Jimmy London – Bridge Over Troubled Water
Today I flicked through a guestbook of an old – now closed – Irish restaurant based in Dublin, Ireland. The guestbook had the strong outward presence of a hardened cover and a fleshy inside of yellow and browning paper. There were names, there were dates, and some drawings – some random, shaded drawings. There was also a drawing of a beetle.
Names flew by without any recognition and then:
O R S O N – W E L L E S
Not spelt out in such a manner, you’ll surely understand, but the letters followed each other in the same rigid formation. I knew that name, didn’t I? Of course I did. Then more. Christopher Lee (the darkness), Ingrid Bergman (the sensation), and Alfred Hitchcock (the genius). I was flicking through sheets and page after page of worn paper that these people had once held, had once pressed their creative – and sometimes beautiful – hands against. These pages they had pushed ink upon. And then, of course, the drawing of a beetle.
To be specific, the drawing of a beetle wasn’t so much a drawing of a beetle as it was a drawing of a Beatle by a Beatle, understand? John Lennon had drawn an image of what looked like Paul McCartney with a right-handed bass guitar (I tut at you, Lennon) with small musical notes drifting in waves from his sketched mouth. Beside it, no note or autograph, but simply:
“The other the three
are saving up to
come here !
YEAH – 3
BSL
Flicking through these pages and slowly dragging my fingers over such a drawing almost felt as good as this song. Almost, but not quite.
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