Beatles fans gather at the Meadowlands Hilton March, 1995

 

 

A weekend of memories

 

Going to the Beatlefest at the Meadowlands Hilton on the weekend of March 17, 18 and 19 meant different things to different people. To many older Beatles fans, it was an opportunity to relive their youth, a memory lane of melodies that they can never quite get out of their heads. For younger fans, it was an opportunity to catch hold of a madness called Beatlemania, dipping their toes into the huge pool of music, posters, history and collectibles that made up such a large part of the early 1960s.

Yet for other fans, Beatlefest was a chance to recall through music and memorabilia vanished heroes like John Lennon, Brian Epstein, and Stu Suttcliffe as well as the still-living members in the Beatles' rise to fame. For Kathy Gerdsen, for instance, this was an opportunity to renew old ties, not with other Beatles fans, but with the family of George Harrison -- with whom until a few years ago she says she maintained correspondence.

I even came with a personal agenda, looking to build a tribute for my best friend, Frank, who died on March 16, one day before this year's Beatlefest got underway. To say he was a Beatles fan is gross understatement, though his fanaticism centered largely around the music. He played it often, and when younger, sang it in the streets of Paterson and New York with the vitality of a minstrel. He even sang it on the bus between Paterson and New York, a bus that oddly enough drove past the sight of the Meadowlands Hilton in Secaucus. Indeed, walking through the exhibits of Beatles memorabilia felt strange without Frank's constant diatribe. Although the Beatlefest has been at the Meadowlands Hilton yearly since 1980, this was my first visit alone. During the 1970s, Frank and I held many of our own festivals, attending double features of Beatles films with the hope that some spirit would rise up and bring the group back together. Although ill for many years, Frank held on until the very week the release of three new Beatles Songs was announced for August.

 

Taking over the hotel

 

My friend would have been very much at home walking through the halls of the Secaucus Meadowlands Hilton during the Beatlefest, basking in the glow of Beatles fervor that illuminated every corner and cast out every shadow. People sat on chairs or stairs or low walls with guitars and harmonicas, singing Beatles songs the way we used to. Everyone, everywhere, wore some form of Beatles clothing, from hats to t-shirts. Many wore buttons and patches that echoed the various phases of Beatles music from the ``Yeah, Yeah, Yeah'' era to the ``Long and Winding Road.''

This mood invaded the two bottom floors of the hotel, irritating grim-faced hotel security men, who constantly whispered into their two-way radios as they kept fans in the public areas <197> where almost every square inch had been converted for the festival's use. The temporary walls that divided the hotel ballrooms into three had been pushed aside to create one huge ballroom in which hundreds of metal folding chairs had been set up, facing a stage full of drums and amplifiers in expectation of an all-out rock & roll show. The stage, however, did serve as a forum for many of the special guests, like George Harrison's sister, Louise, who Kathy Gerdsen had come to see. But other guests also spoke, such as Paul McCartney's stepmother Ruth McCartney, and her daughter, Angie.

Geoffrey Ellis from the Beatles original managing company, NEMS, also spoke, as did Pauline Suttcliffe, the sister of the fifth and most controversial Beatle, Stu, who was recently propelled into the forefront of Beatles trivia by the release of the movie ``Back Beat.''

 

The little stories

 

Kathy Gerdsen came to Beatlefest on Saturday with a mission to meet up with Louise Harrison after losing communication with the Harrison family a few years ago. During the glory days of Beatlemania, Gerdsen accidently bumped into the Beatles when they rushed out of the Atlantic City Convention Hall after a concert. From this brief encounter, she established a tie.

``Before they left, I asked George how I could keep in contact with them. He told me to write his parents at Macketts Lane, Liverpool and that's what I did.''

Over the years, Gerdsen wrote faithfully and said she grew close with George's parents, Harry and Louise. She met with the family finally in 1974 during George Harrison's tour with Ravi Shankar. She took pictures and later continued her correspondence, which eventually faded out.

``I met with Louise at the Beatlefest,'' Gerdsen said. ``She invited me up to her suite where I showed her the photographs I had and the letters. She cried over them. Her father, Harry, died a few years ago, I guess it was nice to see him smiling.''

Other fans got their chance to talk to these dignitaries, though in the more public setting of the grand ballroom, where they asked questions about the intimate and private lives of the Fab Four. In one question and answer session with the McCartneys, Beatle fans pressed the guest speakers for memories, and were told about the time Paul and John sneaked out of the house in disguise to attend a local yard sale, wearing thick glasses taken from the junk drawer. Ruth McCartney said a truck pulled up before the boys got back, delivering all sorts of strange things. John, with his unusual sense of humor, had purchased a six foot tall cross. Angie McCartney said during her childhood John Lennon was her friend and uncle as well as hero Beatle. Lennon, in fact, helped her learn to ride a bicycle. But he was also the naughty brother who Ruth said she sometimes had to scold.

 

Beatles for sale

 

This year's Beatlefest was also alive with the usual Beatle gossip, from talk about the new Live from BBC album to the upcoming three new Beatle songs scheduled for inclusion in the Beatles Compilation album (due for release in August). This talk was particularly intense at the Giant International Beatles Market Place where crowds surged through narrow aisles to view the more than 100 tables of memorabilia, clothing, CDs and other collectibles. Beatles music played constantly over hidden speakers, though it struggled to compete with the chatter of visitors and dealers who quoted prices or talked about values, citing rumors of rare items or records. Many of the rarer pieces of Beatle merchandise brought me back in time to grammar school and junior high. While I never had a Beatles lunch box, many of my friends did. Some had Beatles pencil cases or Beatles umbrellas.

Now with the event of Stu Suttcliffe's emergence from the shadows with the film ``Back Beat,'' his paintings and image appeared at some tables. One dealer, however, complained about all the attention Stu Suttcliffe was getting, saying the man had quit the band before the Beatles had actually taken off. This dealer was among the purists who believed only John, Paul, George and Ringo deserved the high distinction of being called The Beatles. Those who came before their first hit record didn't count. One table selling videos promoted the 1979 TV Dick Clark film ``The Birth of the Beatles'' as the true Beatles story; the vendors said too much attention was spent to Stu in ``Back Beat.''

``Why didn't they call it the Stu Suttcliffe story?'' the vendor asked.

 

Stepping into their shoes

 

Meanwhile, in the upstairs galleries, the temporary Beatles museum traced thirty years of Beatles history with news clippings, photographs and posters with newer images of the Beatles done as part of this year's art contest. The images had the strangely unsettling quality of adoration, that I always found uncomfortable. Mark Lapidos, one of the festival's organizers, often quotes John Lennon who said ``the music is the thing.'' Upstairs, away from the market place and huge hall, the Beatles video rooms broadcast interviews and news clips from the past. In one video, George Harrison and Eric Clapton explained how Clapton had come to play on the Beatles' White Album. Nearby, lines of fans waited their turn to get into the Beatles recording studio where they could sing along for a fee. The Laser Karaoke video sing-along tested the mettle of numerous fans, who braved the embarrassment of having their voices and images broadcast out into the hotel halls. Men and women, ranging in age from teenagers to the middle-aged, each made brave attempts to step into the shoes of a favorite Beatle.

 

The singing fans

 

There were numerous other more organized if not more serious musical events over the three-day weekend celebration. Some of these involved filmed segments from Beatles at the Cavern club, videos from George, Paul, John and Ringo, as well as films, concert footage, and the all important Battle of the Beatle Bands on Sunday, with interludes of Beatles music by the cover band ``Liverpool.'' The big musical event for me, however, was the ongoing Beatles sound alike contest on Saturday afternoon, which drew hundreds of guitar-wielding Beatles fans from up and down the East Coast.  Washington, D.C. was well represented. So was New York City. But there were a significant number from New Jersey. At this event, fans bravely stepped up to the microphone to take their shots at recreating Beatles music. My friend, Frank, would have been among them. He had often been a guest singer of a local band -- a fan invited up to sing the Beatles' version of ``Till there was you.''

The audience, packed with fans waiting their turn, strummed their guitars, added the more complicated musical interludes and harmonies, sang or clapped in imitation of the original recording. Many of these people hadn't been born yet when the Beatles broke up in 1970, yet mouthed every word from memory as if they had heard the original release. Some of the acts performed to the piano, others to a variety of acoustic and electric guitars. There were even acts that sang their favorite Beatle songs a cappella. ``That boy'' sung by two girls from Waldwich and Westwood, New Jersey drew overwhelming applause. While some performers played it safe and kept their performance simple, others, like the duo with acoustic and electric guitar, dared to attempt the last leg of Abbey Road, a complicated recording studio masterpiece that these fans didn't quite manage to pull off live.

And yet for every performance, heads nodded, people swayed, men, women and children sang along, adding the parts the performers missed or could not do themselves, the``oohs'' and ``aahs,'' the complicated harmony. Everyone in that room knew every nuance of every song, yet strangely, didn't scold performers who failed to live up to the original, cheering them on, as if all lived in the same Beatles fantasy, and for this weekend lived again the era when Beatles music was something new. Fathers hugged their daughters as the music played. Lovers hugged each other. During one rendition of ``Here comes the sun,'' sunlight beamed through the glass ceiling as the sun began its slow descent into the meadowlands outside, light streaking through the reed heads, adding texture to the mood of the room.

Then, a sixteen-year-old boy sat down at the piano and began to play ``Hey Jude.''  He did not sing it well. He goofed more than once and played wrong chords. Yet the mood in the room grew somber and the faces respectful, as most of the fans began to clap or add their voices to the ``La, la, la.'' For these Beatles fans, it was a holy song, as it had been for my friend Frank <197> who used to sing it frequently. It was the first song I ever heard him sing, made strong by four years of high school musicals. Even now, nearly thirty years after it first hit the airwaves, it evoked awe in these people, recalling not the drugs and violence of the sixties, but a world of wonder and a community of people to whom Beatles have become a central, positive issue in their lives.  In that chanting of ``La, La, La,'' you could almost hear those members of the Beatles family for whom many of these fans have come to mourn: John Lennon, Stu Suttcliffe, Brian Epstein. Their song spread through the room like a meadow fire, its smoke rising up against the ceiling glass. In it, among clatter of memorabilia dealers, among the clank and clang of imitation Beatles music, among the sing-along videos, recording studio fakers, tapes of Beatles interviews,  questions and answers, I thought I heard the small, but utterly significant voice of my friend chiming in.

 

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.

 

email to Al Sullivan

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.

 

 

 

email to Al Sullivan

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.

 

 

email to Al Sullivan

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.

 

email to Al Sullivan

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.