Beatles Still Popular in London

A newly discovered tape of The Beatles laughing and chatting during an early recording session has sold for about $23,000, an auction house reported Tuesday.-AP

In the John Wayne movie The Shootist, our hero goes in for a haircut and the barber sweeps up his hair clippings to sell after the gunfighter is dead. He sweeps up the small amount of hair from John Wayne, then shrugs are sweeps up all the hair on the floor.

The Beatles have always had this power to make people spend money and do things that seem a tad odd. Grow long hair, listen to sitar music, and think maybe Transcendental Meditation is the way to inner peace. The Beatles also make you want to own anything the Beatles might have had anything to do with.

My favorite London Beatles connection is, of course, The Abby Road Studios and the world famous zebra crossing in front of it. It's the kind of thing that makes the average person want to run over and recreate the Beatles Abby Road cover. There's a website that features a live feed of the Abby Road zebra crossing so you could take a peek and see if anyone was walking across it at the moment-The Crossing-Abby Road. Looks like a good spot to get run over.

I had a small collection of Bootleg Beatles albums at one time, these were regular Beatles albums like Yesterday and Today or Abby Road, but they had a cover photo you'd never seen before or an extra track that didn't quite sound right. These were kind of fun to have, but they were so clearly fake-I don't have them anymore, maybe they fell back into the alternate dimension they came from.

I missed Abby Road on my trips to London, so it will have to be a London attraction on the list for next time. Maybe if I show up early enough I can my own photo taken wandering across the road.