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.”

I was saddened to hear of Gene Pitney’s passing; he died Wednesday after performing in Cardiff, of all places, at the age of 65. He supposedly died quietly in his sleep but to those who remember him, it is hard to imagine him doing anything quietly. He had one of those voices — a great, gulping adolescent voice that could slip into a soprano almost as easily as Roy Orbison’s or into something that sounded like crying (shades of Johnny Ray).

To me he meant the world before the Beatles: It was my sister Pat who had the Beatle albums that we played ad infinitum but before them she had some Pitney and I dug hearing that slippery vocal echo around the house. “Town without Pity” would float my boat but I think I loved “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” even more, being still a child and having not put away childish things. Like guns and John Wayne fixations. (For those who remember the movie, the Duke played the man who really shot the bad LV, played by Lee Marvin, while Jimmy Stewart took the credit.)

I heard the other day that Gene was in the studio recording Liberty Valance when Burt Bacharach, who had written it, came in to say that the studio had released the movie before the song was finished. That didn’t stop the song from being a hit just as the British Invasion didn’t stop Pitney from recording. He famously campaigned to get himself into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and made it just under the wire. He kept singing until he died on the road.

Cardiff was the site of one of history’s great hoaxes but Pitney was the real deal, a survivor in a business that eats most people alive. No giant, maybe, but no fluke either.

Condi Rice visited Blackburn, Lancashire and all we got was this stupid T-shirt. It seems that since Jack Straw visited Rice’s hometown of Buttfuck, Alabama, Rice promised to do the same for him the next time she was in the UK. While she was there she decided to ask Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies what the line “4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” meant.

It means Condi is a square. Even Davies, who was never the hippest of the Fab Four’s chroniclers, thought her question too lame to be answered straight. (Lennon, legend has it, had read a newspaper article about the number of potholes in Blackburn and was no doubt amazed that someone had bothered to count them all, all the more amazed having been no doubt on acid at the time.) Why not listen to the pretty sound of the protestors instead?

For as Rice lamely admitted that mistakes were made in Iraq, she defended the rationale of the war — and was greeted by a chorus of boos wherever she went. “Four Thousand No’s in Blackburn, Lancashire” was how the protest was billed and as the Times reported, friendly faces were in short supply. “Shame on you!” they chanted, while some wore T-shirts that read, “No torture. No compromise.”

Quite a few of the hostiles were Muslims, hand-picked by Straw’s advance team. When Bush’s people select a crowd to greet the president or any of his henchpeople, no dissent is allowed. Everybody stays in line. In England it seems some care more about the holes that have been shot through Iraqui citizens in the growing civil war, a conflict Rice had a hand in creating.

The other article Lennon read that day was about the Guiness heir who killed himself in his car. The juxtaposition of the stories — the hole in the man, the holes in the road — made for a kind of art and a commentary on life’s more futile aspect.

I’d love to turn her on.

Just got back from Belize where we went for spring break (Franny’s and mine coincided, at least for a week) which was nice except for the part where we almost drowned. Belize, the former British Honduras, is chasing the same Yankee ecotourist dollar people like us have dropped in Costa Rica (see photo, left). They are just not yet as keen on the safety angle.

This time last year, for example, we took a day long whitewater rafting trip in CR. The pre-trip precautions were extensive: our guide spent nearly an hour preparing us for any eventuality — dumping the raft, say — and what to do in the rapids should that occur. Later he told me that he had worked on the Colorado River in the US and that Costa Rica safety standards were much more stringent. Having reinvented itself as the premier adventure travel destination in Central America, the government didn’t want some tragedy marring an innocent outing and making headlines back in the states.

I got the impression things were a little more…casual in Belize. The jungle lodge where we stayed the first three nights had been in business since the early eighties and was very professionally run. But the trip we took on our first full day was not quite as advertised. It was billed as a sort of jungle triathalon — horseback riding, caving and tubing down the river — but everything took significantly longer than we had been told. The horse trip was supposed to be an hour and a half — but morphed into three, a big difference when you ride a horse about once a year. (Thanks for asking about my ass.) The cave exploration was brief, but partly because the cave itself was so slick that none of our party felt safe venturing too far from the mouth.

The rude surprise was the tubing, though. We traveled with another family of three and were given five inner tubes and a canoe in which we were to slowly wend our way back to the lodge. “It will take about two hours,” we were told but when the third hour came and we were no closer to our destination, we knew something wasn’t right. Far worse, we learned the hard way that there was a dam upriver and that they were opening gates every afternoon around four, turning our lazy river run into a swift one. My daughter lost her tube, we dumped the canoe three or four times (losing some shoes and drowning my cellphone in the process) and on several hair-raising occasions paddled like crazy to get to our stranded children, reassuring them all the while that everything was as it should be.

Nobody died, of course. But in all honesty, if our kids had been younger or any of us were worse swimmers, somone could have. I thought of Lawrence Gonzalez’s great book, Deep Survival — a collection of horror stories about walk-through-the-park sorts of outings that turned into survival-of-the-fittest endurance trials — and counted my blessings. Back at the lodge they were concerned and apologetic — How about a nice pot of cocoa for the girls? — but did not seem as alarmed as they should have been. Why was there no one spotting us on either end of that journey? Why was there absolutely no instruction about tubing or canoeing down rapids? The news about the dam seemed to concern them less than where we left the canoe.

To be continued…

How heartening it was to hear that the Sex Pistols would not be showing up to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this evening. Last month the band officially declined the honor with a hand-written note posted on their website that echoed Jon Stewart’s famous riposte to Tucker Carlson.

“We’re not your monkeys and so what?” someone — it sounds more like Johnny Rotten than Steve Jones but who knows? — scrawled. The band was speaking as one. “Your not paying attention,” the rant continued — quoting the note newspapers wrote “sic” in parantheses to demonstrate that they knew the difference between “your” and “you’re” but with the Pistols the amendment should be “sick.” It was almost thirty years ago now that the band declared rock sick unto death, a pronouncement as surprising at the news that Barry Bonds used steroids.

I missed the Pistols in their last concert at Winterland, the one where they closed with “No Fun” and Johnny squatted on the floor and famously asked the crowd, “Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?” I was late to the party though glimpsing them on TV I knew that I had blown it. For those who loved rock but despaired of the cocaine-and-unrequited love music of Southern California or the nauseating prog rock of the UK, they were like a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart. (In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus recounts how Joe Strummer, then in a rockabilly band called the 101ers, ran into Graham Parker, then playing pub rock. “Saw the Sex Pistols last night,” Joe said. “Sex…pistols?” said Graham. “Whole ‘nother thing,” Joe said sagely and the next time they met, Strummer had changed his look and sound and was writing stuff like “Janey Jones.”)

“it’s where old rockers go to die,” Rotten once said of the institution called the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame, and anyone still trying to forget the image of Sly Stone performing at the Grammies last month knows that dying in public ain’t pretty. I did finally see Johnny a few years later, perfoming with PiL, howling through numbers like “Rise,” reminding the hysterical crowd that “Anger is an energy.” For the finale he showed the crowd his bare backside, smiling all the while.