Count my blessings
I have to laugh when I read about my Baby Boom cohort’s memories of savoring rock ’n’ roll behind the backs of disapproving elders. I had no such problem. I wasn’t especially taken with the new sounds of the Fifties: I was six years old when Elvis Presley debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. I thought he was vaguely comical. In any case, my parents had resolutely high-minded middlebrow taste in such things, wavering somewhere between Dvorak, Lawrence Welk and Mozart. Rock ’n’ roll was simply out of the question. Everything else heard in the household — country and folk music, in particular, which my elder siblings’ favored — was tolerated to some degree, but my own secret musical vice was not.
