How (Not) to Steal a Train

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The ludicrous amount of paperwork is what saved us. Or the fact that it is possible that no one at the train yard had ever created the documents that would have been needed to handle the situation, or no one would have been able to find them if they had been created. That is what spared us.

We were up to no good, but in a harmless way, so no harm had been done by definition, so nothing was done about us the night I stole a train.
Read More

Today in History: July 6

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I remember coming into the fete and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little Tannoy system. It was John and the band. I remember I was amazed and thought, ‘Oh great’, because I was obviously into the music. I remember John singing a song called ‘Come Go With Me.’ He’d heard it on the radio. He didn’t really know the verses, but he knew the chorus. The rest he just made up himself. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’ Of course, he had his glasses off, so he really looked suave. I remember John was good. He was really the only outstanding member, all the rest kind of slipped away.—Paul McCartney, February 1995, Record Collector

The Woolton Parish Church’s “Garden Fete,” a neighborhood fair, of July 6, 1957, featured a long list of attractions and entertainment acts to fill the day: the Liverpool Police Dogs on display, a parade, the crowning of the Rose Queen, the “Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry,” and “The Quarry Men Skiffle Group,” who were also slated to perform at the “Grand Dance” that night at 8:00 p.m.

Paul McCartney, a 14-year-old who had started to perform music, remembered seeing the band during the day as they were carried through the neighborhood on the back of a flatbed truck. The lead singer of the Quarry Men was John Lennon, a 16-year-old, and McCartney noticed that Lennon, while “suave” and “outstanding,” also was performing on an improperly tuned guitar. (Lennon tuned it like a banjo, which is what he had learned to play on.) McCartney showed the musicians how to tune their guitars, and then performed some songs he knew: Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and some songs by Little Richard. Lennon impressed McCartney and McCartney impressed Lennon.

(Photo at top; Lennon, in plaid, is seated at center, next to the white-shirted drummer, with his back against the cab of the truck.)
Read More

Conspiracy Theories: A One-Layer Cake

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

About eighteen months after I started publishing articles about human rights issues and revealed that I have contacts inside some other news stories, something new arrived in my neighborhood: local police patrols.

Oooh, spooky. I live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the country, four miles from the nearest anyplace, and I have lived here for two-plus years. When there were teenagers in this neighborhood—and all teenagers are worth keeping an eye on, of course—we rarely saw a police cruiser here. I go ahead and publicly reveal on my teeny-tiny web site that I “know some people” and BOOM! we get a patrol car a few days later. It is a regular enough visitor that I wave at it.

Ah, well. Call me naive and I will never consider it an insult: that police patrol has nothing to do with me. I may desire the thrill of thinking that I live in the exciting fantasy life in which I am under police surveillance or protection, but I am not. I know people who are in fact under surveillance and are being harassed by various government authorities (in European countries and other regions), and this is how I know that I am not. I know journalists whose bank accounts have suddenly vanished, as if they never did business with the bank. (If something even remotely like that happens to me, all two or three of you who read this web site will be the first to know.)

All of the above sounds too much for me like a humblebrag.
Read More