It’s Saturday. Time for amusements.

I think the Beatles were fine. It’s quite possible to learn how to play the guitar by getting the two volume set of music books “The Compleat Beatles” and learning all the songs in it. Please do not write to tell me that’s incorrect, because that’s exactly what I did. The books seem to be out of print now, which is generally how you find all useful written things when you look for them. I’m sure you can purchase compilations of Kanye West… um… lyrics… just about anywhere.

Don’t get the other Beatles songbooks because they do not have the songs in the original keys, which is daffy. They put them in the keys more convenient for the piano. I don’t know which end of a piano to blow in, so that is not useful. And let’s face it, it’s a guitar world, we just live in it. You can skip the last 50 pages of the second volume because it doesn’t matter if you can play all the orchestral stuff on the guitar. Learn Rain instead. And learn how to sing along with it too. So what if you can’t sing? Neither could John Lennon, Ringo, or George Harrison, when you get right down to it.

To be considered great, you must be the raw material for further greatness by others. If someone does a parody of you, every body should know who they’re talking about. It doesn’t really matter that Ed Sullivan was a bizarre, talentless, cadaverous stiff. He’s been dead for decades but my 11 year old can do a spot-on imitation of him. If he mattered, it was because whatever it was he was, he was; and all others weren’t.

I wrote that last sentence in that fashion so you’d have to parse it a couple of times because I’m a jerk.

So here it is, the mining of raw talent ore, and the further distillation of it into the the goofy and trivial and sublime all at the same time:
GOOD:

BETTER:

BEST: