Very good insights here. To add to the list, I was a small town DJ in the late 60s when NEW BEATLES RECORDS were coming out. Talk about feeling ancient…
(Of course it did my heart good to see their CD, #1,
Which reminds me of without a single note of new music turn into the best-selling CD of the year and put them back on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Which reminds me of a story that (IIRC) critic Ralph Gleason wrote in the mid-1970s: A pair of teenyboppers are searching through cutout bins in a record store (remember them?) and one of them finds a Beatles album, holds it up and shouts across the room to the other one, “Hey, look! McCartney was in a group before Wings!”
Happened to me when I realized how old Guns & Roses must seem to kids these days. They hit it big in 1987, I was a sophomore in high school. That was 15 years ago. I think about how old-fashioned music from 1972 sounded when I was 15 - that was classic rock, even back then.
Driving home from work yesterday, on comes Whole Lotta Love…instinct made me reach over and crank the radio to full blast and when the guitars started going from one speaker to the other, I was back in my dorm with my buddies gettin’ high in 1972…
Then last night they were promo-ing CSN&Y concert coming to the MGM Grand and I looked at those old geezers and thought “now I know how my parents felt when they watched Lawrence Welk and commented how old the singers all looked.”
Whatever…if you wanna feel old, just take another gander at Opie picking up his Oscar the other day.