Frank Critelli was looking for lemons and toilet paper at Stop & Shop. He wasn’t looking to steal anything. Honest.
It’s just that … at some point, he realized what song was playing on the Muzak speakers: The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.”
“I went to this weird spot in my head, and I started to think about [how] I read a book called The Beatles in Their Own Words. And I know what that song is about. It’s about an affair, right? That he was trying to disguise. So all of a sudden, new words started coming into my head, that told more of the story,” Critelli, a 57-year-old fixture for decades in New Haven’s original music scene, recalled during an appearance and live performance on WNHH FM’s “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” program.
“I left the toilet paper and the lemon, and I went home, and it just fell right out.”
Critelli wrote a new version of “Norwegian Wood” with the original lines beginning the verses. The rest of the verses were his own. He tinkered with the music as well.
And when I awoke
I had to go to work
Now, where is my shirt?
This is gonna hurt
So I lit a fire
At the end of a joint
Now, what was my point? …
Critelli called the finished product “Brazilian Rosewood,” named after the material used in the 1968-vintage Martin guitar on which he plays it. The song appears on a new album Critelli has released called Live at Bonehead’s.
Critelli confessed to guilt pangs over the song.
“I knew it was stolen …” he said.
A likely story. But in turth, Critelli made a weak case for the self-prosecution. Stolen? The court of public opinion would find it a stretch to dub an original out-in-the-open riffing on a classic song a case of theft.
Never mind the tricky plagiarism cases that have produced lawsuits and court cases — the “He’s So Fine” chord-strumming on George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” or Led Zeppelin’s alleged borrowing of the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven” from a band called Spirit. (Harrison lost. Zeppelin won.)
If Frank Critelli were in fact committing an act of musical shoplifting that day in the produce aisle, then we’ll have to lock up every artist who samples a riff or reconfigures a phrase or considers the concepts of love or betrayal or existential angst. If Frank Critelli is a thief, Woody Guthrie was a thief. Homer was a thief. Shakespeare and Beyonce and Amy Winehouse and Leon Bridges … perpetual purloiners all. All those civil rights-era songs Bob Dylan grafted onto English folk melodies or every gospel hymn repurposed as new bluegrass songs? Cancel them immediately.
Every day since the dawn of prose and musical creation, someone has composed a new melody or lyric that built on ideas that came before, that pulsated through the universe and embedded in our brains. The original ideas and words and tunes that gave birth to artistic composition have long fossilized and disappeared. Critelli undertook his original process out on the open. He took a classic song, reimagined it, made it his own — and let us know he was doing it.
This court declares the man innocent of all charges, sentenced to another decade or more of community service: writing, performing, and recording as he sees fit.
Click here to watch and hear Critelli win his absolution — and perform “Brazilian Rosewood” (beginning at the 17:25 mark) along with three other indisputably original songs — on WNHH FM’s “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” program. (And click here to check out Bob Dylan’s own tongue-in-cheek reworking of “Norwegian Wood.”)
