Writings of Brian Lee Beshore

The Five Bs; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, The Beatles and Billy After the Liverpool Invasion, my family and I moved to Arcadia. This was at the beginning of 4th grade for me. I wasn’t happy about leaving my friends in La Canada behind but I was soon to make new friends. Among my new friends were our new next door neighbors, Billy and his sister Andy. Arcadia was very ‘White Bread,’ so Billy and I had to be very inventive to keep ourselves entertained, which was not a big problem, except that it usually landed us in trouble of one kind or another. Outside of getting along great, Billy and I were very competitive regarding certain topics. It seemed a bit random but we chose them nevertheless. For example Billy liked Chevies and I liked Fords. We were very adamant about these rivalries and frequently had long arguments over them. One of the topics we were divided on was music. Billy was for rock ‘n’ roll, The Beatles and The Monkeys while I was strictly classical; Beethoven, Bach and Mozart....

The Beatles in our Living Room When I was just a tyke, somewhere around first grade, my family and I would gather in our living room on Saturday nights for our weekly television watching ritual. This included some cartoon shows, like The Flintstones and such but it also included the Ed Sullivan show. My parents sat in their comfy chairs towards the back of the room and I always sprawled out on the floor directly in front of the T.V. I still remember how Ed would start the show by saying he had ‘a really big shoe’ for us that night. I can remember some of the regular acts which included Lamb Chop and the little Italian mouse Topo Gigio. So you can imagine our shock and surprise when, one night in 1964, Ed introduced a musical band from Liverpool called The Beatles. I had only a faint notion of what rock ‘n’ roll was, from listening to my little turquoise blue transistor radio. My mainstay in music, to that point, had been Beethoven and Bach. I really could not make heads or tails out o...

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