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Help. I need somebody.
One day I meet John Lennon. Happy 80th to a man who changed everything.
A friend of mine lives in a town house on Greene Street in London. The Beatles live on the top floor.
Well, not all The Beatles. Paul and Ringo. Some girls find out about it and camp across the street every day after school. They put albums in the vestibule. We pick them up and lay them on a table in the hallway for the guys to sign.
I never meet either Paul or Ringo, except seeing them dash by, but one day we come home from school and John sits on the stairs signing album covers.
It’s the sixties. It’s London. Music is exploding in the pubs and clubs. It’s hard to imagine a world like that today. Music isn’t just a playlist on the Internet. Music is life.
The songs are going to change the world, and the players are gods.That’s the way it feels.
There’s a pub in Putney, right on the Thames. We go there and drink hard apple cider and see the house band, the Rolling Stones. At the Marquee, on Saturday nights, we watch a young Pete Townsend destroy his guitar.
We plan none of this. We just move around the city and check out different places and that’s what we find. We don’t know what any of these bands will become. They’re the local gigs.
