Jeffrey Gaines's Interview To The Beatles: The Beatles

Over the course of an hour and fifteen minutes, Anthony DeCurtis interviewed Jeffrey Gaines on Thursday, March 14th in the Kelly Writers house on Penn's campus about the Beatles impact on his life and his body of work. DeCurtis, an author and music critic, interviewed Gaines, a life-long musician, about the impact that the Beatles had on his musical taste and on his music in general. Around a dozen people sat in the relatively small venue at the Kelly Writers house with a few individuals entering over the course of the event. Gaines and DeCurtis both sat at the front of the room on stools, barely a yard from the closest audience members, with Gaines holding a guitar for the entirety of the event. Prior to the interview beginning, Gaines joked
The audience member, the manager, the janitor, but who do you wanna be? I want to be the one on stage. I want to be one of them." Gaines said. Gaines went on to explain how to love of music and performance was solely for his own personal interest and distanced himself from artists who performed for the fame or glory.
"Where I'm at, I can decline some things, ya know? I can let some people down because I know all their chips aren't on me at this point *laughs*" Gaines said in response to an audience member's request to play a Beatles song on his radio show.
While the Beatles were described as the main focus of the lecture, Gaines largely avoided speaking on any impact of the Beatles. Instead the interview focused largely on Gaines's personal experience as a musician, and how he felt about musicians as a whole.
Gaines went so far as to state that he is in no way an expert on anything he talks about, as regards the
"But it was interesting hearing his take on the Beatles. He had an interesting perspective about how dark the music could get. Like John Lennon admits to…like, beating a woman and getting better and no one talks about that so? But I wish he had talked a little more about their influence." This sentiment seemed to be persistent among other students who attended the event, that being enjoying Jeffery Gaines, but feeling like the event missed the mark on its original subject matter.
Batchema Sombie, a senior music major at Penn University, heard about the event through the interviewer Anthony DeCurtis as he previously took on of DeCurtis's classes. He also had been previously unaware of Gaines and had come into the program with no knowledge of the topic.
"I really liked his music, I liked the songs that he performed," Sombie said. "His presence and energy were really palpable. His commentary about the Beatles and whatever, I wasn't really too interested in that."
While DeCurtis spent the majority of the interview attempting to steer it back toward a more Beatles-focused discussion, Gaines had little interest in speaking about it, offering opinions prefaced with similar statements to his previous lack of Beatles