Rewind to 1960, when rock ’n’ roll has officially blossomed into a full-grown adolescent: kicking, screaming and improperly shaking its pelvis. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry have become thunderous gods among whiny children, inspiring countless rebellious youngsters to pick up instruments and make nimble hands the devil’s playthings. The garage band epidemic spreads, and the lurching noises of guitars and drums are piling up in backyards, basements and school auditoriums all over the country, bursting with the pre-war vivacity and whimsy that defined the generation.

No one place-—no matter how fiercely sheltered—can keep at bay the allure of the rock. Not even the small town of Concord, N.H., where a 16 year-old named John Forbes Kerry attends the all-boys boarding institution St. Paul’s School. Joining with classmates Jon Prouty and future Harvard graduates Larry Rand ’66 and Peter Lang ’68, the four start a garage band called the Electras. While the group won’t amass fame or fortune, they will radically change the lives of one another. And perhaps one of them, decades after the band succumbs to the drifting interest of its members, will come to change the lives of immeasurable individuals around the world.

An Electric History

The prestigious boarding school of St. Paul’s provided many opportunities and resources for its students, but in 1959, Larry Rand realized his life was missing something the school couldn’t offer—music. He desperately wanted to play guitar, and fueled by this desire, he sought and found a fellow guitarist in Jon Prouty.

After jamming together on repeated occasions, they decided to form a band in the fall of 1960, adding bassist John Kerry and drummer Peter Lang to round out the traditional four-piece garage band lineup. The enthusiastic group called themselves the Electras, after the then-popular car model manufactured by Buick.

The Electras rehearsed in the band room beneath the school auditorium on Saturday nights and quickly drew a devoted audience that came to listen to them jam on a regular basis. Soon they were being invited to play school dances, private parties and debutante balls.

The band tended towards more instrumental pieces, since no one in the band was particularly comfortable behind the microphone. While they mostly performed covers of famous early rock favorites like “Great Balls of Fire,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Johnny B. Goode,” they did have a few original compositions, including a vibrant rendition of the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice.”

In 1961, the band added pianist Jack Radcliffe and maracas player Andy Gagarin to fill out their sound. They also recorded an album that year to sell to schoolmates, family members and friends. The supremely primitive recording session lasted only two hours, and the band relied on only one microphone dangling overhead as a one-track Ampex tape recorder captured thirteen songs from the Electras’ repertoire. They took the recording to the custom manufacturing division of RCA Records and pressed 500 vinyl copies of the self-titled release.

When Kerry, Rand and Prouty graduated in 1962, the band added five new members: David Allen and Julian McKee on guitar, Bart Baldwin on bass and Don Roach and Brink Thorne on saxophone. When the last of these members graduated the following year, the band was officially dissolved. In total, there were thirteen different Electras over the band’s three-year lifetime.

Much has happened during the years since the Electras’ last performance. The face of popular music has undergone some serious cosmetic surgery, from the Beatles and the Who to Madonna and Run-DMC to Terror Squad and Simple Plan. America has endured its fair share of wars and scandals, and so has the music world.

Members of the Electras went their separate ways after prep school. Prouty went to Colorado College and then the University of Colorado Law School before opening three restaurants and deciding to follow his true passion of architecture and planning.

Lang went to Harvard, where he continued playing rock ‘n’ roll, and following his graduation, attended University of Cincinnati Medical School.

Rand studied government at Harvard University, where he played with the rock band the Dielectrics. He currently teaches constitutional law and history at Kent School in Connecticut. He continues to play his guitar.

Meanwhile, Kerry went from St. Paul’s to Yale to the U.S. Navy. He became a decorated Vietnam War hero and, afterwards, an outspoken peace activist. Kerry met one-time lead Beatle and Electras hero John Lennon at an anti-war rally in New York’s Bryant Park on May 12, 1972.

After graduating from Boston College Law School, he entered into politics in Massachusetts. Kerry has been the junior senator for Massachusetts since 1984 and now he is the Democratic presidential candidate in a race with a finish line only days away.