Showing posts with label dave clark five. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dave clark five. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

My Sixty-Four Year Musical Journey


The problem with only being able to get one's music from AM radio was that once a song became a hit, the disc jockey played it at least once an hour. This is the primary reason why baby boomers hate certain songs with a passion (Take "Ode To Billy Joe", for instance. Plus Bobbie Gentry never once said what was being thrown off the bridge, and it probably wasn't even anything interesting anyway.) Conversely, if there happened to be a song you really liked but wasn't in the top ten, good luck catching it on the airwaves. If I did happen to catch it, I'd be in the backseat of the car and my dad wouldn't stop yapping long enough for me to actually hear it.

Plus I didn't know what most of these artists looked like. There were some fan magazines with tiny black and white photos of the top groups, and sometimes network variety shows would feature a pop act "for all you kids out there". I always felt sorry for the bands who were just looking for a little promotion and had to endure the mocking of the eighty-year-old host who'd made his name in the vaudeville days.

On a Wednesday night in the fall of 1964, however, a wondrous thing happened ~ and that thing was called "Shindig". Suddenly I could see all the artists who had previously only existed in my brain as breathtaking sounds emitting from a tinny speaker and tiny one-by-two-inch black and white promotional snapshots in celebrity mags. Yes, the show was in black and white, too, but why quibble? Sometime during the show's run, I switched music teachers and had accordion lessons (yes) on Wednesday nights. By the skin of my teeth I made it home by 7:00 p.m. each week, but it was incredibly stressful.

Shindig had its go-go dancers in white-fringe mini-skirts doing the jerk and...well, that's the only dance I remember...but it wasn't overly distracting, and far superior to a geriatric comedian chewing on a fat cigar and spouting, "Take my wife....please." Everyone who was anyone appeared on Shindig ~ The Beach Boys, The Beau Brummels, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Sir Douglas Quintet, The Dave Clark Five, The Supremes, Roy Orbison; even The Beatles. However, the act that still resonates with me from Shindig all these years later is The Righteous Brothers.


I'm guessing The Righteous Brothers probably made more appearances on the show than anyone aside from Bobby Sherman (I guess you had to be there.) Watching Shindig, I was in heaven.

I still had my 45's, too; and my brother's. In retrospect, the singles I liked the best had a couple of requirements ~ an awesome beat was a given. Then either a great production (yea, even at age nine I recognized the great ones) or something a little off-kilter.

These are the ones I loved then:



I have no explanation as to why that song grabbed me, but it most certainly did. I really didn't know anything about Motown. I didn't know about The Temptations or Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. I did know The Supremes, but I had no inkling that this was a huge Detroit conglomerate. I just liked the song.

This one is (and always will be) a marvel. It's the intro. How was I to know that the creator of this song was a musical genius? I didn't know who Brian Wilson was. I didn't even know that most of the guys in the group were named Wilson. I did know that they all wore red and white striped shirts. I loved this song so much that I wrote my own version, called "English Boys" (it was the British Invasion era, after all.) Just like with the album "Help!", ripping off someone else's creation is the sincerest form of flattery:


This is a mostly forgotten song that is amazing. I love, love this song. And it meets my requirement of being a little off-kilter. The lead singer's voice is quirky, almost artificial; the beat (laid down by Honey Lantree) is magnificent, and the rest of the group was instructed to stomp on the floor to enhance the rhythm during the recording process. The Honeycombs only had one hit, but oh, what a hit it was:


The British Invasion was rife in the mid-sixties. The Animals, Freddy and The Dreamers, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Hollies, Manfred Mann. People think that The Stones were the natural rivals to The Beatles, but that's not how it went down in '64. Everybody was saying it was this group that offered The Beatles the most competition. Creatively, no; but one must remember the times and the songs The Beatles were releasing. The Dave Clark Five weren't that far off the mark. And I liked them. And Mike Smith (rest his soul) was a cutie.


Some artists are flashes in the pan; some stand the test of time. The Beatles (naturally) stood the test of time. The Beach Boys, too. The Honeycombs ~ not so much.

Then there are the masters. In a time capsule a hundred years from now, somebody smart will include this guy:


I don't take lightly the fact that I was present for the dawn of a new age of music. I'm lucky. Generally I'm not a lucky person, but on this one I hit the jackpot. I'll always have that. 

And I won't let it slip through my fingers.


Friday, August 10, 2018

The Delight Of A Fluffy Pop Song


Pure pop music is as old as music itself. When I was a kid, what I called rock music wasn't truly rock. It was pop. But I didn't know better. KRAD was our local station and it called itself "rock 'n roll", even though it played everything -- everything -- from Dean Martin to Bobbie Gentry to the Beach Boys to Roger Miller, to every possible incarnation in between. If I heard a song by a new group like the Supremes, I thought, hmm, that's different. I inherently knew that someone like Roy Orbison was rock (at least some of his songs), but I wasn't quite sure why. My brother bought me an album by the Yardbirds and I hated it. That was rock. I considered the Beatles, who magically appeared on the earth in 1964 to be a rock group, but in actuality and hindsight, they really were pop; just a bit more amped-up pop. Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, who were a tiny bit before my time, were more rock than the Beatles.

Pop isn't easy to define, but like obscenity (I guess), you know it when you hear it. A pure pop song should be bouncy. A repeating refrain is a plus. Even if the lyrics are sad, the music should be uplifting. Often it means nothing (which is how I generally prefer my songs, to be frank). Most lyrics that try to be deep are instead insipid. "Deep" songwriters miss the joy of music. I like my music fun; not studious, and especially not angry.

The first pop song I fell in love with, when I was eight years old, was "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore. I was in fact obsessed with it. I used to stand atop our picnic table in the backyard and frug and sing this song a cappella.


By the time I reached the mature age of ten, I liked this:

 
Time moved on (okay, by one year) and by then music had changed. Now it was visual as well as aural.  Granted, the guys were cute, but leave it to Neil Diamond to write an almost perfect pop song:


It was hard to find a good pop song in the seventies. It was hard to find anything good in the seventies. The seventies was a dreary decade. But every era has at least one thing to offer, and as for pop music, the nineteen seventies offered ABBA.


Conversely, the nineteen eighties were rife with pop. I could get into a whole sociological explanation of why people felt better in the eighties and more open to happiness, but it's really quite evident.

This song is glorious in its pop-ness.  


It's almost as if Lesley Gore had been reincarnated, but more blissful.

Sheena wasn't the only one.


Come on, admit it. You liked this song. You really, really boogied on down to this song. Rick Astley was an eighties god:


If you want to just feel good (and who doesn't?), peruse the nineteen eighties pop catalog. I could include another twenty tracks here, but I won't. Springsteen might bemoan how awful President Reagan was; yet he still recorded "Glory Days", so there you go. Sometimes as hard as one tries to be miserable, circumstances budge their way in.

Even as I began listening to country music again in the nineties, I was drawn (albeit reluctantly) to poppish confections. Hate it if you want, but just try not to dance to it:



I submit that pop music is the salve of mankind. 

It's time someone gave pop music its due.