While today’s kids twerk to songs featuring men calling women bitches and ho’s and stuffy to nasty to post here, we baby boomers smugly tune in the oldies stations to listen to the wholesome, romantic songs of our youth.
Ah, remember Paul Anka singing Diana?
I’m so young and you’re so old
This, my darling, I’ve been told
Nothing beats telling those three words every woman wants to hear “you’re so old.” Those words of age top “calm down” and “make me a sandwich” on what you should say to a woman.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the guy. Put Your Head On My Shoulder was great. Later he wrote Johnny Carson’s theme song and My Way for Frank Sinatra. I even like Having My Baby.
But, that first line of Diana still cracks me up. The old lady Anka mentioned was 18 at the time he wrote the song. He was 15.
Teen Angel used to make me cry whenever I heard it because I was like 4 when it came out. The Teen Angel in the song was not Frankie Avalon in the movie Grease.
The song was about two teens whose car stalled on the railroad tracks. He pulled her out of the car and they were safe, but she went running back.
What was it you were looking for
That took your life that night?
They said they found my high school ring
Clutched in your fingers tight
If true, the train running through that jalopy filtered the gene pool because face it, running back to a car to grab a $9.99 ring is a sign of not much intelligence. Hey, I’m not 4 anymore.
Then there was Silhouettes co-written by Bob Crewe who later became the producer for the Four Seasons and co-wrote many of the group’s songs with Bob Gaudio. Silhouettes was about a stalker. The song begins:
Took a walk and passed your house
Late last night
All the shades were pulled and drawn
Way down tight
From within, a dim light cast
Two silhouettes on the shade
It gets worse. Not only was he a stalker but a violent one because he thought the woman he was stalking was kissing another guy.
Lost control and rang your bell
I was sore
Let me in or else I’ll beat
Down your door
But it turns out the madman was at the wrong house and on the wrong block. So in addition to stalking and and threatening violence, he was stupid. He should have married that Teen Angel girl.
A couple of decades later, Crewe co-wrote My Eyes Adored You for the Four Seasons. It was supposed to be a nostalgic song about a “reminisce ‘bout the girl I miss and the love I left behind.”
Aww.
It’s terrific song except for the line “Though I never laid a hand on you.” It always bothered me. She was in fifth grade. No one lays a hand on a fifth grade girl, not even a sixth grade boy. Why bring it up?
Circling back to Teen Angel, the girl, most of the girls in the 1950s were far from stupid. Connie Francis was a regular Perry Mason in the song Lipstick On Your Collar:
You said it belonged to me, made me stop and think
And then I noticed yours was red, mine was baby pink
Who walked in but Mary Jane? Lipstick all a mess
Were you smooching my best friend? Guess the answer’s yes
That deductive reasoning would impress anyone, even Broderick Crawford.
Girls today don’t wear baby pink lipstick. They wear baby pink hair.
Then there is Lesley Gore who was a powerhouse strong, independent girl with knock them down dead lyrics. You Don’t Own Me was a statement of not being the property of a boyfriend.
Contrast that to her first hit, It’s My Party.
Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone
Judy left the same time
Why was he holding her hand
When he’s supposed to be mine?
But she got her revenge in It’s Judy’s Turn To Cry.
She was a bit manipulative.
Oh, one night I saw them kissing at a party (a party)
So I kissed some other guy
Johnny jumped up and hit him
‘Cause he still loved me, that’s why.
Poor Johnny. He should have asked Shelley Fabares out.
Boys could be a little possessive too. Consider this line from an Elvis song, Baby Let’s Play House:
Try to understand
I’d rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man
Now baby come back, baby, come
That house he wanted to play in must have been a house of horrors. But the song inspired John Lennon to begin Run for Your Life with: “Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”
Run for your life. Good advice. No wonder Paul got all the chicks.
60 years later, the music of the 1950s and early 1960s turned out to be harmless.
I don’t believe twerking your wares like a baboon in heat or dismissing women as ho’s and bitches are harmless.
This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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Insightful and enjoyable.
I have heard that when Paul Anka was naturalized as a US citizen in Las Vegas some years ago, he picked the wrong parking space near the US courthouse there, and received a tcket for hundreds of dollars (US, not Canadian).
It has also been said that Bob Crewe was a largely closeted homosexual (he’s portrayed as somewhat flamboyant in “Jersey Boys”), which might have something to do with why he never laid a hand on the female object of adoration. When he managed Diane Renay, as a teenaged girl from Philadelphia, apparently her parents did not worry about her safety in his hands.