"It's Really Nowhere...Man...."

The Beatles made me do it.

They were the reason I begged, pleaded and bargained to get that Sears Silvertone acoustic guitar for Christmas 1964.

Got it, too.

Well, at first, I got a picture of the guitar cut out of a Sears catalog and taped to the bottom of a nicely wrapped present.

My parents made the same mistake a lot of parents made.
Every kid over the age of 9 wanted a guitar that year.

So there was a little back order thing that had to be dealt with.

The guitar finally showed up, though.

And with it, and subsequent others, I wrote, through the years, four or five hundred songs, got a couple hundred published and had a few recorded.

Artists you would know.
Songs you wouldn’t.

Hey, if I had written some monster hit do you think I’d be working sixty hours a week and blogging on the weekends?

Meanwhile, back at The Beatles.

I really don’t think of myself as a Fab Four fanatic.

Although I will proudly say that I have been, and am, a fan.

Truth is, I was enamored of their work starting at yeah, yeah, yeah and started to lose interest somewhere around the Magical Mystery Tour period.

Everybody went ape shit about Sgt. Pepper.

Personally, I think it was a pretty cool album.

But, for my money, they hit their stride with Rubber Soul and Revolver.

And I found their “experimental, existential” stuff to be a big snooze.

Give me the exquisitely melodic, lyrically poignant “We Can Work It Out” over self-indulgent crap like “Revolution Number 9 (“…number nine….number nine….number nine….”) anytime.

So, while I credit them with exciting and inspiring me to start maturing my own musical masterworks, I was never one of those people who felt like every sound that came out of every orifice they possessed was genius.

And now, I hear tell of yet more sound to come.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A "lost" Beatles track recorded in 1967 and performed just once in public could finally be released, according to Paul McCartney.
"Carnival of Light" -- a 14-minute experimental track recorded at the height of the Beatles' musical experimentations with psychedelia and inspired by avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen -- has long been considered too adventurous for mainstream audiences.
In an interview for BBC radio, McCartney said his bandmates and their producer George Martin had vetoed its inclusion on the exhaustive 1990s "Anthology" collection, according to UK's The Observer newspaper.
McCartney confirmed he still owned the master tapes, adding that he suspected "the time has come for it to get its moment." The Observer reported. "I like it because it's the Beatles free, going off piste," McCartney said.
Almost everything recorded by the Beatles from their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg to their break-up in 1970 has been released amid almost insatiable public appetite for anything to do with the legendary Liverpool quartet.
In the 40 years since its recording, "Carnival of Light" has acquired near mythical status among Beatles fans who argue that the existence of the track provides evidence of the group's experimental ambitions beyond their commercially successfully pop career.
The improvised work features distorted electric guitars, discordant sound effects, a church organ and gargling interspersed with McCartney and John Lennon shouting random phrases like "Barcelona" and "Are you all right?"
McCartney would need the consent of Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and George Harrison's widow, Olivia Harrison, to release the track.


As I said, I’m a fan.

And here’s a little something I imagine you probably thought you’d never hear a fan say about the possibility of new, undiscovered Beatles music.

Yawn snooze.

The Beatles had moments of brilliance.
The key word in that sentence was moments.

Fourteen minutes of distorted guitars, church organ and John and Paul gargling isn’t brilliance.
It’s self-indulgent bullshit.

So, I’ll take a pass on “Carnival of Light”, thank yew veddy muhhch…

I’m a Bogart fan, too.
But I don’t need to see collector’s video of him making armpit noises for the crew between takes.

Let it be, already.