One of the refrains of my childhood was my father’s 6-syllable sing-song admonition, “you’re anti-everything.” That wasn’t quite accurate, but I do have to admit to an inbuilt contrariness that asserts itself at the faintest whiff of hype or herd approbation of – well, just about anything.

Like The Beatles, during my high school years. In First Year, 1968, all the hippest kids rated them the coolest of the cool. So, of course, did all the wannabes who took their cues from the hippest kids. And the Untouchables – the dorks and nerds – probably agreed, though no one knew or cared what they thought. Me? I don’t know where I belonged (what changes?), but I knew one thing – I wasn’t going to bow to the same gods as the herd.

Like everyone else, though, I tuned into the radio for the first public airing of every new Beatles release, which was always promoted by the DJs days ahead: “Don’t forget this Friday 6pm, for the first time ever on Perth radio, the new Beatles single Hey Jude – we’ve had a sneak preview over the phone from London, and we can tell you, you’ve never heard anything like this. It’s seven minutes long! This may be the greatest song ever written and you’ll hear it here first!”

I, too, thrilled to the censorial “beep” that covered our delicate ears from Lennon’s blasphemy in The Ballad Of John and Yoko:

Be-e-[Christ]-e-ep you know it ain’t easy, you know how hard it can be, the way things are goin’, they’re gonna crucify me…

And I loved the singles from Abbey Road: Come Together, Something, Here Comes The Sun and Oh! Darling (McCartney’s throat-shredding vocal on the last fascinated me). But I was looking for a blasphemic vehicle all my own – a band to fling in the faces of The Cool and throw their universe (more Beatle-centric than ever by 1969, after Abbey Road and Hey Jude) – off its axis.

The Rolling Stones wouldn’t do – too obvious. Besides, they were just about as popular as The Beatles. Elvis was past it. I flirted with Simon and Garfunkel as a possibility, but they didn’t rock and were about as wild as a family picnic. There were other contenders, but none that enraptured song after song. You see, this quest was complex. I wasn’t being perverse for the sake of it. I was seeking a new church with a credible Satan at its head – I had to BELIEVE.

If you’re familiar with the late 60s pop scene, you’ll be thinking you know where this is leading – this invocation of a shaman with the power to unseat the sweetly harmonising Liverpudlian Four, to make them look twee…you’ll be thinking The Doors. And you’ll be wrong. I was not that sophisticated. Or informed.

As high school kids in those days, our only access to new music was through the radio. Our pocket money was too meagre for albums. Even a single was a major purchase that required some strict budgeting and forgoing of essentials like packets of Capstan 10s. Our taste was shaped by the radio DJs, who enjoyed celebrity status in the tepid backwater of Perth of the 60s.

Trevor Smith, or “Smitty”, who held down the prime time evening slot on THE pop station of the day, 6PR, was the guru. When the “Paul is dead” stunt broke, Smitty had all the inside dope. We listened enthralled as he revealed in tantalising detail the evidence signalling Paul’s demise, held the radio up to our ears when he played Revolution 9 backwards, straining to discern the Lads’ secret backmasked message to their fans of Paul’s death. He proclaimed Abbey Road the Beatles’ masterpiece, and that was The Word. Hey Jude was their greatest song. That was The Word. Smitty seemed to know stuff, to have some inside understanding of the scheme of things pop-musical that was beyond me. What other explanation could there be for his extravagant praise of The Band’s Rag Mama Rag?

So there’s what I was up against. My new band, the one that I would train like a cannon at the Holy of Holies in which The Beatles were ensconced, had to be a personal revelation, to inspire a faith strong enough to steel me through the epic crusade ahead. They had to prove themselves with a string of hits, for the radio was the measure of all things. They had to rock; nothing wimpy would do. But greatest of all challenges, since it was outside the domain of my perception – Smitty had to bestow upon my anointed ones his hallowed approval!

In truth, my quest was not as calculated, not as articulated as it may seem in this recounting from so many years afar. I’m giving you a shrink’s summary, selecting elements that cohere, designed to make sense in the retelling. The dramatist within yearns to cut to a eureka moment…

In early 1969, I turned on the radio and there it was: the band I’d been waiting for…And when Smitty came in at the end of the song and announced it as “the great new single from…” – well, I raised my fist in the air and shouted “Die, Beatles, die!”

But it was not like that. Sure, I liked their first big hit single a lot (and it was 1969, and Smitty did give it the big thumbs up). The singer’s voice disengaged from the pack, aloof and proud, like a lone wolf. They had melody and beat and distinct guitar tones. But it took a succession of hits, all ballsy and melodically strong and distinguished by those great rockin’ vocals, to set the hook. Then there was no way back. The name of my obsession had a mysterious, if not mystical quality: Creedence Clearwater Revival.

OK, laugh. If a fat, bespectacled, delusional, paedophile runt calling himself The Little Pebble can found a religion by that ridiculous name in Australia of the 1980s and gather a devoted following that persists to this day, is it such an indictment that I, way back in the late 60s, as a 15 year old romantic twat with obsessive tendencies and an iconoclastic streak whose listening experience was limited to 6PR’s playlist, should fall for Creedence?

By 1970, The Beatles were floundering, rumoured to be on the verge of breaking up. It was the perfect time to strike.

The hippest of the hip at school was Brownie. He had thick black hair, longer than the rest of us were allowed, and even looked a bit like Paul McCartney. Needless to say, he was a Beatles fanatic and widely considered an authority on the Four. He wore winklepickers. And most impressive of all, his voice had broken and even in First Year he had REAL “sidies” (sideburns) – the envy of his barely pubescent peers, who sported “hangers” (long wisps of hair grown down beside our ears, simulating the real thing). One envious furtive glance at Brownie’s daunting unclothed form in the showers after sports periods, as he beamed with bushy pride, was enough to establish beyond challenge his status as leader of the pack.

Thus, it was with some trepidation that I chose to throw down the gauntlet before Brownie as he held forth amidst a spotty crowd one lunchtime, extolling the luminous virtues of some Beatles track.

“Creedence Clearwater shit on The Beatles.”

All eyes turned to regard the heretic. I felt like John the Baptist staring down the moment of his martyrdom. Brownie regarded me incredulously, then sneered “What would you know fuckface?” Case dismissed. And that was as far as it went! Brownie had spoken. We went on with our lunch.

Not much of a climax, considering the elaborate and extensive foreplay that had preceded it. But I stuck to my guns with Creedence until Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love pushed the boundaries of radio rock into a twilight zone that was as compelling as it was initially incomprehensible. I experienced Zeppelin at the peak of their thunderous power at their legendary concert at Subiaco Oval in 1972, and the walls came a-tumblin’ down. Creedence played at the same venue the week after, and I watched on unmoved. My flannelette shirt period was over.

But I had set my sails on a course of iconoclasm that was to take me through adolescence to adulthood, and on. My targets were wide-ranging. D.H. Lawrence. Lord Of The Rings (the novels, of course). Star Wars. 2001 A Space Odyssey. Anything to do with Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night. Marriage. Disco. Fondues. Theme parties. The Queen. Wealth acquisition. Looking back, I impress myself.

And yet I am contemptuous of the narrow-minded arrogance of the younger me. For in my default rejection of populist culture and institutions, I pointedly stayed away from Hair, O Calcutta!, Woodstock The Movie, Jesus Christ Superstar (and any Lloyd Weber productions), Cheech and Chong movies, stoned viewings of the surf movie Morning of the Earth, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and lawd knows what else. In effect, I managed to miss virtually all the mass-cultural events that are popularly considered to have defined the time for my generation! Such is the price paid by the uninformed iconoclast. The worst of it is I am not sure how high (or low) that price was, and now never can be.

I finally watched Rocky Horror on TV a couple of years ago. It was crap. Its time was long past, and it was sorta sad to verify that. And yes, I know it was conceived for theatre, and I know how much fun you all had dressing up and wowing yourselves as an interacting audience. But you know something else? If I could wind back time, I’m buggered if I would join you still.