The year is 1967.
The Stones are on Ed Sullivan. The Who perform their first concert in America. The Beatles release Sergeant Pepper's.
Yesterday, in the August 2012 issue of Opera News, I read this remarkable paragraph:
My second trip to New York City was a series of happy firsts. It was June 1967. I was just sixteen, and though five years earlier my mom and I had traveled there by train, this time round (with Dad in tow) we were arriving, thrillingly, by airplane - my first flight anywhere. We were staying at the famous Biltmore, with its "under the clock" rendezvous, and for the first time I could roam an intoxicatingly vertical Midtown on my own. But the trip's mecca was the shining new Metropolitan Opera House, just opened the previous September. The Friday of my visit, the Met launched a ten-day season of twentieth-century repertory by the visiting Hamburg Staatsoper - the new house's very first foreign opera troupe. Saturday's offering was Berg's Lulu, in its New York stage premier, and I couldn't imagine spending that evening anywhere but orchestra seat AA111 at the Met.
1967. And Patrick Dillon, age 16, wants nothing more than to be in a front row seat for an Alban Berg opera.
On October 18, 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone rolled off the presses. By that time, Opera News had been in publication for 31 years.
It seems at least one teenager already had a magazine that showcased the music he loved.