NEW YEAR’S GREETINGS❗️
More Than A Few Months Ago,
We were given the wonderful opportunity to participate in a book being put together about ‘The Beatles’, & certain salient moments
where their Music touched our lives.
As it were known how intrinsic were the ‘Fab Four’ to our own Musical Chronology, we readily agreed, & with enthusiasm to spare.
However, somehow on the way to Damascus, we were asked to approve for publication a version of our Essay edited not by our usual suspect ‘W. Marmoset Yarn’ but by AI.
And what it had done was to have removed our individual voice & tone from our writing & replaced it with a more muted, soulless, compromised suggestion of what it had been.
A bit too overly familiar to us this was, in recalling our Young Blade Years & struggles in the Music Industry. The same attempt to give one a voice other than one’s own.
So no flashbacks for us, Thank U Very Much. Those days are the days that were, & these days the hours that are. And ours to own.
We respectfully requested the return of our Essay to our own hands, from whence the words began.
We (myself & TreeHouse) would like to submit to you this Essay for your own perusal in the hope that you’ll better understand just how much of an impact the Music of these representatives of British Culture, transformed the life of a dude born in Harlem & raised in the projects of the Deep South.
Please Enjoy & Most Of All,
HAPPY NEW YEAR❗️❤️
Sananda Maitreya !
Friday 2 January ‘26
Italia 🇮🇹
THE BEATLES ESSAY by SANANDA MAITREYA: ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’
Only Those With Broken Souls, Can Walk the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
And thereby were I found, as ‘deep in my cups’ as I’d not previously encountered,
& all the while, being surrounded not only by a darkness too dark to see, but also by the steady crashing of the waves. By taxonomy an ocean, but A Sea of Pain to me.
We were in Malibu, Ventura County Line, at the Turn of the Century.
LIVING A DREAM (living on the beach), that had transmogrified into a fucking nightmare of Wide Screen proportions. Perhaps the changing tenor of the times & its uncertainty, combined with the years of building frustration with an industry losing touch with itself while imploding had blanketed me with a misapprehension of life itself, mixed with an ennui that I couldn’t figure my way out of.
And the scariest aspect of it was my lack of fear of death, which seemed (at the time) a welcome breath of a scenery change, albeit a rather extreme choice of venue for such a change. So the change instead would have to come from within, wherein all real change derives.
THE BEATLES HOLD A KEY TO MY CHILDHOOD that quite no other entity of existence has had,
So instinctively, it was to them that, in the midst of a depth of misery I dare not name, I returned for appropriate calibration back to a more workable state of mind, a mind which could see itself going forward. And to this task we turned to ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’.
We kept our main sound system & TV in a bright Yellow room right next to the stairs taking us down to the beach. I meditated there often. And by meditating I meant smoking out my head, & seeing where it was, while listening to the tides resettling the stoned beneath them. There were no neighbor on that side of the house, nor were the houses as close together as were the homes further south. So when we wanted to blast Music, no one was disturbed, it was my sonic domain.
One day early, after coming home from walking in the Mountains, part of my daily ritual to shake our lethargy, I got the idea to ‘skip work that day’ (survival had become our more important work) & watch the film ‘HELP’.
I were 2 years young when I first heard & felt the vibrations generated by the Beatles, so they were familiar friends. Their Music awakened in me the possibility of boundless creativity, & it exuded an optimism towards living & participating in the magic of life’s parade. And suggested to me, the many forms love takes to convince us of its value. Whatever ‘Happy Place’ my childhood knew, the Fab Four were a vibrant part of it, & naturally the soundtrack of it. I drank the cool-aid, spiked as it became with nostalgia. So to that happy place we returned.
In the film HELP, we never got past scene 5. That’s the scene that after encountering ‘many madcap hijinks’, the Boys settle into a Recording Studio to ‘record’ the Song which pulled us from the muck & the mire of existential malaise, ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’, which I’d always kind of heard as John’s ‘Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ homage. It has a swagger, a swing, a confidence in its own shape, mixed with a JOY that slowly reconstituted the blueprint of my molecular levels.
I recall for at least 3 consecutive days, getting up in the sunrise’s wake, getting baked, & listening obsessively to the song as were it driftwood keeping my chances of recovery afloat in the bobbing brine. Of course, we weren’t just listening to a song, we were reminding ourselves of what it once meant to us, before it all went from Harvest, to Pear Shaped Pumpkins too bitter to seed. We were returning to the innocence lost, when Paradise too was lost, & then thereafter cynicism became the wallpaper separating fact from fiction & desire from dreams. The way Paul would connect with Ringo in a demonstration of understanding their great & good fortune, as well as their shared burden. The way John & Paul fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The way the Guitars were framed as both objects to be coveted as much as they were items of imminent liberation, the keys to another, better, much cooler world. Or We Wouldn’t Have So Many Damned Guitars !
I’M GONNA LAY DOWN MY BURDEN DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE.
Clandestine Cultures Speak In Code. A necessity for the subversion of survival.
So we learn to ‘read between the lines’, if not the lies. Laying one’s burden, one’s cross to bear, down by the river was more than just spiritual metaphor, it was more than the deep soul yearning to be expunged of the sins of captivity, more than a prayer that shackles cease, & chains release.
IT WAS TELLING YOU WHERE THE WEAPONS WOULD BE FOUND, because ‘shit was about to break off soon’. What burdens the riverside would surrender would be guns, & ammunition.
And in a like-minded manner, I would convince myself that ‘YGTLTG’ was in fact reminding me that, Sooner or later, this corrosive life defying attitude that swaddled me in a thick gray penumbra of angst, would steal that life from me, replacing as its receipt, a debilitating inertia. A hollowed out shell of ‘him who would’ve been’ (if he’d only…). We were able to extract the meaning that our level of pain demanded, thereby slowly lifting our wavelength back closer to the frequencies of a Movable Feast.
Because, however it’s read, SONGS HAVE THE POWER TO MOVE SOULS, & perhaps more importantly, to give us back to ourselves, while burnishing our faith in life & those who champion its existence. What was once a gleam in the eye, becomes a drifter’s alibi, & the sultry voiced crooning of the call & response melody, with the seductive admixture of those chiming, grinding guitars suggests a joy at the core of existence. An ode to optimism, the ‘stiff upper lip’ for which our Brits are often lampooned. This song, that over the course of 72 hours saved my spirit, is all at once innocent & sexy, vulnerable & yet confident of its power to persuade.
IT’S A GREAT FUCKING SONG !
Now let’s rewind a dozen years past. I’m in my home in London sitting across from George Harrison. It was an out of body experience to say the least. Before, despoiling the moment by freaking the fuck out, I’d managed to tell him just how brilliant his songs were, & then he spoke a few words of John, the kind of stuff that you’d want to hear of your heroes.
But right as I were about to ask him about the scene wherein ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ was contained in the film, his attentive wife Olivia came to collect him & remind him of other pressing engagements requiring his person. But in time however, the question that I’d have otherwise posed to him in London, was in a much more tangible & indelible way, answered over the course of those tempest tested Malibu days. When the hours were much too long, & the nights much too close to bear.
Sananda Maitreya !
Post Script: I kept a Black Gibson ES 355 Guitar among other musical items, in the house as my ‘writing Guitar’, next to the writing Piano overlooking the expanse of fields folded into the girth of the Santa Monica Mountains. But why, during this extended episode didn’t I just grab the Gibson & play along with the ‘Boys Who Were Buzzing’ ? Perhaps for the same reason we don’t hopscotch (or Tango) while breastfeeding, because it wasn’t an essential act of survival. Later, once out of the fog of forgotten favor, we would take our 6 Stringed Vessel & refamiliarize our memory with this affirmative Song & a few others besides, playing to remind us of why we took the Beatles bait in the beginning when all that lied ahead of us, were the encroaching reverberations of the Drumbeat of Happy Feet & good intentions, while deaf & blind to anything that might suggest anything less than a passport to the best of all possible worlds.
#SanandaMaitreya
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Photo credits: Sananda Maitreya in Liverpool on October 26th, 2025. Photo by Wes Orshoski.