This month’s column is about a brick. Not just any, ordinary brick, but a brick that has played a pivotal role in the history of rock and roll. It now serves as a rustic bookend on a shelf in my den. But before I tell you the story of my brick, I’d like to reflect for a moment on the cultural significance of bricks in general.

Bricks are more than just building materials. Throughout history, they’ve been used as symbols to express a wide array of human emotions:

·                   Fear (“I was sh–tting bricks.”)

·                   Klutziness (“That shot was a real brick.”)

·                   Admiration (“She’s a brick house.”)

·                   Great Expectations (“Follow the yellow brick road.”)

·                   Devotion (“Donate $100 and get your name engraved on a brick.”)

·                   Stupidity (“thick as a brick”)

·                   Strength and Stability (the story of the Three Little Pigs)

If you’ll remember, in the story of the Three Little Pigs, the first little pig built his house out of some flimsy building material – empty beer cans, as I recall. But this had several advantages: 1) It was environmentally friendly, since it was constructed entirely of recycled aluminum cans, and 2) It gave the first little pig an excuse to sit around and drink beer all day long, under the ruse that he was building an ecologically sound house.

“I’m going to work on the house,” he would tell his wife every day as he left the pigsty with a case of beer under his arm. This beer bungalow was no challenge to the Big Bad Wolf, who easily blew the pig’s house down with the pig’s own hair dryer, which so frightened the pig that he went wee-weeing all the way down to the second pig’s house.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the rest of the story. Suffice it to say that the first two little pigs, who built their homes with substandard building materials, got their houses blown away by the wolf. But the third little pig, who was much wiser than the first two little pigs, built his house with sturdy bricks, which were able to withstand even the wolf’s leaf blower.

Unfortunately, as sturdy as the third little pig’s brick home was, it was not strong enough to withstand the “Great Hurricane of 1893,” which swept the third little pig and every brick in his house out into the Gulf Steam. (Although his body was never recovered, the third pig’s bricks continue to be found, to this very day, on the beaches of places as far away as Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.)

You’re probably thinking, “Boy, Antonio must be claiming to have one of the original bricks from the little pig’s home, which, if accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, signed illegibly by someone purporting to be from some made-up organization, such as ‘The American Brick Historical Society,’ could be sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars.”

Wrong again! No, in reality, my brick came from Liverpool, England, which was the hometown of all four of The Beatles. It once lined the walls of an old cellar called the Cavern Club, where The Beatles performed 257 times from February of 1961 through August of 1963. It was there in the Cavern that The Beatles first developed a large following.

After The Beatles hit it big, every rock group in the world wanted a gig at the Cavern. But in 1973, the Cavern Club was expropriated to use the cellar space for (no joke) a ventilation shaft for Liverpool’s subway. The warehouse above the Cavern Club was torn down and the Cavern filled in with rubble. Shortly after that, British Rail realized, “Hey, we don’t really need a subway ventilation shaft there, after all.”

The historic club remained buried until 1982, when a developer attempted to restore the Cavern, only to discover that it was no longer structurally sound. So the bricks from the original Cavern were carefully removed and used to completely rebuild it. There were some bricks left over, and those bricks were sold, with the proceeds donated to charity. That’s how I got my brick.

I recently visited the birthplace of my brick when I embarked on a Beatles Pilgrimage to Liverpool, which I will tell you about in next month’s column.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Give me a break! Now he’s going to start writing about his vacations!” But this is not just your ordinary week-in-a-condo-in-Destin vacation. This is the birthplace of The Beatles, AND I AM A BEATLEMANIAC!

Just be thankful I’m not making you look at my pictures.