Ah, but I regress: I'm over listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the elliptical machine at the gym. Today I popped Something New (the Beatles' third album to you Post-Boomers released ca. early 65) and my half hour zipped by.

And I suddenly figured out what it really was about the Beatles that made them THE BEATLES: Today I heard all sorts of musical influences that I would not have understood when I got the record for my eighth birthday (rockabilly, 50's bop, teenybopper idols, and had Ringo listened to mambo during his teenage years?); but the cool thing was that, unlike later albums like Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper, none of this was announced (and here young music-lovers, we hear George on the sitar, an instrument Ravi Shankar taught him to play on the occasion of his first meeting with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi -- how f**king educational). The other cool thing was that even though the Beatles were clearly not as obviously blues-influenced as the Rolling Stones, they nevertheless obviously got it; never "soul" singers (nor wannabe "soul singers"), they played and sang with the soul of a bunch of working class boys from Liverpool (what is Liverpool, anyway? Kinda the Detroit of Great Britain, maybe?).

And it has taken these 40 years for someone to figure all this out. I oughta write a book.