I wrote these lines in 2001…

Something else happened during my last year at Brandon; it was the year the Beatles came out. It is well
recognized today that the they were widely influential in the field of entertainment and popular music, but
I am convinced that their effect on the world was much more fundamental than that. They finished what Elvis started, they broke the back of the insipid pap that had passed for American music back then. I had heard a few of their songs on the radio and had not been too impressed, but when a girl I was sweet on at the time invited me to come over and listen to their first album, hot off the presses, I made it a point to go. I went to scoff, but came away a believer, I had never heard music like this before. The early Beatles were primitive musically, in fact, they weren’t very good musicians at all, but they were able to use what they did know extremely effectively. The harmonies were unearthly, the beat hypnotic, and the lyrics captivating compared to the banal popular music of those days. I had been brought up with classical and Cuban music, and the rock, jazz, and country of the fifties was intolerable. I can’t articulate just what it was about the Beatles that captivated me so, but the effect was electric. Subsequent albums followed, each better than the last and each eagerly anticipated. The rest of the package was irresistible as well, the long hair was a revelation, not just because they had the courage to wear it that way, but because of the irrational opposition it provoked among the older generation; for some reason, our parent’s tribe found this incredibly threatening. I’ve often wondered why this was so, hair far longer than the Beatles wore theirs was not that remote historically, no one ever thought General Custer was a sissy. But I suppose the ferocity of the reaction convinced us that, just by luck, we had hit a raw nerve, and we weren’t about to let up now. It wasn’t just that hair was a symbol of rebellion and growing it long was a way to irritate our folks, although that certainly was one result of the new fashion. The truth was that once we realized our parents had been wrong about the music, and then the hair, we could suddenly see they were wrong about a lot of other things too.