Pipeline (excerpt from chapter 16)

After writing many album reviews for the newspaper where I worked, I developed an idea for my own music trivia column. "Pipeline to the Sixties" debuted in the Elkhart(IN)Truth on June 3, 1983. I designed my own logo and used a photo of Little Richard for the first column. The idea was simply to provide tidbits of '60s music trivia, such as listing the top songs of 20 years ago, brief bios of an artist or band and quirky facts, such as: Stephen Stills once flunked an audition to be in the Monkees; Dave Clark was once a film stunt man; the Righteous Brothers weren't really brothers and Paul McCartney wrote "Martha, My Dear" for his English sheepdog.

"Pipeline to the Sixties" was published monthly for six years. I never ran out of interesting ideas -- at least interesting ideas to me. I added more features, such as "One-Hit Wonders," "Beatle Bits," "At the Flicks" and a trivia quiz. I found or created all sorts of oddball lists: goofy songs such as "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" and "Beans In My Ears;" bird band names such as the Partridge Family, Yardbirds and Crow; show biz kids such as Nancy Sinatra and Gary Lewis. I found unique photos and album covers to run with my logo, which changed three times. Eventually, the column name was shorted to "Pipeline", as I added late '50s/early '70s trivia to the '60s mix.

"Pipeline" uncovered a new connection to the music of years past that lived in my head. The best music of the '60s era, really rolling far into the 1970s, created a new genre called classic rock.