Trying to write like the Beatles

 March 15th 2026

As much as we all admired The Beatles, our band was very late in trying to do original material and then sounded too much like Beatles songs to ever be taken seriously.
I wrote my first song in 1968 which was called "through the looking Glass" which was more or less a monkees tribute 
The band itself remained the cover band for decades after that.
Pauley and I did a number of original pieces on our own without the band.
This included a number of instrumentals we modeled after mountain's scenes from an imaginary Western in that we saw ourselves as doing the score for movie 
Although I had started writing beatle like songs almost from when I picked up the guitar in 1970
Pauley and Rick did a rendition of "my cross of Jade" song and inserted in one of these imaginary soundtracks called dead horses.
I became for much more serious songwriter during the 1975 recording sessions in my fancy apartment in Passaic after the settlement of the car accident insurance allowed me to buy a four-track reel to reel
Paulie and I spent hours and much pot and speed into the late night recording songs.
 
Although I love the Beatles as a whole I tended to be most attracted to Paul McCartney songs and frequently tried to do what he did.
Out of these sessions evolved my song called old news which was my attempt at writing a Eleanor Rigby type song.
Later I would write a song called "hey there" which was modeled after John Lennon.
 
Pauley wrote a lot of songs many eventually wound up as the basis for the bands recording sessions in 1990 through 2000. 
From what I can gather he was still writing these songs at the time of his death in 2020 
Most of what Paulie did with the band was very very imitative of other bands, particularly The Beatles -- not merely an attempt to actually write a song that was in that vein but a little too close in structure and in sound to ever be taken seriously by a record company.
I don't think this were deliberate.
Whereas in my case the songs I wrote and still write are deliberate attempts to write songs that I think someone like Paul McCartney might play or Bruce Springsteen or others like Simon and Garfunkel.

During the early 80s pauley, Garrick and I did a number of sessions in my cold water flat in passaic, mostly stoned, very humorous, often mocking hank and trying to duplicate John Lennon's artsy fartsy and strange songs of the magical mystery era.

For instance we had Hank read backwards from some provocative novel while pauley and I played music.
We also wrote a song that forced Hank to sing a sentence I had created out of all the words he mispronounces.
A number of songs that I wrote like Orange ball and a few others were lost as the tapes vanished.

We managed to get into a Pink Floyd phase about me being stoned and going to the supermarket for a cigarette or the invasion of alien monsters. 
Some of these tapes I still have.

A close study of n
Beatles music now I realize just how amazingly complex early Beatles songs were and how innocent and how over time especially from revolver on they grew more serious and intense, filled with a kind of dystopian vision of the world that they lacked as younger musicians.
 
How do you capture either the Innocence from the early days or the bitterness of John Lennon later?
What I admire about Paul McCarty is his storytelling just as I think that is the best of Bruce Springsteen as well, stories about his life and the people in it.

I've tried numerous times to duplicate Penny Lane which is impossible 
 And yet has become a kind of framework for my songwriting that with teaches me The Craft 

A number of my songs were written about Peggy a stripper that I dated in the 80s and about other people specially women I met earlier and later

These days I'd write about places and moments in time, trying to preserve them .

Nearly all of these don't eork because I don't have the music Craft of The Beatles or Springsteen, yet brings me great pleasure to make the attempt.

Since I am primarily a word Smith, I struggle with the problem Paul McCartney did in that I start out with words and try to fit music to them
he said that was rare when he did that.
 most of the time he starts with the tune

My better songs especially those written during this '80s were written music first, and later I started to get the idea their need to be movement in the music and aspect I'm still working on