PART 2
And then in the summer of 1968 everything changed for me, and maybe for the entire country, too. Personally, at age 12 I started going through puberty, my entire family suddenly moved to a new town, and "the 60s" started to hit mainstream America. So it was a triple-whammy. Now a lot of people that weren't alive during the 60s have a misconception about that decaded. For most of the decade it was still pretty much a '50s kind of world. What most people think of "the 60s" didn't really start happening for most Americans until around 1968. I can still remember the exact moment when "the 60s" really started for boy Ace Backwords.
Since I was the New Kid in Town that summer, I didn't have any friends and was very sad. For want of something to do I'd often go out shopping with my Mom when she drove off to the malls off the freeway in Paramus. All of us brats would pile into Mom's beat-up old Ford Fairlane. Anyway, this one night I was blowing my allowance at this discount mall. It was the kind of place where you could buy all the mass-produced pop-culture crap of the day. I'd stock up on candy and baseball cards and MAD magazine and comicbooks. ANyway, I happened to stumble across this cheap paperback titled "THE BEATLES STORY" or something like that. "With 20 Pages of Exclusive Color Photos of the Fab Four!" 99-cents or something like that. It was one of those cheap pop culture bios they'd crank out about the celebrities and sports stars of the day. It was the latest Beatles toy cranked off the endless Beatle merchandize assembly line. Later that night I took the book home, laid there on my bed eating my candy and opening up my packs of baseball cards ("Not ANOTHER Walt 'No Neck' Williams of the Chicago White Sox card!" (They had it rigged so you had to buy dozens of the crap cards to get one Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays card, it was a rip-off I tell you). When I opened up my new Beatles book the first thing I noticed is how much the Beatles had changed. The black and white Fab FOur had metamorphised into this strange and colorful creature. They were wearing these colorful outrageous costumes -- "psychedelic clothes" they were called in the caption. ANd the Beatle had grown hair on thier marrionette faces. John looked the strangest of all. He was wearing granny glasses and he had this fu manchu mustache; he looked like a completely different person. And the text of the book was even stranger. The Beatles had just released a new record called "Sgt Pepper" and there seemed to be a big controversy about it. Something about "kids and drugs." It seemed that the Beatles had been taking this drug, this "psychedelic drug" called LSD, and apparently that was what caused them to metamorphis into these colorful butterfly like creatures. And there was a song on the new Beatle album called "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that was supposedly about taking an LSD trip, and the song had all these surreal lyric about "tangerine trees" and marshmellow pies" and "kaliedescope eyes." It sounded like Alice in WOnderland. Supposedly you took this "hallucinogenic drug" LSD and you hallucinated and it took you to this fantastic realm, this magical Candyland, where you saw all these amazing visions. Maybe I wasn't reading the fine print to clearly, but to my 12-year-old brain it all sounded pretty cool. Paul McCartney was quoted in the book as saying that "LSD helped him to see God" or something like that. And that sure sounded pretty cool, too.
Well, I sat there on my bed pondering this strange new Beatles book, as I blew bubbles with my bubblegum and opened up the rest of my baseball cards. And then I went out and played basketball in the backyard with my little brother, and I didn't think any more about it until much later.