Any time is a good time to grow up if you find what you love, but there was something special about coming to self-consciousness in the mid-sixties, amid the British Invasion and the rise of Motown. I got hooked on rock early, when I was six—in 1964, in Queens, at the onset of Beatlemania—thanks to a friend in my building who, like his cool older sister, had a pocket-sized radio, so my father took me to Radio Row (the electronics district in lower Manhattan that was wiped out to make way for the World Trade Center) to get me one, too. Top Forty music (though nobody I knew called it that then) was the soundtrack of my life for the rest of the decade, as it seemingly was for the world at large, because that was the meaning of the rock revolution—the making of a new mainstream. That’s why my millennial children listen to that sixty-year-old music now, whereas, in 1964, only a precocious Mahler buff would have listened to the music of 1904.

I soon started buying records (45s, which had an A-side and a B-side—the intended hit and the throwaway that was sometimes just as good): lots of Beatles to start, but also other artists’ work, including “The Name Game,” “Downtown,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Satisfaction,” “Love Potion Number Nine,” “Look of Love,” “The Game of Love” (looks like I was getting a whole lotta love). Thanks to radio—New York’s 77 WABC—I heard and loved many more songs than I could buy, and what I got from this wide and wild spectrum of collective liberation was an aesthetic education, a sense of style that took far deeper root than did anything I was finding in books or movies. These songs evoked worlds of experience then beyond my ken, and did so in ways that, in retrospect, seem distinctly cinematic, from film noir (“I Fought the Law,” “Summer in the City”) to neo-Westerns (“King of the Road”), from spiky low-budget independent films (“You Really Got Me”) to European art films (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”), from comedy (“Wooly Bully”) to surrealism (“Red Rubber Ball”) to a real-time freakout hallucination (“Pictures of Matchstick Men”). Meanwhile, a prodigious weekly outpouring of masterworks from Motown laid the groundwork for my teen-age love of jazz.

Rock was endless summer: heat and sunshine came through my radio all year long, but I didn’t have a song of the summer until 1969. We’d just moved to a Long Island suburb, where I hadn’t yet set foot in the school, and meeting other kids casually was almost impossible, because the development was planned not for walking but for driving. In our old neighborhood, everyone just went outside; in the suburbs, I learned of the peculiar practice of calling another child on the phone and making an appointment. In any case, I had no one to call. The summer went by in a slow blur at a local pool; I don’t remember what I read or watched, but radios were playing everywhere—at poolside, at home, in the car—and the song that I made mine was “Bad Moon Rising,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Their sound was one that I was already attuned to, from the frequent airplay earlier that year of their previous hit, “Proud Mary,” which I first heard in one of my daily elementary-school bus rides, where the driver kept the radio on, too. I didn’t know why anyone would sing about a riverboat, but the words filled the melody’s space admirably, in the way that most pop lyrics struck me then—as the equivalent of vocalise, the apotheosis of which had been the spirited nonsense of “The Name Game.”

“Bad Moon Rising” was different; it was the song of my solitude, as much for its meaning as for its sound. The lead singer’s voice—I had no idea yet that his name was John Fogerty—felt like it came from somewhere distant, deep, and haunted. I wouldn’t have known a bayou from a mud puddle, but the blend of natural mysteries and mystical dangers, of good times amid evil spirits, was unmistakable. Fogerty made the menacing lyrics, about “trouble on the way” and “bad times today,” sound like a boast; the song shone like my own bleak sun—yet it still rocked. Its irrepressible joy was intensified by the darkness looming at its edges; this was the only singer I knew who could sing “Hope you are quite prepared to die” and turn it into a party. I may have been alone, but this was a party I was invited to.

Then summer vacation ended, I went to school and met some kids, and the following summer, actual death stole into the family circle and the songs didn’t matter so much; but Creedence wasn’t done with me. At the end of the year, their new album “Pendulum” came out; it was the first album I’d ever bought, so I depended less on radio hits. In one track, Fogerty’s desperately aggressive query “Molina, where you goin’ to?,” which he wailed with a hefty backbeat, captured this twelve-year-old's bewilderment with existential randomness and concision. I can’t say I’ve listened to Creedence much since then; the association with bad times is hard to shake. Also, I soon found other paths through the darkness—I read Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case,” I found out that philosophy exists, and I started listening to music with far more revolutions per minute, namely, jazz—but in substance and sound, their summer song had opened the way. ♦