Nevada Bob Gordon

Photo credit: Gary Firstenberg Something very important in rock and roll history happened here in this house. Do you know the story of Little Willie John? I, like many teens who came of age in the Sixties, was unaware of how many of the pop singles we listened to had their origins in black R&B. The things we've learned in retrospect could fill volumes. There's a whole chapter devoted to this in David Halberstam's  The Fifties .  The McCoys' two big hits in 1965 were "Hang On Sloopy" and "Fever." I never knew that the song Fever had been first recorded by Little Willie John. In fact, it had been a #1 hit on the R&B charts in 1956. Over a five year period Little Willie had 13 songs reach the Top Ten on the R&B charts. He also had many regional hits including "Leave My Little Kitten Alone," of which The Beatles recorded five takes while recording Beatles For Sale  in August 1964. The song was very popular in the Northwest, which wa...

If you're a Baby Boomer, you very likely remember exactly where you were when two specific Sixties events took place. The first, which made an indelible mark on all of us, much like a concussion, was the assassination of JFK. The second was wholly other, the first appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show . In olden times, tribes and people groups discussed their histories by noting "markers" in time. The old-timers had value because they remembered these histories. The year of the flood or the year of the locusts. For me, these two events mark a major change in my life. I was in sixth grade, living in Ohio when JFK was killed in Dallas. In January our family moved to New Jersey, and three weeks later the Beatles shook the world with their appearance on Ed Sullivan.  At the time, I knew very little about the rest of their American Tour, so it was fun to read Nevada Bob's account of his experience in Seattle as a policeman hired to protect the Fab Four on their...