A Few Words About My "Statement of Blog Purpose"

In re-reading my "Statement of Blog Purpose", it suddenly occurred to me that one or two people might find certain statements difficult to believe. I feel strongly about those one or two people. Life teaches most of us that there are those who tend towards making unlikely things happen, and those who tend towards keeping things predictable, and that on a scale of 1 to 10, or better yet, 1 to a million, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are at the top of the list of people who tend towards making unlikely things happen. This does not prove my statements true, however, it does serve as a necessary preface, as it should prepare those one or two people for the idea that my statement is fundamentally as plausible as the possibility of it raining tomorrow, as opposed to the possibility of Martians landing tomorrow.

At the time that the Beatles and the Stones were doing songs because of me, I did not consider it possible. In fact, my ego was such that when I received a letter from Paul McCartney a week after Billy Joel sat next to me on an airplane, I assumed it was a fake. At one time I would concoct some extremely absurd explanations to rationalize that The Beatles, the Stones, and others were NOT doing anything appropos of my doing something, in spite of how directly things pointed and point that way.

While I will not go into every one of the countless details that have cumulatively formed my perspective on this particular Beatles and Stones matter, I would nevertheless like to share some interesting elements "for posterity". In not sharing every one of the countless details that led to this perspective, I realize that skeptics will always be given a seat at the table. As will those claiming to be skeptics, who in reality are acting on behalf of the many important people implicated by the statement that something is due to me that I have not received. That list of important people goes well beyond the Beatles and the Stones, who are implicated the instant one accepts that I am neither a crackpot nor a con man nor a fool.

My 1965 story, "Endless Voyage", is about how the world governments, faced with the dire threat of overpopulation, devise a scientific solution: a pill that permits people to breathe underwater. Those who take it can never breathe air again. And so, dispassionately, the human race would be divided in half, and the question of what to do with all the people resolved, by sending half to live beneath the sea, to become a group of strangers to the other half of the human race. All we had was a photograph, with the instruction to write a two-page story. I wrote a 15-page story, which was treated like a thousand pages. "Eleanor Rigby", "Yellow Submarine" and "Paperback Writer" resulted from this story. "Yellow Submarine" was the flipside of the 45 rpm record containing "Eleanor Rigby". Donovan would later describe how these two songs were worked on by Paul McCartney simultaneously. "Eleanor Rigby", which raises the question of what to do with all the lonely people and where they all belong, contains a theme that can be found in the very creation of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". When Lennon felt he had to justify that "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was not code for LSD, he described the entire song as having originated from a single image, not a photograph, but a drawing that his son Julian made for school. An entire song from a single image.

The Rolling Stones have been known to pick up on and then change things originating from The Beatles. It is no controversy that they made "Her Satanic Majesty's Request" appropos of "Sgt. Peppers", nor is it a controversy that they made "Let It Bleed" appropos of "Let It Be". Lennon and Jagger were good friends, and when people make such clear connections no anomosity against the Stones is assumed. On my tenth birthday, my best friend, Dan, picked a fight with a classmate. Dan was as much the troublemaker as I was the introvert. Yet he set up the situation such that if I didn't join with him after school to fight this kid who he'd picked a fight with, my very loyalty to my best friend would be in question. When my mother saw me with my first bloody nose ever, she grabbed the arm of the kid who had hit me and began marching him back to his house to tell his mother. In the true spirit of adding insult to injury, the kid screamed all the way there that my mother was a hag. The Rolling Stones a few months later, and a few months apart, released "Street Fighting Man" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash", the latter of which contains the lyric, "I was raised by a toothless bearded hag". Five years later, at George Harrison's "Concert For Bangladesh", Leon Russell did a medley of two songs, the Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and the Coasters song, "Young Blood", the latter of which contains the lyrics, "I met her dad, He said 'you better leave my daughter alone.'" Unfortunately, the dna sample from the song "Young Blood" gives no indication of whether its title contains blood from anyone's first bloody nose. It is also not known whether, in spite of it having been my tenth birthday, Mick Jagger felt, with regard to my bloody nose, that everyone should have just "let it bleed".

Since then, I have made no small number of contributions to the work of Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, the ex-Beatles, and many, many others. In most cases I find it considerably more easy to demonstrate than the incidents referred to here.