Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton

      *This is crazy. Don’t do it.

      TRANSISTOR RADIOS

      February in Minnesota is dismal, even if your farm isn’t struggling and your father isn’t damaged. And in February of 1964, President Kennedy had been dead only three months. Contemporary accounts—such as John Updike’s 1963 Christmas “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker—describe an especially overcast time. The popular music was thin, warbly, and chaste. “Dominique” by the Singing Nun had topped the charts in December. It was actually sexier than “There! I’ve Said It Again” by Bobby Vinton, which was number one throughout January.

      We heard that WLS in Chicago was going to play the first song by a new group. We had set a transistor radio on the kitchen counter. My brother and sisters pushed the kitchen table and chairs aside to create a dance floor. They turned the volume up.

      “I Want to Hold Your Hand” didn’t play so much as it exploded; it incited; it abraded. It began with a guitar riff—tinny to modern ears—that repeated as if rallying support. The vocal, pushed along by hand claps, rose into a falsetto. John Lennon fought out of the song’s syrupy break—It’s such a feeling that my love—by singing the next phrase—I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide—so adamantly that his voice almost gave out. Everybody danced—Maureen with Dennis, Colleen with Sheila, me presumably careening by myself. We thought without thinking.

      The phrase “this changes everything” now means almost nothing, thanks to the lazy bravado of some advertising that will have us believe that a new razor blade or midsized sedan will transform the world. But that goofy little single really did change everything or at least everything that a pop song could change. It didn’t rewrite physics or discover a new continent, but it did unleash a vast energy—an energy that you could feel in your bones, that felt both subversive and sweet, that was multiplied by a million radios, and that transformed an assassination-dulled and February-blighted population into so many puppies. Maybe it was all demographics and hormones, nothing more than, in Keith Richards’s phrase, turning on sixteen-year-old girls. But this felt different.

      I despair of making the impact of the Beatles clear. People even a few years younger than me listen to the early songs and hear only a boy band. Yes, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was about the single most innocent erotic act. Yet the music knew what the words wouldn’t say. The song’s image was dopey but its subject was human yearning. Lock yourself in a closet and listen to Bobby Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again” for a few hours and picture a world in which that was the high point. Then listen to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

      How much else did we know about this song and its creators? Had we seen them on Sullivan yet? Had we seen them move girls to scream and faint? Had we seen the interview where John, when asked how he found America, replied, “Turn left at Greenland”? Did we know that they wrote their own songs? That they admired the music of Negroes and sharecroppers? That they were, themselves, working class?

      Were we working class? The question’s tricky in America. My mom had graduated from college, and Dad nominally owned the farm. But we considered ourselves working class. Nurses and farmers work around shit. We had little money. One of the few Bible verses my mom quoted insisted that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The Beatles were working-class boys who wrote their own songs. Somehow, I noted that. I turned toward these working-class boys who made songs, like a plant turning toward the sun.

      I wasn’t alone. The Beatles and their peers thrived in our house. We played records constantly—in the girls’ room but also on the console stereo in the living room. We didn’t just play the records; we danced to them. In the house of a man who struggled to walk, movement was a sacrament.

      * * *

      The new electric music was everywhere. When we came in from chores, Petula Clark’s “Downtown” whispered the romance of cities into our lives. In a voice both glossy and soothing, still accented, Clark conjured images of bright taxi cabs in granite canyons; of rain that saturated the air like harmony and neon that infected the air like melody; of hurried, purposeful, joyful movement; of blossoming umbrellas; of incandescent windows and incendiary clubs. Sheila and I loved it.

      * * *

      I looked forward to learning to read because reading promised liberation from my breathy, straining speech. And when I started first grade at Holy Trinity School, I immediately liked its crowded energy, its momentum and clamor: boys stampeding down stairs, girls gathering and dispersing in chatty groups. I inhaled the distinctive Pine-Sol smell; my feet deepened the light half moons in the same steps my mother and now my brother and sisters climbed; I touched the sponge in the holy water font in the hallway; I looked up at the cloudy blackboards, at the green institutional paint, and at the crucifixes—the pierced, half-naked, heaven-supplicating Christ. The trip to Holy Trinity was my first commute. I awoke, prepared myself, left home with routine urgency, traveled, felt the subtle indifferences and brightnesses and adrenalines of a place where things are accomplished. School was a brisk promise.

      But reading initially disappointed me. The nuns—like teachers everywhere at the time—taught reading through phonics. The phonics method assumed that children were comfortable with speech and taught them to read by breaking words down into sounds. And, in the case of the vast majority of children, this approach reassured them. But phonics disappointed me. When I saw o and a on the printed page, they were crisp, confident things; when I said them, they smooshed into “uhh.” Words invigorated me, but sounds baffled me. It was as if I had been told to dance the syllables. Other kids struggled with real disabilities, but I didn’t notice. Phonics enforced an averageness upon me that I hated.

      I found in sports the fluency I was looking for in school. I added commentary tracks to everything my friend Karl Herber and I did, including sports. Maybe all kids did this, but for me, experience was always distilled to story and sharpened to style, and probably not in an entirely healthy way. When you confuse the box score with the game, you miss things.

      Standing in the yard, I assumed a batting stance, my bat twitching behind me, my head facing forward, my feet planted. Because we couldn’t yet connect with the baffling butterfly of a thrown pitch, Karl rolled a softball on the ground toward me. I announced, with an ease I only achieved while playing with friends, “Fenton smacks a hot grounder back to the pitcher, ending the inning.” While we couldn’t hit a tossed ball, we could sometimes catch one. When Karl stabbed one of my floating throws out of the air with his glove, I’d improvise, “Herber nabs it,” and then I would instruct him, “and spins and fires it home to Fenton, catching the runner at the plate.”

      While the possibility of being injured by machinery or animals kept farm talk sober, sports talk could intensify into joy. I bounce the basketball twice and deke my hip sideways a little. I squint, get two hands beneath the ball, push it outward and upward like a swimmer doing the breaststroke, and arc the shot up from less than ten feet out toward the orange hoop that Dennis had nailed to our barn. The ball climbs toward the basket. It wobbles in midflight. It touches the backboard and, too exhausted to do much else, collapses through the hoop. “Yes! Fenton wins it at the buzzer!” Stories emerged from my blathering.

      * * *

      Dennis and I slept in a bedroom, but I otherwise claimed it as a kind of personal retreat. In my room, I listened to sports. Pine tree branches scraped against the window when the wind blew. The green-blue walls tilted inward with the rooflines. Eight-by-ten glossies of Tony Oliva and Bob Allison and Harmon