Literature and Life: How One Leads to the Other

As a youngster, books satisfied my interest in history -- military and ancestoral.
As a youth, they quenched my thirst for information related to a new and exciting interest -- contemporary music.
The British Invasion was in full swing and the Beatles remained the top of the pops.

I wanted to know everything about them. Who, what, where, when, and how, all questions I would later be required to answer as a professional journalist.
As a result, books about the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the music of the 1960s, continue to make up the bulk of my library. 
They now number in the fifties, with more than half being Beatle-specific. 
My music library is rivaled only by my record collection, which consists of some 500 vinyl records and a nearly equal number of compact discs.
The collection includes the entire catalogs of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, plus a growing number of related DVDs.

Before switching to journalism in graduate school, I served as a professional disc jockey and studio engineer.
I'd earned a bachelor's degree in mass communications with an emphasis in radio broadcasting.
Little did my mother know, but she was setting me up for the future by playing the radio while preparing my pre-school breakfast. I virtually fell in love with the medium.
Ironically, she never understood how you could make a career out of being on the radio. But, I was going to college and that's what mattered to her the most.
The vast majority of these books are in paperback, which show their age. However, some are first-edition hardcovers, autographed by the authors. They remain in pristine condition.
Among the best, in my opinion, are Shout: The Beatles in their Generation," by Phillip Norman, and The Love You Make: An

Insider's Story of the Beatles, by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines.
Both are insider accounts.
As a journalist, Norman was assigned to cover the Bealtes' business, Apple Corps., and was granted access to the inner circle and its dealings.
Brown was the director of NEMS, the Beatles' management company, and the best man at John Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono.
It was Brown, in this book, who reported that Paul McCartney had fathered a child previous to the group's ascent to the top of the pops. McCartney refutes the report.
Gaines was a well-known pop culture journalist.
In regard to Bob Dylan, there's Knockin' On Heaven's Door: On the Road in 1974 by Rolling Stone Magazine, Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography by Anthony Scaduto, Hard Rain by Tim Riley, The Poetry of Rock: The Golden Years by David Pichoske, and, of course, Bob Dylan: Chronicals, Volume One by the man himself.
Rounding out the music-related category are biographies about the most famous artists of the period who died young.
No One Here Gets Out Alive: A Biography of Jim Morrison by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimmy Hendrix by David Henderson, and Buried Alive: An Intimate Biography of Janis Joplin by Myra Friedman.
As you can see, my  voracious appetite for music and its history, led me to a pair of somewhat allied occupations.
It continues to this day, evidenced by my recent launch of a website promoting live music in my community.
It's called barjammers.com and it can be found by following this link: http://www.barjammers.com/  
It's a work in progress, but it's being well-received. It even features my beBee-based blog, which may be found in the music reviews/columns hive at https://www.bebee.com/groups/music-reviews-columns 
A follow-up to this post will reveal the mind-expanding books and their authors that once consumed my imagination.
When you put the posts all together, you will get a snapshot of who I am and what I've become through reading various types of literature.
To read the first installment of this three-part series, please follow this link: https://www.bebee.com/producer/@randy-keho/from-boxes-to-bookcases-the-resurrection-of-a-library

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