The Beatles

It's been awhile since I've posted and I apologize but there have been so many things going on. I'll try to post more often. My band (Dark Horse ) played last Saturday night at a place called Blackbeards. It was a very magical night as there was a large enthusiastic crowd and we put on a very special show.

I know a lot of you may not consider the Beatles classic rock, but for me they were the first band that really mesmerized me and influenced me to want to learn how to play guitar. And besides, a lot of their later stuff is still played on "classic rock radio".

Beatlemania really took off after that first appearance on Ed Sullivan. The British Invasion came soon after that and American radio was flooded with songs by the likes of The Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, The Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Hollies, the Troggs and little later (as I remember it) by the Yardbirds, Manfred Mann and the Kinks. I knew the words to all the hits and soon started spending my allowance money buying 45 rpm records of the hit songs. I wish I still had them but I'm sorry to say that I don't.

My folks bought a small record player that my siblings and I shared but I liked it better when we were allowed to play them on the big Philco console stereo that sat in the living room. It had a record changer that had an adapter for playing the small 45s and we would stack 8 or so of them up. That way we could play more or less continuously maybe half an hour. It wasn't long and we had quite a collection of those 45s.

I also carried around my little AM radio with the mono headphone pretty much anywhere I went. In the early to late 60s AM radio stations in the bigger cities blasted out at 50,000 watts or more so I could easily tune in WDGY out of Minneapolis and actually at nighttime could pick up WLS in Chicago. Later on in the late 60s I started to tune into KAAY in Little Rock (more on that in a later post).

So here I was at around 7 or 8 years old and there was all this wonderful early rock and roll on the radio. I must have drove my parents crazy as much as I sang along with (and without) the radio. It was really the beginning of the road for me. I don't think I really wanted to play guitar until a few years later but I was already really touched by music in a big way. I should also point out that my sister had a pretty big influence on me too as she and her girlfriends seemed to know all the latest hits, that latest bands and the latest trends. They were a couple of years older than me and seemed much older than that to me.