"It's the music of lonely people," confided the Spirit. "The music of a single saxophone at night. Like a train whistle. There's a lot of heart."

Fats Domino, a chubby torpedo with the hands of a rake and the voice of a raspy chain saw, deposited his 300-pound frame at the piano and began to play. They turned on the house-lights. Fats, in a red silk toga, had been known to inspire hysteria.

A Harvard man got up and started to leave. "You know what this stuff is?" he asked as he trundled by. "It's devolution. Spawned in the hillbilly hinterlands and the African jungle. And sustained by the gathered momentum of Sound. Sound and Motion--a sense narcotic to dispel the dim and Damoclean shadow of reality."

And with that, he wandered friendless into the multitude shaking his watch and brushing the dandruff from his hair.

The Spirit of Rock 'n' Roll continued, undeterred. First they said it was calypso. Then Hawaiian music. Now, what? All of them were supposed to replace us. Nothing."

Partisans in the third balcony were throwing chunks of wood at the stage, Frankie Lyman struggled about the platform, dwarfed in his 14-year-old grandiloquence by the microphone.

The spirit of levity had moved one gang of youths to hoist an usher above its shoulders and hurl him down a flight of stairs. The crowd roared and the City's Pride convened for action. The show went on, oblivious and even louder.

Laverne Baker, the grand lady of the rhythm world, emerged from the wings in a dress sprayed on by an atomizer. And the tumult shook all gods from their cynical periphery.

"We shall survive," said the Spirit of Rock 'n' Roll. "We shall survive despite the Sunday morning rock 'n' rollers, the disc jockey post mortems, and the third rate flicks. Despite Lawrence Welk and Lester Lanin. Despite the amateur sociologists and their 'adolescent subcultures.'

"In a thousand one-night stands and red-lit neon holes from San Diego to Baltimore. In a Beat as Big as a bass-fiddle, tight-drum Hot America. In the dull roar and muted chant of the Juke Box Generation. We shall survive--and prosper. Man, you heard it here."

And he had a chorus, a thunderous "Amen!" from the stamp of heavy shoes and the clap of hairless hands. Youth spilled out last Friday night like so much combustible gas, gathered as a gust and bright balloon, rose, burst with a desultory bang, and was gone. Leaving only the silence of the morning after.