Now and Then

[Shane_B.]

On 11/8/2023 at 3:30 AM, Rain said:

Man, I love the Beatles. They weren't even around anymore when I was born and I feel I owe them so much.

Same here. The first song I learned to play on guitar without having the music in front of me was Misery. Lol. Second was Anna. I was 10 or 11. I had The Pocket Beatles paperback book with all the lyrics and chords. I used to wedge it under the front edge of our big tube TV to keep it open so I could play and read it. The binding separated and all the pages fell out eventually from jamming it under there.

I picked up a CD at a record shop one time. Ritchie's in fact, when he was in The Pocono's in PA. long before he moved out by you. The Beatles at The BBC. I think it was an import but I may be wrong. I don't think you could ever get it here in the U.S. from a retail store. It was a 2 or 3 CD set iirc. That set paints a whole different picture of them. It sounds like a studio recording but I think it was actually live. 

He also had a ton of bootlegs on CD. Somewhere, somehow, over the years, somebody got a ton of their studio tapes and put them on CD. He had a 10 disc set of nothing but studio banter and starts and stops of them doing takes. 

He wanted too much for them and I never got them. He did let me borrow a couple to listen to for a few days to try and entice me to buy them. I was pissed. I never could get my SCSI CD drive to rip and burn. 😁😔😜. To this day I cringe when someone mentions scuzzy (SCSI) drives.

One of the spots on that bootleg CD that sticks out in my mind was, the recording engineer got pissed off at them for goofing off and you hear him yell at them, "TAKE FOUR!!!".

I also had quite a few bootleg LPs. Lost them all when my basement flooded one time. Had them in cardboard boxes on the floor. Because of that, to this day, I will not store anything on my basement floor unless it's in those big plastic totes. I keep most stuff on those metal racks with the bottom shelf removed so I can slide the plastic totes under it. If anything happens the water has to get at least 18" up before anything gets touched and at that pointn ou got bigger problems than just your basement flooding. Lol.

Of course I got blamed for the flooding. Iowa weather is very unpredictable. We had an early freeze one fall and I left the garden hose out because I was still using it. It froze, broke, then thawed and we didn't know it. Of course, my reply was, well you're too cheap to go let me get the sump pumps to put in the sump pump pits we paid the concrete guy an extra $2,000 dollars to put in and run drain tile from out in to the ****ing yard Mrs. Scrooge.

Ah memories. Good times. Good times.