THE BRITISH ARE COMING!

When the Beatles hit the Boston Garden in September 1964, the British Invasion became more than a collection of imported records—it became permission to look different, sound different and scare the hell out of your parents. Boston answered with its own insurgency: Barry & the Remains, the Rockin’ Ramrods, the Lost, Moulty and the Barbarians, and Peter Wolf’s Hallucinations, while Bob Dylan plugged in down the road at Newport and Gram Parsons drifted into Harvard Square.

Then the Rolling Stones arrived at Lynn’s Manning Bowl in 1966 and the whole thing ended in a stage rush and tear gas. The British had invaded—but somewhere between the screaming girls, long hair and feedback, Boston discovered it was perfectly capable of starting its own revolution. Boston Babylon follows the invasion and the beautiful mess it left behind.