Beatles – "You Never Give Me Your Money" (1969)

Soon we'll be away from here

Step on the gas and wipe that tear away

My law firm has sponsored a coed slow-pitch softball team for many years.  Each season, someone on the team volunteers to write an account of each of the team's games, which he e-mails to everyone at the firm.

Every reader of 2 or 3 lines knows that it is about a lot more than just the songs it features.  Likewise, the softball game accounts are not just about the games.  

The current scribe for my firm's softball team and I are kindred spirits.  For one thing, we both like to quote song lyrics.  For another, we are both show-offs and narcissists.

I'm always on the lookout for free content for 2 or 3 lines.  So I contacted the guy who writes the softball e-mails – who also is the team's coach – and asked him if I could do some wholesale cutting-and-pasting from his latest game account.  After lengthy negotiations (which threatened to break down in the middle) he gave me permission to do so.

I'll leave out the boring stuff in the e-mail about the game itself, except to note that my firm's team trailed 9-3 after three innings.  That's when the coach's mind began to wander:

As I sat in the bleachers swatting mosquitoes, I could not help but look out into left field and see the Lincoln Memorial.  

Now I could regale you with a story about how President Lincoln in 1864 was worried about the Confederates acquiring all of the Union’s gold and how he told the Secretary of the Treasury (Salmon P. Chase) to take possession of all the bullion that belonged to the U.S. Treasury and have it buried throughout the District of Columbia in case Washington was taken over by the Confederates.  This “buried gold” (projected worth today: $110 billion) would later be known as “Lincoln’s Gold.”  

By 1865, this gold went missing, and after the war prospectors and treasure hunters would travel to Washington with their own ideas of where they thought “Lincoln’s Gold” was buried.  

Yes, I could tell this story . . . but I will not.

[NOTE: The only possible source I have found for the legend of "Lincoln's Gold" is a 2000 episode of The Simpsons.]

The author continues:

However, just typing that story reminded me of a college friend named Alex Hidell who lived across the hall from me.  He was the first of many great social engineers that I would come across in my life.   

[NOTE: "Social engineering" refers to non-technical methods of intrusion used by computer hackers.  It relies heavily on human interaction, and often involves tricking people into noncompliance with normal security procedures (e.g., choosing insufficiently secure passwords).  It is one of the greatest threats to the integrity of modern-day computer networks.]

His view of the world was – and I quote – that “Life is a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.”  Now, with a life creed like that, he is probably viewed in most people’s eyes as one of the worst people you would ever want to meet.  I fell on the opposite end of the spectrum.  I found him fascinating.

[NOTE: "Alek Hidell" was an alias used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed assassin of President John F. Kennedy.  I'm not sure if the author of this anecdote changed "Alek" to "Alex" because "Alek" is a much more common name in this country, or because he simply is a sloppy typist.]

I realized that Alex was not “normal” in the true sense of the word one night when we were a solid eight Miller Lites deep into old reruns of the TV show “Cheers.”  Suddenly Alex pulled out out a telephone book.  He picked a name at random and, with a smile, dialed the local electric company and pretended to be the person whose name he had chosen.  

His goal?  To get this guy’s electricity turned off.  Why?  He had no particular reason.

[NOTE: This reminds me of a friend of mine who used to call his landlady from bars and ask her (in a thick Mexican accent) "Ees Pedro there?"  When she told him that there was no one named Pedro at that address, he cheerfully replied, "Okay . . . I call later!"  He did this night after night, until the landlady was climbing the walls with frustration at his inability to comprehend that THERE WAS NO ONE NAMED PEDRO RESIDING AT THAT ADDRESS!]

Alex proceeded to pick a total of eight names, and was successful in six of his eight attempts to either have the electricity to that person’s house turned off, have the cable TV turned off, or have cable TV installed.  (While on hold during one of these calls, he explained to me that “the main motivation of a customer-service rep is to placate the customer and to get you off the phone as soon as possible.”)  

This is what Alex Hidell and his buddies did in high school for fun!  (Seriously!)  He would just get on the phone and act like a completely different person.  I also recall him saying, “If you believe your lie . . . well, then it’s not really a lie, is it?”  

What Alex did is reminiscent of what Mister Mxyptlk did to Superman in the comics.  Mister Mxyptlk was a trickster who created havoc in Superman's life no apparent reason, but whose actions were generally harmless in the end.  

[NOTE: Do you remember what Superman had to do to get rid of Mister Mxyptlk?  He had to trick the trickster into saying or writing his name backwards.  Once Superman did that, the annoying Mxyptlk had to return to his home in the 5th dimension and stay there for at least 90 days.]

Keep in mind that this was 1991.  Now you see this type of Mister Mxyptlk-type behavior almost every day in your e-mail inbox, with phishing, baiting and computer viruses.  Social engineering has gone electric just like Bob Dylan did in 1965, and the world was never the same. 

But I’m getting off topic.  This is no time to talk about the Mister Mxyptlk.  Let’s get back to the game. 

Actually, let's not get back to the game.  (It was the sixth inning, and my firm's team was down 20-4.)  Let's talk a bit more about Alex Hidell instead.

As for Alex Hidell, I heard that he may have died from a brain aneurysm back in 1996 at his desk at Raytheon.  However, that never rang true to me.  Knowing Alex, he probably just changed his name to Hisip Shin, moved to the suburbs, and quietly made malware just to annoy everyone.

The softball game account ends with the closing lines to "You Never Give Me Your Money" – namely, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven/All good children go to heaven."  

It is signed "Carl Lazlo," which was the pseudonym used in author Hunter S. Thompson's Where the Buffalo Roam for Thompson's attorney and friend, Oscar Acosta.

Here's the incoherent trailer for that incoherent movie:

By the way, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas featured a character named "Dr. Gonzo," who was also based on Acosta.

Thompson used these words to describe Acosta:

One of God's own prototypes.  A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.  Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

In 1974, when Acosta was 39 years old, he disappeared while visiting Mazatlán, Mexico.  According to his son, Acosta called just before his disappearance and said that he was about to board a boat "full of white snow."  Acosta is presumed dead, but his body was never found.  

Earlier this year, Time magazine included Acosta on its "Top 10 Famous Disappearances" list.  Others on the list included Jimmy Hoffa, the Lindbergh baby, Grand Duchess Anastasia, Amelia Earhart, and D. B. Cooper.

Here's "You Never Give Me Your Money," which kicks off the famous 16-minute-long medley from side two of Abbey Road: 

Click below to buy Peter Doggett's book about the post-breakup Beatles, which is titled You Never Give Me Your Money:

Beatles -- "You Never Give Me Your Money" (1969)

One sweet dream

Pick up the bags and get in the limousine

Soon we'll be away from here

The 16-minute, 14-second medley that takes up most of the second side of Abbey Road is a pop music tour de force.  It dazzled me the first time I ever listened to it, and it still does today.  (Actually, I could do without "Sun King," but the other 14 minutes make up for that.)

I don't remember the exact date I purchased Abbey Road -- which was the last album the Beatles ever recorded -- but it had to be sometime between October 1 (when the record was released in the United States) and November 7 (the day that I and several of my friends left Joplin for a visit to the University of Missouri at Columbia).

I had recorded Abbey Road on to a cassette tape simply by playing the album on the phonograph in my parents' Magnavox console stereo, positioning a portable, battery-operated monaural cassette recorder between the console's speakers, pushing the "record" button, and hoping that no one rang the doorbell or called on the telephone before the record ended.  I don't suggest this techniques for serious audiophiles, but it was the only option I had.

My parents forbade me to take the cassette recorder with me on the trip to Mizzou, but I ignored them.  I don't know why they forbade me, but I'm guessing it was a combination of two things.  

First, while a battery-operated cassette tape recorder wasn't exactly a major appliance, my parents had a very modest income and were very careful with their possessions -- they knew there was a good chance I would lose the recorder or drop it, or at least wear out the batteries.

Second, I think my parents thought it was a good idea to say "no" to my requests at least half the time as a matter of principle.  Better for me in the long run to have too little fun rather than too much.  (I used to find myself hesitating before saying "yes" when my kids asked me if they could spend the night with a friend when they were young.  I had absolutely no good reason to deny their request, but the example set by my parents made me think twice before giving in -- maybe fun is something that should be given to kids in small doses.)

The weekend that my friends and I spent at the University of Missouri was one of the great experiences of my high-school years.

Mizzou coeds in 1969

We were hosted by a professor and his family, who owned a big old two-story house with a porch and an attic -- where we listened to his son's band practice Saturday night after going to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  (More about that in a future 2 or 3 lines.)

Earlier that day, we had attended the Missouri-Oklahoma football game.  (More about that to come as well.)  

Before that, I had time to hang out at the University of Missouri bookstore – which was almost as exciting for me as the football game or the movie.  I had never seen a real bookstore, and I was almost overwhelmed by the selection there.

For a 17-year-old pseudo-intellectual, a university bookstore circa 1969 was tall clover indeed.  I fancied myself a devotee of the Beats, and bought a poster of Allen Ginsberg (my parents never let me tape it to the wall of my room -- might damage the paint, you know) at the University bookstore.

I also bought the City Lights "Pocket Poets Series" paperback edition of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.  The City Lights Bookstore, a cultural lodestone which was located in San Francisco's North Beach, was co-founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who started publishing books as well as selling them soon after City Lights opened in 1953.  The ACLU defended Ferlinghetti when he was arrested and tried on obscenity charges when he published Howl in 1956.  (He was eventually acquitted.)

The first book in the “Pocket Poets Series” – all of which were small enough to fit easily into a pocket – was a collection of Ferlinghetti’s own poetry.  He also published poetry by Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Gregory Corso, Malcolm Lowry, and Jack Kerouac.

I also bought Ferlinghetti’s 1961 collection of poems, Starting from San Francisco – which had a picture of Machu Picchu on the cover for some reason.

I still have my copy of that book:

Later that year, our English teacher asked us to assemble a notebook of our favorite poems.  I don’t recall many of my choices – I think we were supposed to pick 20 or 25 poems.  

I’m pretty sure I included Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”  Here it is in its very brief entirety:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

A B-17 ball turret gunner

I think I also included some lines from Howl, which was probably not a great idea – remember, the government considered Howl to be obscene, largely because of its explicit references to homosexual acts.  (To say Ginsberg was out of the closet is an understatement.  He held nothing back in Howl.)

I remember the title of a Ferlinghetti poem I put in my notebook as well: “Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower.”

My teacher was not impressed with my selections.  (I should have known better, but I obviously didn’t.)

I also left the university bookstore with a couple of 6" x 9 1/2" spiral-bound notebooks with a drawing of "The Columns" on their covers.  ("The Columns" are six limestone Ionic columns that once supported the portico of the first academic building on the Mizzou campus.  That building was completed in 1843, but burned down in 1892.  "The Columns" survived the blaze and are now an iconic campus landmark.)

I still have those notebooks, which I used as journals, or to write some very forgettable poetry in, or for various lists.  

I’m a big fan of lists.  For example, when I lived in San Francisco in 1981, I used to watch reruns of The Rockford Files and Kojak and note the name of each episode and the guest stars in this notebook for some reason.

Kojak seemed to have the better male guest stars -- including such notables as Richard Gere, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, William Hurt, Leslie Nielsen, Eli Wallach, and Bernie Kopell (the ship's doctor on The Love Boat).

One of my U. of Missouri notebooks

The Rockford Files attracted a better class of female guest stars -- Rita Moreno, Linda Evans, Lindsay Wagner,  Stephanie Powers (a/k/a "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E."), and Leslie Charleson (the star of my favorite soap opera, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing).

Here's an interesting coincidence.  Daniel J. Travanti guested on Kojak.  Veronica Hamel guested on Rockford.  Several years, they starred together as police captain Frank Furillo and his love interest, public defender Joyce Davenport, on Hill Street Blues.

Here's "You Never Give Me Your Money":

Here's a link you can use to buy the Abbey Road CD from Amazon: