THE FIRST BRITISH INVASION 1964-1966

I WANNA HOLD YOUR BAND

Every so often at unexpected moments, memories float to the surface, like long ago dream fragments. As with other intensely emotional recollections—good romances, rotten romances, family traumas, births and deaths—they remain Technicolor visions, accompanied by sounds and even smells. But these are different. They're of my parents in 1964, scurrying around to all our neighbors in the Bronx building where I was raised, advising everyone that murder was not being committed in apartment 6B. Rather, their 15-year-old only child had the black and white console tuned to Ed Sullivan, screaming to high heaven for the love of Paul McCartney. They're of a windswept afternoon in 1965, when that self-same daughter, now 16, snuck into Manhattan after school and stood for three hours in the misty damp for one 10-second glimpse of Brian Jones in his limousine.