Will I joke around and still dig those sounds
When I grow up to be a man?
- Beach Boys, “When I Grow Up” (1964)
Say what you will about the Baby Boomer generation, but one thing is for certain: our formative years were accompanied by an awesome real-time soundtrack. True, many of us were born too late to see the dawn of Rock and Roll or Elvis in his prime. That is a small price to pay, however, for being just the right age to appreciate the new Motown Sound of the 1960s or to catch the wave of the surf rock craze that the Beach Boys rode in on.
Even if you weren’t a fan of “Surfin’ USA” or Diana Ross and the Supremes, you could still count yourself lucky for being on the front lines during American music’s British Invasion. In February 1964, a quartet of chaps known as the Beatles made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show and ushered in Beatlemania. Less than two months later, this boy band from across the pond was dominating the Billboard charts, and all of the nation’s Top Five hits were Beatles tunes. The band would produce many more hits until its breakup in 1970; their top-selling 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album would be released just in time to welcome the “psychedelic era” of pop culture, along with the albums of fellow Britons and bad-boy counterparts the Rolling Stones, who would return to their hard rock roots by 1968 with their single “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
Whatever your musical tastes were at the time, you could find a plethora of excellent music being performed by an unusually large pool of talented musicians. This was true even if you were barely out of diapers. Remember “The Chipmunk Song”? It won a 1958 Best Recording for Children Grammy, and in 1960 the award went to the follow-up album “Let’s All Sing With the Chipmunks.” Any way you slice it, our childhoods came with a great soundtrack.
Care to chime in? Share your coming-of-age musical memories with others at Boomer Yearbook.
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