In my imagination, the Beatles killed Gene Pitney. And Roy Orbison, and Lou Christie and all those big emotional voices with the Phil Spector-sized ambitions for their sound. (Not altogether true, of course; Christie had a huge hit with “Lighting Striking Again” after the British invaded, and Roy and Gene kept recording. But the bell was tolling for them, and it had a Mersey beat.)

The advent of the Beatles was, for me like many my age, the beginning of my relationship with rock and roll. I was probably nine when I brought my copy of A Hard Day’s Night over to John and Mark Moritson’s house, I remember listening to “Tell Me Why” and the reaction we had when they got to the bridge

Well I’m begging on my bended knees
If you’ll only listen to my please
If there’s anything I can do —

and on that line John and Paul hit a falsetto note that may not have held a candle to anything Gene or Roy or Lou could do, but they did it in unison with a jumpy ascending guitar part and it THRILLED us. “Play it again!” someone yelled. And we put the needle back, again and again, reveling in the joy and the abandon, until Mrs. Moritson said we would ruin the record if we didn’t stop.

A year or so later, my sister Pat came home with the new Beatles album, Rubber Soul. It was overcast, as it usually was in Crescent City. My father had already left and things stunk at home, in every sense. There was something wrong with the record, too. The Beatles’ faces were strangely elongated on the cover, they were wearing brown suede jackets and black turtlenecks and no one was smiling. They looked like they were at a funeral, looking into my casket. The pictures on the back of the LP were all black and white, too, and they were doing adult things like smoking.

Strangest of all was the sound. Though the first number was a la-la song from Paul (“I’ve Just Seen a Face”) which would have made sense on Help! (and was, I learned later, on the British import), Norwegian Wood was a downer. What did it mean? What was Norwegian Wood? Why did John have to crawl off and sleep in the bath? I knew that there was a gulf between the Beatles’ experience and mine, that adulthood loomed and it would be filled with grey skies and wood smoke, people leaving or sleeping in the bath. I did not identify the feeling as depression then but I do remember leaving before the first side had finished.

“Hey, where are you going?” my sister said. “The album’s not over.”