The Soundtrack of My Life Part I

I posted on Facebook a while ago about how I knew who George Harrison and Ringo Starr were before I knew who the Beatles were. And that's true, odd as it may seem.

It's not the first time I've made this observation, and someone usually reacts in with some level of consternation, but it's not that hard to imagine.

I'll try to explain. First, you need to understand that I grew up in a desert in southern Arizona. At various time in my childhood I lived 20 minutes from Tombstone and 5 Minutes from Mexico. Aside from the tumbleweeds and tarantulas of the literal desert, it was also a rock and roll desert. Our little town's radio station was KHFH (for Historic Fort Huachuca, one of the last homes of the Buffalo Soldiers). They played country and soft pop--Marty Robbins, Roger Whitaker, Lynn Anderson and that type of stuff. Most of the records in our house were my parents' records. They listened to Jim Reeves, Sonny James, and Faron Young. My older sister was a huge fan of the Osmonds. And we had a bunch of The Monkees' albums, but I never heard the Beatles or other rock artists on local radio or in our home. That's not to say I had never heard of the Beatles, just that I had virtually no exposure to their music during their heyday.

In the early 70s two things happened that opened my ears to rock and roll. First, KHFH became KTAN and began playing Top 40 stuff, so my musical horizons widened. And, more significantly, during one of my late night frequency scanning sessions, I came across X-Rock 80, which played straight up R&R. Now THAT was a aural revelation. That's the station ZZ Top is telling you about in Heard It on The X.

In any case, prior to about 1972, I had very little exposure to rock music. When I did finally get access, there were four artists named John, Paul, George and Ringo who were all hitting the charts regularly as solo artists, and that's how I came to realize who those artists were. It was some time later than I learned they had all been in a group together way back in the 60s.

So it's just not that strange for a cohort of music fans about my age to think of the Fab Four as solo acts that were once in a band together rather than as a band that broke up.