Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love

Chapter 41. Magical Marketing Tour

This morning, I was taking my son Patrick to school. We were listening to the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Patrick's in the process of making demos in his bedroom recording studio, which provides me with steady proud daddy moments.

Anyway, we were talking about the Beatles. They had an interesting problem. Their drummer, compared to other drummers at their level, was—not to put too fine a point on it but compared to, say, Ginger Baker (Cream) or Charlie Watts (Rolling Stones)—"weak."

Ginger and Charlie had strong jazz backgrounds, and playing rock music was really "playing down" for them. Not the case with Ringo Starr.

They also had another problem, one that would have destroyed a lesser group. Their best lead guitar player was singing and playing bass. Their next best guitar player was also singing lead and providing the strong rhythm guitar that drove the band.

That left George Harrison, who, in time, became a wonderful guitar player. However, when he joined the band, he was the same age as my son, seventeen, and compared to the lead guitar players in other bands of the time—Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, just to name a few—he was pretty weak, too.

I can just imagine John Lennon and Paul McCartney sharing a couple of pints at the pub, talking this over. They weren't about to let little things like this keep them from conquering the world. They were building an empire, and realized, rightly, that problems can be turned ...