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  My Musical Journey – The British Invasion Begins I turned 14 in early 1963. I spent most of the summer of 1963 at the beach, generally Crescent Beach. That was the town beach where the kids my age went. There was sort of a regular crowd of kids there, in fact we kind of took over the beach. Eddie and I would hitch to or have one of our mothers drive us to the beach any non-rainy day we were free. We almost always hitched home. We were too young to have a regular summer job at this point so we were free most days. I cut a few neighbors lawns for extra cash. Eddie caddied at one of the country clubs in town. I tried that too but I was so thin that I was either selected late in the day or not at all so I stopped. I did not have or want a paper-route but I did sub for a couple of friends when they went out of town on vacation with their families. At the beach there were always transistor radios playing. The one song I particularly remember from that summer is Stevie Won...

  My Musical Journey – The Lull Before "The British Invasion" I attended Memorial Junior High School in the fall of 1961. In the years 1961 through the end of 1963 much of the pop music was coming from the Brill Building (Don Kirshner) and also from Phil Spector. These were my junior high years. Songs from this time period were dominated by songs about love and boy/girl relationships and they could get pretty sappy. For example: We got songs like “Roses are Red” and “Blue Velvet”, “Soldier Boy”, “Bobby's Girl”, “Sealed With a Kiss”, “I Will Follow Him”, “I Love How You Love Me”, “Where The Boys Are”, and who can forget, even though many of us would like to, “Hey Paula” by Paul and Paula. Yuk! I liked high energy songs and/or something with a bit of an edge. Where were these songs? I n junior high I started making a whole new set of friends. I pretty much stopped hanging out with most of my grade school friends except for both Joe and Jimmy who both lived nea...