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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