Magical mystery tour

 When we took off from LA in our red white and blue BW van and April 1971.

 we were not just thinking of The Beatles magical mystery tour although that tape played prominent on our cassette player as we drove.

We were also thinking of easy Rider and we're a little scared that our trip would be more like that movie than the pleasant romp through the country the way the Beatles did for two weeks filming there movie.

We still take magical mystery tours every Friday, driving to places we've never been, often getting lost usually picking the music that fits the mood of the place we hope to get to.

 

Most often it's beatle music but sometimes has if we go to places like Asbury Park, Springsteen is on the CD player 

This idea of going somewhere and not caring if you get lost was a big part of my relationship with the Beatles,even after they broke up, a sense of abandonment to fate which would possibly have made George Harrison very happy if not John and Paul.

In the summer of '72 Hank, Paulie, Garrick and me did several of such magical mystery tours in search of land, one that ended us up on the Canadian border others through the pea country of New York State .

In those days we carried the Paul McCartney pub mentality around us in the car, singing beatle tunes to the radio or if none were to be found there, singing them without the radio.

Hank of course had obsession with Beatles Christmas records, those things that were sent to fan club members and he was particular attached to the age of 34 as if that was a defining factor in our life or in one case the number 44 he would find highways that matched it to drive down, even though we had no clue as to where they would take us.

 

The band of course always had Beatles songs in its repertoire even at those times when we were trying to keep up with the times so that we would get get back side by side with rolling Stones but then also Ziggy stardust and of course mott the hoople.

We are always fighting to have the band do more beatle songs which we added to the repertoire later in the 70s when they became a more conventional cover band.

 

When I traveled around the state with Hank we were constantly singing Beatles songs and especially when we got drunk with Paulie

at one point we ended up at paulie's girlfriend's girlfriend's house and we were so drunk they didn't want us there

but we had a guitar and a tape recorder and recorded a number of Beatles songs none of which were any good because we were too drunk but ultimately almost all of them ended with the end of twist and shout.

Pauly called it Oshkosh which still resonates when I see a sign or hear of some report of that City which we have never seen.

I suppose I will continue to do mystery tours because I need that part of my life and will continue to sing Beatles songs on the road 

Two of us going nowhere

Beatles music is the soundtrack of our lives March 14, 2026

 

 

The news broke about the breakup of the Beatles in April 1970, just as we packed up our VW van to go back on the road. I was crushed.

Paul made the announcement, but in reality, John had previously ended it months earlier in late 1969, just about the time I got discharged from the Army.

Beatles music had made up the soundtrack of my teen years – although I was much more familiar with the singles than I was with albums. Hank and I (along with our gay friend from the Stonewall Inn) had frequently sung the songs while walking the streets of Manhattan.

I knew about St. Peppers, of course, since kids on the school bus in late 1967 kept sing the songs, proving how big an impact the album had on our otherwise ordinary lives.

When I fled from the police to LA in late 1969, I holed up in roach infested apartment in East LA. I brought a reel to reel four track tape recorder and purchased two tapes – The Sound of Silence album, and Magical Mystery Tour, which I listened to endlessly while hiding out.

The Sound of Silence was the most depressing album I’d heard to date, especially because one of the songs talked about being on the run from the police. Equally disturbing was “Blue Jay Way,” because it was a dark song and referred to the many police I might meet.

The tape did not suffer from many of the problems LPs did, but provided a crystal clear rendition of the Beatles songs.

My whole flight from the police had come about because I had fallen in love, and I eventually made my way to Boulder to meet with the girl of my dreams. While waiting for the bus in Denver, I went to the local music store where I purchased a cassette player and every Beatles cassette they had, listening to these non-stop, as if these albums had just been released.

Magical Mystery Tour and the other albums came more in focus when we got back to LA where we took LSD for the first time – and many times afterwards, sensing somehow that a number of these albums required the drug to fully comprehend the meaning of the songs.

We played these tapes nonstop when we took off on the road in the VW van (a van painted red, white and blue with the slogan - stolen from Arlo) -of Multi-colored Rainbow Roach, which made us a target of every cop we encountered.

Let it Be had just come out with songs like Two of Us and such, raising hope that the Beatles break up was only temporary – a fruitless hope.

My Sweet Lord was on the radio when we got back to New York City, Ram was released a short time later, as was Imagine, great music, but did not fully fill the void the break up had created.

My friends and I constantly hoped for a reunion that would never come, and then, came worse news in 1980 that fan had murdered John Lennon. – another fan would attack George in his home – a scary rendition of Beatlemania that still makes me cringe.

During the 1970s and 1980s, our band played Beatles music, making it clear that we had a treasure trove of songs we could use to recall those days.

When Hank and I worked in the warehouse in Fairfield, he brought his stereo in and played the whole collection of Beatles music from start to finish (what was available then), something I think about a lot now with so many more songs released we didn’t know about back then – making me realize, they still are the sound track of our lives.

 

 

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Missed Beatles opportunities March 13, 2026

  

It’s mid-March. Usually, we gear up for the Festival for Beatles Fans, only the East Coast event was suspended for this year as organizers seek to reconfigure it.

As much as I love it and have unfailingly attended it since the mid-1990s when it was called “Beatlefest” and was located in Secaucus, the event has lost much of its luster over the last few years.

We did not attend the event when it celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in America because they relocated it temporarily from Jersey City to Long Island.

But in truth, each year makes the event less attractive, partly because those who have seen the Beatles story firsthand have faded away.

Over the last three decades, the line up of stars was amazing, include Astrid, George Harrison’s sister, members of Wings and other – including Donovan.

None of the Beatles ever attended, even John Lennon, who supported the concept when it started in the 1970s. I suppose the Beatles when all were still alive feared a repeat of Beatlemania madness.

Beatlefest became the place where later albums were unveiled, such as Live from the BBC, and the Anthology, and a not small irony of my friend, Hank, who passed away days ahead of the release of Live at the BBC, when he – like the rest of us – had ached so much for a Beatles reunion.

His funeral took place at the same time as the Beatlefest that year, which allowed me to purchase Sergeant Peppers patches for myself and the two other surviving members of our unofficial Beatles wannabes.

Garrick being Garrick managed to slip his patch into Hank’s coffin just before it was closed for the trip to the graveyard, a quiet and private tribute to Hank and all our hopes of following in the footsteps of the Beatles –and rekindled in me the feelings I had back in 1980 when John Lennon passed away.

In 2001 when George Harrison died, I made my way to Strawberry Fields, and then months later to Beatlefest where we all paid tribute, accompanied that year by Garrick.

Pauly, the Lennon-like member of our little group, long claimed the Beatles ruined our lives by setting up expectations that we could actually achieve greatness, despite our blue-collar upbringing. It is an illusion he took to his grave, and something I thought about when they canceled the 2020 Beatlefest on account of COVID.  Unlike with Hank or George Harrison, I had no place to go to help mourn his passing, a gap that still exists in my life, even though a year later, the event resumed.

Over the last 30 years, I perpetually held out hope that one of the remaining Beatles would show up, giving us all the thrill of a lifetime. My wife, fortunately, saw the Beatles live at Shea Stadium. I never got an opportunity to see them or any of their solo acts.

When I was still on the run from the police back in 1971, I missed George\s concert for Bangladesh – I had been living in New York, but went west to Portland, only to kick myself when the event as announced, though Hank managed to make it, just as he got to see Hendrix at the Filmore a year or so earlier.

Now, with Sir Paul more or less retiring and Ringo likely to do the same shortly, the opportunity to actually Meet the Beatles becomes even less likely. But we will always have their music, and perhaps that will always be enough.

 

 

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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.

 

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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

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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John Brown syndrome

 

Another day, another shooting in Minneapolis.

I can’t wait for the t-shirts to come out with the names of all the people ICE allegedly killed in pursuit of their duties.

The latest shooting, according to ICE report, came when DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.

This information is disputed by the governor and the mayor, along with the usual suspects, including biased media.

The bigger question is why this legal gun owner decided to bring his weapon to the protest, considering that he was very active in his role to disrupt ICE.

This has become something of a crusade, and the poor man with the gun has become yet another martyr to the cause, much in the way the four rock-throwing students as Kent State did when they got shot down.

These victims of ICE are a product of the rhetoric coming from the Governor, the mayor, and major media, all of whom have given these radicals license to disrupt ICE activity.

When you carry a gun or drive a car at ICE agents, this is largely inevitable, and all the excuses being made on the left, and all of their gnashing of teeth, will only guarantee we will see more violence against ICE, not less.

Artists throughout the county have naturally come out on behalf of the protestors, much the same way artists back in the 1800s celebrated the heroism of mass murderer John Brown, most of which made this vicious killer out to be some kind of Saint – with the exception of Hawthorn, who like some conservative actors and musicians of today, saw through the bull shit, painting John Brown at the vicious killer he was.

But we have morons like Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, Bad Bunny and others spouting off in support of these radicals, and so give potentially violent protestors more justification to create violence.

At the end of the day, people who want to protest peacefully, don’t bring guns to the event (even when they are legally allowed to carry them), or disobey officers telling them to exit a car.

Protesters and their enablers (the governor, the mayor and the media) believe they have moral high ground (the way John Brown did), and so go far beyond just protesting, and have set the stage for their own tragedy.

Free speech does not justify interference with law enforcement, but then the state’s governor and the city’s mayor seem not to acknowledge this, talking out of two sides of their mouths when they use incendiary language, while claiming they want peace.

The two deaths are tragic, but they are to be expected when you have media pumping up the volume, and making these idiotic people into heroes. They are not heroes. They are pathetic and to some extent brainwashed by their own ideology.

 

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James Cameron hides his head in the New Zealand sand Jan. 23, 2026

 

  

James Cameron has taken his marbles and scampered back to New Zealand.

He said he can’t take it here in the United States where people actually object to being forced to take inoculations against their will.

He hates people who don’t follow science.

This is a man whose most recent work – the Avatar series – is manipulative woke propaganda, real tear jerking crap that insists on rewriting American history.

Cameron squawks like a two-year old (or like any liberal these days), when people disagree with him, regular spoiled brat with a lot of money, who appears to hate other rich people.

He wants everybody to accept whatever liberal president tells us, whether it is injecting ourselves with an unproven and largely parsley tested chemical to help us get over a disease created in a lab, paid for by the American government.

The release of COVID is very suspicious since it came at a time when Democrats were desperate to destroy the Trump economy (and when that didn’t work, these same Democrats stole the election and jailed those who sought to keep them from doing it).

Cameron is a typical rich liberal, who believes we should do whatever we’re told to do, provided it is a liberal government telling us to do it.

Avatar shows just how brainwashed Cameron is, retelling the tale of American conquest, only in his fantasy, the savages win.

I nearly puked during the first of these propaganda films, and only managed to get half way through the second.

Cameron doesn’t live in the real world, but in a fantasy much like the ones he creates, where his side is always right, and all the characters are puppets in which he gets them to say all the politically correct things.

Unfortunately, other people disagree with him and so he runs off to New Zealand like the pathetic sop he is.

I don’t know if Cameron cheered when Charlie Kirk died, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did, part of the intolerant left.

I suppose Cameron will continue to make propaganda films like Avatar when he gets to New Zealand, hiding his head in the sand, having no real experience with real people only that silly upper west side crowd that like race horses have blinders to keep him from being distracted by other people’s facts.

Cameron is a sad example of a human being, still stuck in the cave looking a shadowy avatars that Plato taught the rest of weren’t real. Instead of meeting with, talking to, people with whom he disagrees, he disparages us, and then flees to other countries where he won’t ever have to look reality in the eye, and can spend the rest of his pathetic life living out his own pathetic fantasy.

I don’t feel sorry for him. Quite frankly, I’m glad he’s gone. One less intolerable liberal to tell me how wrong I am about everything just because he hates people like me who disagree with him.

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Upper west side Springsteen Jan. 20, 2026

 Springsteen is being a woke asshole again.

He came out against ICE at a performance in Red Bank and dedicated his show to the woman who tried to run down an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

While a lot of us have questions concerning the merits of that shooting, only the most extreme woke people seek to exploit her death in order to promote their questionable woke agenda.

To be cool these days it to be anti-ICE, which is largely what Springsteen is about – self-promotion.

I stopped liking Springsteen when he did the Philadelphia concert in support of Hilliary Clinton just before the 2016 election.

Springsteen is constantly jumping on bandwagons in order to promote his legacy, so his current statements should come as no surprise.

Springsteen is about Springsteen, even when he pretends to be doing things for somebody else.

His receiving the Medal of Freedom from Obama (along with other liberal scumbags like Tom Hanks and Teri Gross) went right to Springsteen’s head, one more piece of the legacy he’s attempting to evoke.

To be honest, Springsteen has never been original. His best works are derived of Van Morison, his early works ripped off Dylan, the Beatles, Zeppelin, Cream and other original performers. His later works – including his much-celebrated River and Nebraska, are at best hit and miss, not original, but tolerable as long as you don’t’ know who he’s ripped off in the first place.

Over the last few decades, Springsteen has been on a non-stop self-promotion tour, from his almost unreadable autobiography (yes, I read it but by taking a lot of antacid) to his rather silly but overly promoted tour on Broadway – a display of just how completely boring Springsteen’s real life is.

Many of Springsteen’s fans remain loyal to him, even if he betrayed them with his support for Clinton (and now he comments about ICE), mistakenly believing he still represents working people in America, when he only represents himself. Did he ever really have a real job? (You need to read his biography to find out.)

A friend of mine used to see early Springsteen singing on the Boardwalk in Bradley Beach (Asbury Park has outlawed street performers, taking on airs the way Springsteen has himself).

This is not to say Springsteen should be denied his right to oppose ICE. What’s questionable are his motives? Is he doing this to become relevant again (was he ever really relevant at all?) or does he really believe what he spouts?

Springsteen came to the town I covered last year to pay tribute to a film being made paying tribute to his life and career. How could he resist when someone is willing to pump up his ego even more than he pumps it up for himself.

Of course, I still listen to old Springsteen music, even if I believe he has turned out to be a scumbag, a would be Upper West Side liberal who doesn’t live on the Upper West Side and may not even still live in his home state of New Jersey.

I actually pity him. How can he live with an ego as inflated as his is?

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Who can we trust? Jan. 19, 2026

 

Madness on all sides

Our Democratic U.S. Senator called Trump a megalomaniac.  He’s right, as far as that goes, but this is a progressive Democrat, whose party has abused power, perhaps even stole a presidential election, and vowed to destroy the supreme court, the electoral college, the filibuster and erode other constitutional protections that keep that party from imposing its will on smaller republican states.

At the end of the day, neither side can be trusted, and we are forced to choose which poison we choose to drink.

The Democrats are very upset by Trump’s use of ICE to remove illegal immigrants that Democrats allowed into the country under Biden’s presidency.

This is all about money and representation, ahead of the 2030 US Census that requires everybody be counted, legal or not, and Democrats could lose as many as 40 congressional seats if Trump’s deportation succeeds.

Under Biden, Democrats have steered billions of tax revenues to their favored supporters, especially in regard to the dubious Green Science, and this is another sore point as Trump dismantles their money machine.

There are no good guys in this dispute, and so, we are forced to choose between the megalomaniac republicans or the greedy democrats – the latter of which hide behind high-sounding slogans while exploiting the deaths of misguided protestors.

As much as Trump scares me – especially his plan to take control of Greenland – the Democrats scare me more – since they already control major media and will destroy the constitution (if they regain power) to assure us nobody like Trump; will be able to rise to power in the future.

We only narrowly avoided seeing the Democrats gut federal protections under Biden – partly because he was an incompetent crook and partly due to one U.S. Senator who stood up against his own party.

Biden is gone; so is that senator. We may not be as lucky next time as we were in the past.

The question remains: how much damage can Trump do over the next three years, and is it worth keeping him in place in order to avoid Democratic control?

Democrats already proved they can be as equally ruthless as Trump and perhaps much more unethical, weaponizing federal agencies, putting relatively innocent Jan. 6 protestors in jail, creating fake charges against Trump (if they can do that to Trump, they can do it to anyone.)

At the end of the day, who can we trust?

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Is Trump leading us to world war

 Should we be scared? is history really repeating itself, a new megalomaniac who will lead the world back into global conflict from which this time we might not escape unscathed.

Protesters paint Trump as a new Hitler and can point to actions he has taken that seemed to in lockstep with what Hitler did in his rise to power century ago.

This has to raise questions as to whether or not the outcome will be the same.

 the Nazis scapegoated jew in their attempt to make Germany great again, following along an established pattern of oppression, demonizing, separating then exterminating them.

 regardless of how current the crop of illegal immigrants are here ridding our country of them is too strongly resembling the stormtrooper ethics of the past.

But this is hardly the only similarity

 the attacks on Venezuela and the hijacking of its oil is very close to what Hitler ordered his troops to do to feed his war machine and while Congress has acted to resist Trump from ordering an invasion, there are still parts of the world the president has taken aimed at, and has not ruled out the use of force, such as to acquire Greenland.

This last is startling me because the West let Hitler do similar steps in Europe before finally putting its foot down when it came to Poland. this could put us on the path to war with our own allies and makes me wonder if we will see a repeat of the Hitler Stalin pact, as Trump sides with Putin to divide up the world. 

Of course this seems far fetched yet nobody expected Germany to do what it did until it did it and already liberal leaders are telling troops to disobey Trump, suggesting they fear the worst and a rise of a maga movement, not too dissimilar to the Nazis 

All this may be moot. Democrats may take back Congress this year and block these moves but again the courts in Germany also supported the Nazis and the military and what he said will they do the same with Trump

If you don’t want to be called a nazi; don’t act like one

 

They hauled more people off the streets here, dragging them off bus stops and out of stores, laying them on the ground, hands cuffed behind them before the meat wagon came to drag them off to jail.

There has to be a better, more humane way to deal with illegal immigrants, even if this is being done to undo the damage Biden causes when he threw open the borders to allow tens of millions of people to flow into the United States, later scattering them around the country so they could not be easily traced.

So, as a result ICE grabs everybody, recent arrivals as well as those who’ve been here for years, sending them back to countries that really do not want them back – a ruthlessness that gives potency to the protestors who have come to compare ICE agents at Nazis.

If ICE doesn’t want to be labelled as Nazis, they shouldn’t act like Nazis.

My friend in a neighboring town saw some of this, the bread-winners for whole families carted off to private prisons, leaving wives and children back at home to wonder what happened to them, later discovering they are being held in private jails with little or no legal recourse.

There is more than enough blame to go around. Obama did the same thing, even going as far as to put kids in cages – and people consider him a kinder and gentler president as compared to the one we currently have. Clinton and Congress passed legislation in the 1990s that allowed the White House to deport people without due process. So, if we are indeed a new Nazi Germany, it has been decades in the making, as history will likely show.

Hitler did the same thing to the Jews and others, and when he could not transport Jews to Palestine (which was then a Jewish state), he resorted to his Final Solution, partly because it was impossible to deal with the mass number of people involved.

Some activists fear Trump will resort to similar tactics when it becomes evident it may be impossible to deal with some many illegal immigrants that Biden allowed to cross the border. You really can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

While I don’t think we will see the mass slaughter we saw in Germany during the early 1940s, many people back then didn’t believe Germany would either, and the tactics of ICE so much resemble those employed by Nazis in the early year of the Holocaust that the comparison is inevitable, maybe even justified. If you don’t want to be called a Nazi, don’t act like one.

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