I’m in the age group which saw people building bomb shelters and we did duck and cover drills under our desks. The USSR had just sent up sputnik and we thought the end of the world was coming.
This week is the 50th of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. I was 17 and watched all the girls go crazy. I liked them to, but at heart I was a big R&B fan.
Me too .. Feb 29, 1948
By the time I was in high school we were living in the SF bay area. Music was everywhere in my life. About 62 or 63 the Beatles and Beach Boys were competing for stardom with R&B influenced British pop battling the west coast lifestyle influenced surf music. I had an AM radio in my room and used to tune into a black owned radio station from Oakland so I could listen to the blues influenced music the big stations didn't play. Names like Solomon Burke, Elmore James, Garnett Mimms, Clyde McPhatter, Bobby Bland, Muddy Waters were familiar to me, but not my friends.
I was drafted in 66 and when I came home the country had changed. I went back to the Bay Area at the top of the hippie era and saw all the popular bands of the time that gave birth to the FM radio domination of music broadcasting that was a bit out of the mainstream. While you could hear "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the big stations, you could also go down the dial and find cuts that weren't making it into mainstream.
What is interesting to me now is that I meet so many seniors that have no idea what I'm talking about when I remissness about the music of that era (all the way up to the early 80s).
Somewhere in their subconscious they may have heard "Dream Weaver" or "Whiter Shade of Pale", but mention Spooky Tooth (Gary Wright's original band) or Robin Trower (guitar master from Procol Harem) and their eyes glaze over.
Maybe I'll have to start a new "old school FM show". ;-)