger goal for him than actually creating art -- historically, he has sold his soul to the devil in every case to find immortality.

The problem with this latest effort is that he's going to go down as a nut case and that's very sad-- for someone who even stealing his ideas from other people had a decent body of work that he could retire on.

 

Obviously whether it's derangement or a plot to get even richer than he is, Springsteen is vying for a piece of History to become the new Bob Dylan or John Lennon, a spokesperson for peace only his rhetoric is so outrageous that he can't qualify on any level to be either one of them.

At the end of the day, Springsteen is going to come down as a has been, a wannabe, a pathetic woke warrior with no more credibility than the wackos and he celebrates in the streets of Minneapolis.

 very sad 

Springsteen doubles down on his stupidity

 

You have to admire the tenacity of Bruce Springsteen, who is apparently desperate to become the new Bob Dylan on the 21st Century.

Springsteen ain’t no Bob Dylan or John Lennon, even though he’s ripped off both over his long musical career.

When Springsteen is stupid, he doesn’t hold back, and apparently hopes to get another medal – this time perhaps from the Chinese government, which is funding the anti-ICE campaigns.

Springsteen may even get a statue erected in Cuba the way John Lennon did.

For many of his older fans, Springsteen is more than just a minor disappointment. But clearly is looking to capitalize on the deaths of two protestors (both of whom were apparently funded by the Chinese) in order to be seen as being on the right side of the current American Civil War.

He even penned a new song with the aim of it becoming the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our generation, and he can get even richer than he already is.

What is it that goes on in his pee wee brain? Does he really think he’s God’s gift to mankind, and that people will gravitate to him as the new savior?

Hard core fans will continue to support Springsteen’s music, even when the greedy son of a bitch does nothing but rake in cash from overpriced ticket sales.

We should have been warned about his disposition when Springsteen moved to Beverly Hill all those years ago and tried to hobnob with the jet set.

But since Obama gave him the Freedom Medal, Springsteen has got a new vision of his role in the world – even going so far as to offend his fans by giving a concert to raise money for Hillary Clinton.

These days, he’s on the road promoting his anti-ICE agenda, trying to outdo pathetic bands like Bad Bunny and Green Day as the most offensive performers in music.

It’s all right, ma, everybody must get stoned, and Springsteen erodes whatever status he had among working people by this diatribe in his desperate attempt to solidify his status as a rebel.

Springsteen was never a rebel, just a fake.

And the more he rants and raves about social injustice, the more obvious it becomes that he is trying to exploit the current situation to build up his status.

This is a sad man being stupid.

 

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