Build Date: Wed Aug 13 23:54:17 2025 UTC
Guess what I brought back from Europe: _GRAPE_ flavored Mentos! They're crazy!
-- ICBINJ
All Beatles Must Pass
2001-11-30 03:39:06
George Harrison has defied the critics once again. Rest in peace.
I'd completely given up on George long ago, and I wasn't surprised he was dying, because it seemed like the only logical thing to do at this point, careerwise. But then an interesting thing happened on the way to the morgue: a dawning, crushing sense of loss, married to a sputtering sense of anger when you think how much of the world the old coot actually held in his hands at one point and exactly how much he just up and tossed away like old bread. "Creatively he's been dead since 1972," I wrote to a friend. Fuck the tosser. But wait....
I used to root for him quite a bit to show some of the old spunk, especially back in the early 80s, which was just a horrible, horrible epoch for dinosaur rock, what with the Who doing their damndest to make everyone forget they were ever any good, Zeppelin broken up and the Stones setting new milestones for forgettably bland Semi-Tilt Run-On Boogie. So stuff that used to be great but was currently horrible was sort of my guilty pleasure then, and I used to fantasize great comebacks for all the old heroes where everything would be Just As Good As It Used To Be, And Then Some.
But then George went silent for a long time, and between the ungodly Travelling Wilbury thing and the miserable sight of a Beatle needing to have his career resuscitated by Jeff "Fucking" Lynne, all hope got lost in roughly the same place where Pete Townshend put his Telecaster into mothballs in lieu of making "gentle acoustic music that doesn't make people's ears go all wobbly and such."
I will not deny that a half dozen or so George Harrison compositions give me roughly as much pleasure as anything else ever recorded by humans. Even the oddball stuff. Especially the oddball stuff. "Badge," with Eric Clapton, pretending to be a Cream record but there's no disguising that melody; I can listen to that song on my worst day as a human and feel at least a smidgen of contented relief, if nothing else. Heck, I'd even put the cameo guitar bit on Cheech and Chong's "Basketball Jones" up there with anything that, say, Ringo's ever done on his own or as a guest.
George was also funny as hell in the Beatles movies. Watch him sometime in "Help!" or "Hard Day's Night." John and Ringo always got all the credit for the yuck-making in various Beatles joints, but there's a very stoic surrealism going on with George that he never got nearly enough respect for, because he wasn't off-the-wall as much as he was part of the wall. I'd call his comic intuition zenlike, but that just reminds me how unfunny someone like Richard Gere is.
He also never got enough credit as a guitarist, and he was a damned good one. Roughly 8/10ths of all the great Beatle songs are built entirely and solidly around his guitar riff, and this was an excellent decision by the group. He was precise without being flashy, and he could set a mood better than anyone else in the business back then, bar none, not even Clapton, certainly not Hendrix. You have to flash forward to Neil Young ca. 1974 or so before you get to someone who could tell so much with so little, just by playing a guitar. He wasn't a virtuoso, but he didn't need to be, and if he had been, he would have completely fucked up the Beatles. There's a lesson in there for the Frippertronics crowd, I think, but I'm not about to go sorting it out right now, let alone trying to defend it.
Yeah, I'll miss him. I think if everyone just said that, we could go about our business without having to rename freeways and libraries and the world would be a much better place than it's probably going to be in a week or two, after listening to 257 straight hours of Beatle tunes on every goddamned radio station in the world.
T O P S T O R I E S
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
Delusional rich man tries to fire town staff
"I'm mayor now" said write-in mayoral candidate and founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks Robert Ehrlich after losing the election for Mayor of Sea Cliff, NY. Then he tried to take over the Village Hall and fire everyone. (More...)
Musk claims Xitter security is staffed by idiots
Earlier this month Xitter experienced a massive outage. In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." (More...)
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Pigdog brings you SETI astronomer Seth Shostak to bring you the truth about Ay-leens (More...)
The One I Feel Sorry For Is Joses
We've had a lot of Jesus coverage lately here at the PDJ. But let's face it, we're not exactly cutting-edge in this subject area. Jesus has been making headlines for, oh, I guess it's a couple thousand years now. Jesus is a very strong brand. Jesus has a lot of mindshare. (More...)
It's winter in Idaho, and Boise personality "Lego-Man" reports on how he celebrated Thanksgiving. "I fed my wife, mother and sister wine slurpies!" (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
We here in SMRL's Beverage Research Lab realize that there is more to life than just drinking spocktails. It's important to have other activities. One such activity that we wholeheartedly support is dancing six or more hours to Trance music. So we have designed a drink to accommodate this. (More...)
Vacationing from Somnambulant Narrow Realities
So about six months ago, I was chilling in Chang Mai, Thailand with ICBINJ, perursing the Bangkok Times over my banana pancake and Big Chang breakfast when I spotted this article reprinted from the LA Times. It was about some kooks from California (where else?) who were claiming to have been to the front lines in Afgahnistan in mid-December and had recorded the whole feat on their website. "Holy Fuck!" I thought, "Now That's web journalism. Who are these guys!?" (More...)