My brother turned 19. My graduation would occur in two weeks. The hurricane season began. And a tornadic turntable event erupted: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Everyone I knew and read about had been tracking this release for weeks. My dissolving band had been talking about doing something “new,” and my blues-based heart struggled to accept it. We all bought the album, or so it seemed, and we talked it up as if T.S. Eliot had returned to life, the U.S. ex-pat poet of angst and strife.