- From Faith Current: “The Sacred Ordinary: St. Peter’s Church Hall” - May 1, 2023
- A brief (?) hiatus - April 22, 2023
- Something Happened - March 6, 2023
I spent about ten years of my life holed up in an attic obsessively listening to Beatles bootlegs (that’s what we had to do, back in the days before Anthology, BBC, and remasters) on vinyl (that’s what we had to do, back in the days before mp3s and Purple Chick torrents). I studied them like Torah; not only did they satisfy my lust for new Beatle music, bootlegs were one of the few things that sounded perfectly fine on my JC Penney stereo.
None of my pals really understood why I did this, and I never understood why they DIDN’T. Listening to a bootleg was like hanging out with The Beatles, and who wouldn’t want to do that? Add to this the rarity, the need to hunt, and the expense of collecting them, and it became almost intolerably awesome. Even now–put it this way, probably the best Christmas of my adult life was the year Kate bought me 20 LPs worth of downloads from some site in Brazil. I spent two days deciding which ones I wanted, then making homebrewed CDs out of them. Fantastic.
Hanging out at a Beatles session, listening to them screw up and make jokes, and make all the little decisions that add up to genius? God, it entertained and heartened me so much as a kid, when I really, really needed it. And those years are what I thought of when I listened to this bit of YouTubery. Years spent counting the minutes until college, and hanging out with The Beatles.
I remember hearing some of this about fifteen years ago with a friend from the U.K. When Paul said “Ya daft git” she cracked up and told me “That’s so Liverpool!” Something that would have gone completely over my head otherwise…