I was born in September, 1967, right after the Summer of Love. When I was a kid, I figured that made me an actual child of the 60s.

My parents were not hippies, but they met in the midst of the Minneapolis folk blues scene, and they certainly had a lot of interesting friends.

In 1967, they were living in Ankara. They only got new records when friends and co-workers brought them back from the USA and UK. Whenever those records arrived, they  had a party.

When Sgt. Pepper arrived, the party went over 24 hours. They just kept turning it over. Mom was past 8 months pregnant with me, and along with everyone else she danced all night to that one record. She got broken glass in her foot and didn’t notice. She had a good time.

After I was born, she says when I got fussy, if she put that record on I would quiet down and listen. If I was tired, it would put me to sleep–I would go out with that final chord.

I still have no objectivity about this record, or not much. I go years without listening to it, but it’s part of my brain, I still have it memorized in detail, in depth.

She always said that her original copy, printed in the UK, had the sound of a cocktail party on whatever you call the final groove that winds toward the center label, and is usually blank. Some later party guest walked off with that copy, and her replacement didn’t feature that extra. After she died, I found a copy that does. It’s not a cocktail party. But it makes all the sense in the world that she remembered it that way.