The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Made Sure I Survived as a Military Kid

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

In July 1969, I emerged from the public pool grounds in Albany, Oregon, with Jesse’s hand in mine. She was a pretty, small, rather timid girl, but we had developed a lot of affection in a short time. Something haunted her. Even at the age of 14, I knew life was troubling for her in ways she couldn't, or wouldn't, express. I gripped her hand tighter and she gave me a lovely smile, one I would still remember more than 50 years later.

Jesse let go of my hand and cried as we separated for our respective walks home. We would never see each other again, and we both knew that the day we had spoken of was here.

My stepfather, Gene, was a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant, an E-5, stationed at the soon-to-be-closed Adair Air Force Station, just outside Albany. He was a communication specialist with the Military Auxiliary Radio System, or MARS. In May 1969, he received orders to be deployed to a radar site not far from the Demilitarized Zone in South Vietnam.

As was the tradition with the USAF, families were permitted to return to any previous posting while the servicemember was “in country.” My parents elected to return us to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, where my mother had left a job managing a large civil law firm just 18 months earlier.

I was not amused. I was losing my new girlfriend Jesse as well as my gregarious older neighbor Barbara, my best friends Danny, Charlie, and Mel, and a chance to play basketball with the sophomore squad at Albany Union High School.

I loved our little house on 29th Street, where I’d excelled at street football and hockey during an unusually cold and snowy winter, where I'd watched Portland wrestling on TV with my grandmother on Saturday nights, where I loved torturing my blonde older neighbor Alice Glace with jokes about her last name meaning “ice cream” in French. She hated that and once swatted me with her notebook for the privilege.

In Albany, I was three blocks from school and a world away from dark, frozen Alaska, which felt like a prison to me. I was, for the fourth time, leaving friends, a school, a state, and a routine I'd become used to. I was deathly sick of it, but dared not verbalize a word of that anxiety. I had been lectured about how this was simply required of every military kid. I never understood why I had to be unwillingly responsible for helping fulfill the mission of the United States Air Force.

It sucked, and I became sullen, introverted, and angry, an anger that persists until this day.

My best friend Danny and I went to a local record store to buy a copy of the new Rolling Stones’ single “Honky Tonk Women.” That satisfied my frustration for a day or two as we played it repeatedly in Danny’s room.

That song awakened something distant and fleeting in me. I wanted what they were talking about, even though I didn't have a clue what the words meant. It was confusing, but it felt liberating. Rock 'n' roll could set me free. The Stones, The Beatles, The Doors, Iron Butterfly—they all had something this lonely, scared, disenfranchised boy wanted. The Air Force certainly didn’t.

Music gave me a warm blanket to wrap myself in. By the time I graduated from West Anchorage High School in 1972, I had attended 11 schools in 12 years.

I wasn’t happy, but music kept me from slipping off a dark precipice into serious drug abuse (I had definitely experimented ), criminal activity (though I did get busted for shoplifting a Bob Seger album), or suicide. I couldn’t express myself, but music could.

Music buried itself deep within me, to the point that the Bee Gees song “Gotta Get a Message to You” immediately brings back the sights and sounds of the fields where I spent the summer of 1968, picking beans to earn some cash. So does Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again,” and the song that would presage my twin avocations of musician and rabbi: the controversial hit “Sky Pilot” by Eric Burdon & The Animals.

Every time my family moved, I packed up my records. They always made it to the new house, unlike my cool five-speed purple Spyder bike with the banana seat that disappeared between Oregon and Alaska. Gone forever, just like my guys and girls from Albany, Oregon.

Music became the go-to prescription for everything I felt. When I felt low, I’d listen to James Taylor or The Beatles’ early sides that were poppy and uplifting. When I felt alienated, The Rolling Stones’ classic live album “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out” went on the turntable and I buried my anxiety in their bluesy rock.

But the one that stands out is The Who’s transcendent “Who’s Next” record, which contained the enraged anthem “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that spoke to my feelings about a malfunctioning American government.

I was doing my homework one day with “Who’s Next” blaring on the turntable. My mother walked in and condescendingly said, “You can’t study with that racket on.” What she failed to observe was that homework would often sit idle unless I had my music on as loud as I pleased. I was a mediocre student, but music made it possible for me to pay attention. Mom never understood this principle. I would have gotten D’s and F’s without rock ’n’ roll in my life.

The Vietnam anti-war poster insert from my “Chicago III” record, featuring the band in military uniforms at a cemetery, hung on my Anchorage basement bedroom wall. My mom disapproved, but tolerated it nonetheless. It was as clear a political statement as I’d make inside my own home. War sucked and I was going to be heard about it, courtesy of the boys in the band Chicago.

In 1969, my mom had bought me a pawn shop bass guitar at Christmas. Three months later, I was playing blues jam sessions at the local youth center in Anchorage.

The Air Force helped Mom get a loan to buy a home in the middle-class Turnagain neighborhood of Anchorage, which thankfully meant I didn’t have to switch schools again. A friend of Gene’s was recruited to build bedrooms in the empty basement. There, I maintained my bass guitar playing and penchant for loud rock ’n’ roll.

My brother and sister’s new rooms were next to mine, and that I could have done without. But as the war dragged on and my stepdad was ducking Soviet-supplied rockets and artillery shells in Southeast Asia, I was learning about Bob Dylan and the anti-war movement that was taking hold in much of America.

I saw it as a means to an end. If my opposition to the war helped end the damned thing, then why not?

One small problem: I had been encouraged to join Air Force Junior ROTC. I saw it as the lesser of two evils. We had to wear uniforms to school on Thursdays. That was painfully unhip to a guy who was studying Dylan’s “Masters of War,” Grand Funk Railroad’s “People, Let’s Stop the War,” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission).”

In December 1976, the Eagles released “New Kid in Town,” which critics dismissed as a lightweight diversion, but it told a familiar story. It’s about a kid who moves into a new town, at first hailed and admired, but soon just another lost face in the fast-paced, youthful community. I heard my story in song, and it delighted me at the same time it captured the turmoil of my world, permanently, in vinyl.

“They will never forget you ‘til somebody new comes along” was the kid’s fate, soon to be absorbed and forgotten by his peers. That was my life in four different states and countries as a child of the US Air Force. It made me hollow, immature, and insecure as an adult. But music made sure I survived.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.