I remember being in a VW bus. It was autumn and we were riding along a hillside overlooking a valley. My uncle Chuck, looking younger than I’ve ever known him to be, was driving and a song came on the radio.

The song was about a boy in love. It moved along slowly and melodically as I watched the orange maples pass my window. I didn’t notice the song building, that it was all leading somewhere. I didn’t notice until The Beatles had already changed rock ‘n’ roll with two words: Hey Jude.

I remember the song going on and on and on. But I don’t remember The Beatles breaking the all rules, I remember them playing like they never knew the rules were there. I remember it being 1968, even though I was born in 1986.

It’s a memory from a story told to me by my mother. It exists in a set of memories experienced and given to me by my parents. They are some of my fondest.

My father told me about being in the Air Force in the 1970s. He and his buddy Dave Dennison used to put on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album and just sit and listen.

They didn’t talk; this music didn’t play in the background.

Other memories, I’ve created. They come from things imagined, things I’ve read and watched, but mostly from the music itself. I can listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and get pissed off about Vietnam and that lying son of a bitch Johnson. “Suzie Q” feels like acid trips I’ve never taken. And it seems like I’ve spent every summer day of my life with The Allman Brother’s playing “Jessica” somewhere nearby.

Classic rock gives me a sense of nostalgia for a time I didn’t exist. It’s part of an identity larger than mine, a common identity.

I have been a lonely teenage broncin’ buck. I have danced with a girl in a dusty high school gymnasium, and somehow understood what crimson and clover meant. I have been in the woods, drunk on cheap beer and searched for a heart of gold.

My mother heard “Hey Jude” for the first time on a road that I’ve driven many times. I was never told to value classic rock, but connections like this made it feel like something real, something of substance. But for years I thought the substance was bland. I preferred the tension and angst of modern rock.

The “roll” has been dropped from the genre name because whatever it was, everyone can tell it’s gone.

Rock ‘n’ roll speaks of something soulful; something from the bones of a person. Rock was the energy, the emotion; roll was the flow, roll was what soaked in and spoke to you.

I’ve looked for it. I catch it in moments; bands chance on it and catch it in fleeting seconds. My Chemical Romance has a song out called “Welcome to the Black Parade.” It starts with a story about a boy, a spoken story with drums, then builds. It builds into a song that doesn’t sound much different than all the other flimsy emo on the charts. But maybe it sounds completely different.

It sounds like this group has taken elements of a dead-end genre and resurrected it into rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not salvation, but it’s a start. It’s something.

This might be my passing whim, just a catchy song I wish would lead to something more, but will die after its radio rotation is finished. I have been fooled before.

I once thought Limp Bizkit had perfected something earlier bands had only begun. I also thought Korn was the best band ever.

A summer day and a car radio on seek changed my mind. “Eleanor Rigby” showed me there was something terribly wrong with the music I was listening to. Slowly, I began to understand what genuine music meant.

Bob Dylan taught me lyrics can be poetry. Jimi Hendrix played the guitar like guitar is a language only he could speak to us. And The Beatles gave me music that moved and breathed. It was music that sounded like the world speaking. A world that stretched into the past and brought it sliding down on me.