Boilen - Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

For all the musicians inspiring life and imagination through this invisible art we call music. You spark ideas, shake the normand have completely changed my life.
Thank you.

And with much love to JULIAN, MAY, and BUZZY.

CONTENTS

Its August 15, 1965, and a cool summer night as I look toward the glowing lights of Shea Stadium about ten miles north of me, imagining, no, wishing I was with The Beatles. Im twelve years old and sitting on my stoop in Queens, New York, holding a Westinghouse transistor radio to my ear. The radio cost me five dollars and a label from a bottle of Listerine. It is tuned to WMCA, my favorite AM station (FM barely exists at this point). Less than two years ago, on the day after Christmas, WMCA played I Want to Hold Your Hand, becoming the first New York station to play The Beatles. The night of the Shea Stadium show, I struggle to imagine what a concert there would be like. It is the first rock and roll concert to ever be held at a major stadium. Approximately fifty-six thousand people attend, including my next-door neighbor; the show sold out in seventeen minutes (mind you, theres no Internet).

I read the news the next day and see the black-and-white footage on TV the following nightthe screams drown out the band, the meager sound system no competition for the level of noise produced by thousands of adoring fans, who faint with passion, their hormones raging as they shout the names of their favoritesJohn, Paul, George, and even Ringo. Its a monumental event, and one that will eventually pave the way for the sort of arena shows well take for granted fifty years later.

I loved, loved, The Beatles, and if I could turn back the clock to any one night and be someplace, it would be Shea Stadium on that night.

My love for The Beatles began alongside Americas love for The Beatles, first with their songs on the radio and then with the newscast of their arrival at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few miles from my house. President Kennedy was shot eleven weeks before they came to America, and I dont believe its a stretch to say that our news media was happy to have something to celebrate after so much darkness. On February 9, 1964, two out of every five Americans turned on their black-and-white televisions to watch The Ed Sullivan Show. The Beatles appearance had been booked three months earlier, at which point no one in America knew them and their songs had never played on American radioin fact, youd be hard-pressed to name any British act with a popular song on the U.S. charts thenbut by the time they arrived in New York, I Want to Hold Your Hand had shot to number one. Credit their brilliant strategist and manager, Brian Epstein, and their sound, of course. I sat in front of the television with my mom, dad, and thirteen-year-old sister, May, and thought it was the most thrilling music my ten-year-old ears had ever heard. The Beatles were vibrant and young, none older than twenty-three, and on that night our screens filled with rock and roll, a departure for the normally tame variety show, which often featured Broadway singers, acrobats, comedians, and a magician doing a saltshaker trick.

Punk is often credited with shaking up the music world, while we tend to view the British Invasionthe wave of British bands that followed in the foot-stomping steps of The Beatlesas cute and adorable. But everything about music changed after those Brits arrived. Sales of records and record players hit all-time highs, much of the teenage world bought guitars, and your next-door neighbors garage was as likely to house a budding band as an Oldsmobile. In 1958, guitar sales in the U.S. totaled approximately three hundred thousand; by 1965, barely one year into the British Invasion, that number had exploded to one and a half million. The guitar replaced the piano as the main instrument in popular music. My sister and I took lessonsme with the intent to learn all The Beatles songs. I struggled with the instrument, and my teacher later told my mom that I had no musical ability. I was crushed. Instead, I spun 45s endlessly in my bedroom, pretended to be a DJ, created secret make-believe pop charts, and fell deeply in love with music. When I wasnt in school, I always carried two items: my trusty transistor radio and a stickball bat. I lived for baseball and records. At night, I hid my radio under my pillow and listened to either New York Yankees games or rock and roll. My friends were The Zombies, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Beau Brummels, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, The Yardbirds, and so many others. I bought my first album, Meet The Beatles, at the radio and television repair shop at the local shopping center in Lindenwood, and often walked all the way to the Times Square department store to purchase my 45s.

I was raised in a middle-class family in a working-class neighborhood that consisted mostly of Italians and Jews. I was the latter. My dad, Roy Boilen, sold frozen meat and frozen food and the freezers to store them in. My mom, Buzzy, worked the phone, canvassing families and arranging appointments for my dad. He traveled a lot and wasnt home much during the week, but when he was, he listened to big band music. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller made him happy. I recall visiting his parents house and listening to old 78s in the basement. It is a world of music I came to appreciate only much later. My mom loved show tunes and Barbra Streisand, music that I never came to appreciate: to this day it drives me up the wall, though my sister recently reminded me of my obsession as a six-year-old with the Broadway cast album for Flower Drum Song.

Some time around 1965, my dad bought a fancy stereo sound system, with a nice Scott FM tube receiver and some snazzy speakers, which I blew up about five years later listening to the deep synthesizer music of Emerson, Lake & Palmer at high volume. The year 1966 saw the evolution of FM radio, and that too changed everything. DJs like Alison Steele, Rosko, and Scott Muni, among others, started playing what they loved rather than music they were told to program. For a kid like me, the shift from AM, with its low quality and screaming commercials, to the low-key and high-quality sound of FM was mind-blowing. I think its fair to assert that the development of FM was as revolutionary to the world of music as the one weve seen in the twenty-first century with the transition from CDs to digital downloads and now online streaming. With the advent of FM, music that catered to particular tastes rather than mass appeal had a home. It was the first time I heard The Velvet Underground, and it was the beginning of underground music, later called alternative, later called indie. The thread is long, but the aesthetic is the samemusic as art, not commodity.

By 1966 technology made the recording process more expressive and the listening process more trippy (so did the drugs). Bob Dylans Like a Rolling Stone (1965) and The Doors Light My Fire (1967) were short songs on the AM dial, but twice as long and twice as interesting on FM. It was also a year of mind-altering albums, including The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, The Beatles Revolver, Bob Dylans double album, Blonde on Blonde,