My Life in the 60's

Life was very different back then. Love was mean't as dedication rather than in liking, one-night stands were only the coolest relationships, Acid made you cool, and best of all, The Beatles were the number-one band.

My name is Hazel Schewin. I have long brown hair and big grey eyes. I love leather and flowers and would kill for a decent record. This my life in the 60's.

You could say I was a Hippie and I wouldn't deny it. You could say I was obsessed with The Beatles and with what little of Elvis Presley there was left. But you definitely could not say that I wouldn't want to go back to the 60's.

The late 60's; when I would skip school with a couple of close friends and do whatever drug Stewie Deens had bought that day; when you didn't really think about your future, but knew that you would hate it; the times of the very beginnings Woodstock, a congregation of "hippies" who want to listen to people's fabulous musical ponders; and the 60's, when the world loved John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

I first learned of them back when I was eleven, in what I think was the very early 50's, and would help out at a local under-ground pub owned by a family friend called the Cavern. One day, three lengthy Elvis impersonators came tittering down the stairs, pushing each other and laughing and asked me if they could talk to the pub owner. I told them that she wasn't in, but would be the next day, and that they needed a hair-cut. The one, the tallest who had a long, fine nose and deep brown eyes, patted me on the head and muttered something to his friends about "tainted water". They left to come back the very next day and ask if their band could practice and preform down here. The pub-owner said yes. When they came in the next Thursday afternoon to set up, they snickered at me-- the three boys did. Only now do I realize that I told John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Pete Best (but who cares about him now?) to cut their hair! Flabbergasting!

They would preform almost every day, John, Paul, and Stu -- as I had come to learn all their names after a year-- on guitar and bass, and Pete on drums. They weren't too shabby. They played songs with beats I'd only ever heard from Elvis or some other "skiffle"* band.

One day, a Regular Joe walked down the stairs and asked me to direct him to where the "Quarry-- I mean, the Silver Beatles" played. So, I lead him to the front row of the crowd so all the better to see there the crowd of screaming and swaying men and women. Little did I know that this man was the Brian Epstein, the man to discover the Beatles. He took them from the pub and we were never to see the boys again.  They were like brothers to me.

Two years later, however, I nearly fainted when I learned that The Silver Beatles were now The Beatles, and that Stu and Pete had been dumped to be replaced by Ringo Starr, a handsome man from another band, and George Harrison, who had often joined them for band sessions down in the Cavern. I also learned that they were spending a lot of time in Hamburg, Germany from listening to my personal radio. They played "Please Please Me", one of my favorites, from time to time. Life was at ease with the soft sounds of their earliest songs.

Yes, I knew the Beatles. I was a huge fan in the 50's and 60's... and 70's, and 80's, and 90's, and even still, now.

*Skiffle was a type of music some bands played in the 50's and 60's. It was like Rock and Roll as we now it today, only with acoustic instruments and a lot more singing. In retrospect, it was the very beginning of Rock and Roll.