I was barely fifteen and needed rock and roll to get through my every day. Like every other fifteen year-old everywhere, boy or girl in the history of the world, I was having the hardest time with everyone; school, friends, family-they were all on my case. No one could ever understand any of it (and so it goes)....
I had no older brothers or sisters so it was The Beatles who introduced me to rock and roll-not Elvis or the Everly Brothers. I couldn't spell hootenanny and still can't (thank goodness for spell-check). If you had told me George Harrison invented the guitar, I'd have believed you and if you are very convincing, I might still.
I was an accidental anglophile-Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Chad & Jeremy, Peter & Gordon, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, and hundreds more (perhaps thousands).
Around the time of Rubber Soul, someone played me electric Dylan and I was intoxicated by the word play. I already loved The Byrds and all the bands those members evolved into and the bands that people they played with created. Strange days, indeed.
Civil rights, a half million men on the ground in the jungles of Southeast Asia, space race and short skirts. Rock and roll was growing up, leaving June, moon, croon lyrics far behind and then on this date, in 1967, (it was forty-seven years ago today) s*it just got real and nothing was the same ever again.
-bill kenny
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