Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
BOB DYLAN
In November 1960, John F. Kennedy, aged forty-three, became the youngest president in American history. The sixties, he announced, were a new frontier. That same month, compulsory conscription for all healthy males between eighteen and twenty-one was abolished in Britain. Earlier that year, Britain’s prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had declared that “a wind of change” was ending centuries of empire and thus the need to send young men to fight colonial uprisings in Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, Sergeant Elvis Presley, benefiting from the rollback of the American draft, celebrated his demobilization with a string of hits.
In 1960, another civil rights act was inscribed in the U.S. statute books, the Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s segregation laws unconstitutional, and Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. Penguin Books was cleared of obscenity charges by UK courts for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal, Chubby Checker sang “The Twist,” and Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns laid the foundations of pop art.
But even as television and radio pursued a conservative, apple pie agenda that prolonged the chart-topping success of Elvis and Sinatra—and a crew of fifties crooners, balladeers, songbirds, folksters, and instrumentalists—a new generation of singers was emerging in dive bars, coffeehouses, and smoky cellars from California to Detroit, from East Coast campuses and Greenwich Village basements to the industrial heartland cities of Britain.
A band called the Beatles embarked on a forty-eight-night run in a seedy Hamburg club. Robert Zimmerman prepared to drop out of his freshman year at the University of Minnesota and travel to New York City to play in folk music clubs as Bob Dylan. Two boys called Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met on a railway platform in East London and discussed a shared passion for Chicago R&B epitomized by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. And three brothers practiced harmonies that would form the foundation of the Beach Boys. A new frontier beckoned its pioneers.