My favorite year

When it comes to nostalgia, for me there will never be another year like 1964. I was 16, had my driver's license and a car, my first “real” girlfriend (as opposed to imaginary), and as 1964 started the Beatles hit the American airwaves, changing popular music in our country overnight.

There were a lot of great songs in 1964. I’ve gone to YouTube and this is just a sample of songs I liked that year. There were others, and tomorrow I'll show more of them.

YouTube being what it is, a video can be here today and gone tomorrow. If you’re looking at this and see a black screen telling you the video has been removed well, unfortunately, that’s how YouTube works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be).

First up: Cilla Black does a song written by Lennon and McCartney, who make a cameo appearance in this rare video of “It’s For You.”



The British Invasion took over the radio for many months, but some American groups managed to sneak onto the charts. Among them the doo wop group, the Reflections. Besides being a great song with catchy hooks, the lead singer has one of the world’s great pompadours.



I liked “You’re No Good” but it's taken all these years to find out that the song I misremembered being by the Hollies was actually by the Swinging Blue Jeans. I got that information from my brother, Rob, a human encyclopedia of the pop music of the era.



The Hollies did “Just One Look.” Give just one look to a very young Graham Nash.



After I bought the Beatles “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on 45 rpm, the next single I bought was the Searchers' “Needles and Pins.”



The Honeycombs had a female member, a drummer, predating Karen Carpenter by several years.



…and then there were the Beatles, whose songs will be played long past the time we Baby Boomers are all gone. The Beatles are still the giants upon whose shoulders the other groups stood.




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