One of my close, personal Facebook friends posted this clip on his feed today. I watch this every other year or so, which indicates how often I watch Beatles- and Lennon-related documentaries, not just this clip in particular. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t particularly attracted to the cult-worshiping aspects of this scene:
This footage never fails to give me chills – on many levels. What’s really got me going now is the link I followed from the YouTube posting to a Dick Cavett appearance of, possibly, the same guy. If that’s in fact the same guy you’ve got to wonder what was going through his mind when Mark David Chapman completed his twisted act of fandom.
It looks like I might be making my first-ever trip to England this fall! I’m going to be in the Manchester area for a couple of days for work, then I’m going to take a few days to see some sights. At first I was going to go to Liverpool for a couple of days and make my long-awaited Beatles Mecca, but honestly, the more I thought about it, the more I began to dread getting caught up in tours full of guys my age in pathetic, dyed mop-top hairdos: middle-age white dudes in dyed mop-top hairdos, black guys with their hair straightened into bangs, Japanese guys with mop-tops, women with mop-tops…and women my age still longing to pee their pants in excitement over the thought of seeing the Fab Four in their performing prime. I love the Beatles like I love no other artists, but I fear getting caught in a sea of middle-age Beatles fanboys—and being identified too closely with them! Then a friend said that, beside Beatles tours, there’s probably not much to do in Liverpool. As my wife said to me a couple of days earlier, “Why don’t you visit London for a few days instead?!?!”
I apologize for being pretty much out of the loop of late. I’ve been extremely busy with work stuff, and I’ve been honing some other creative pursuits in what little free time that’s been available. I do hope to catch up soon. Meanwhile, how about the above image, which existed only in my mind’s eye, since reading about The Buzzcocks‘ recent Philadelphia show last Friday. I didn’t make it out to the show for reasons I both regret and stand behind, but reports that Pete Shelley was sporting a “full mountain man beard,” as a friend put it, stuck with me until just now, when I went searching on Google for an image to verify this most unexpected beard.
Even seeing Pete Shelley in a beard, I can’t fathom it. I’m not sure than any musician has suddenly appeared bearded and shocked me more. A beard does not fit the music of The Buzzcocks at all, does it? Is there anything in their music to support the band’s leader wearing a full-on mountain man beard? Not that I can think of.
Please help me identify facets of the music of The Buzzcocks that might explain the appearance of this most unexpected beard. I’ve placed my prediction for Townsman BigSteve‘s response in a sealed envelope, but I will chuckle nonetheless when he delivers. I want to know what other fans of The Buzzcocks and/or beards make of this union.
As a follow-up question, which artist’s sudden development of a beard most challenged your view of the order of the universe?
As a teenager I couldn’t fall asleep without listening to music. Every night I’d pop in a cassette of one of those King Biscuit Flower Hour concerts I’d recorded off the radio and rock myself to sleep while studying the details of how the Attractions, for instance, could skillfully bring it down behind Elvis Costello on “Motel Matches” and then burst back into the fore with a Pete Thomas snare hit. Or the way Patti Smith Group could sloppily plow their way through their cover of “My Generation” with not an ounce of finesse or style that the Who brought to the original. It didn’t matter that they sounded like they were winging it. Smith barked out the lyrics as if possessed. I imagined the guys in the band unleashing shit-eating grins after an hour-long set dedicated to the noble effort of performing silted originals that awkwardly attempted to graft Smith’s free verse poetry to musical variations of Them’s “Gloria,” their keynote cover song. As a practicing musician, I knew from experience the thrill of sloppily running through those garage-band classics.
I had to keep my cassette tape collection fresh, so once a week I’d load up a blank cassette and tape the latest King Biscuit concert off WMMR, excluding the monthly forays into up-and-coming Corporate Rock bands like Journey. WIOQ occasionally featured a newly released, vaguely New Wave album. One month I taped both a live concert and the second album by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. They seemed like a New Wave band even the traditional stoner dudes could grasp. For younger readers, I should note, the practice of taping music off the radio was the equivalent of downloading music illegally. We were the first generation to kill the record industry.
In terms of listening to music for the purpose of falling asleep, an especially counterproductive practice occurred on Sunday nights, when I tuned into the University of Pennsylvania’s WXPN for a low-wattage broadcast of Yesterday’s Now Music Today, hosted by someone named Lee Paris. I don’t recall how I stumbled across this underground show. Paris had none of the insider cool of the FM DJs I’d been getting accustomed to. He got nowhere near backstage with the Boss or Jackson Browne. He had no time for the Stones. His enthusiasm and sense of wonder were more in tune with the early ‘70s AM DJs I grew up with, but he lacked their concise professionalism and compressed, booming tone. He raved about the new music he was playing and the underground bands passing through Philadelphia’s small clubs. He likely chatted up some of these bands, but he never gave the impression that he was a confidante of the artists, the way one legendary WIOQ DJ, in particular, did when dropping tales of his latest encounter with the Boss or Billy Joel.
