Fleetwood Nation

 

One of the finest passages in musical history, includes lyrics as follows:

 

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

            Dom dom, dom do dom, ooby do,

                        (da capo  al fine del mondo)

 

The lead singer -- a guy named Gary, it turns out -- begins in a style that, in refined circles, is denominated "a capella" (from the Latin; literally, "in chapel style"), but which, in the doo-wop era, was known simply as "singing".  How it all came about:  This guy Gary (we learn from Wikipedia, which knows all) was waiting with this other bobby-soxer at a bus-stop, see, and they got to singing, and it was pretty neat, and so the girl, she had this friend, and so the three of them sang at school, and all the kids liked it, so they "formed a group" -- a process as simple then  as forming a collection out of a, b, and c, in set theory.  The group was called "Two Girls and a Guy", which really said it all.  Originally they were purely a-capella; later they added a rhythm section, consisting entirely of Gary's car-keys.

 

Then later, when they started to get famous, some manager changed their name to "The Fleetwoods", which is still a pretty neat name.  (Notice I do not say, "a cool name"; that would be beatnik.)  But they never forgot their roots -- in fact, the "Fleetwoods" were not so dubbed after the Cadillac of that description, but after their own telephone exchange (as in "Fleet-wood Four Five Seven Oh Nine").

 

The masterpiece referenced above was -- well, obviously, you had to be there, there and then.  The then and the there was American suburbia in 1959.   Back then I was even younger and even more completely clueless than in 1961, anno "Please Help Me I'm Falling" (**).  The Fleetwoods TOOK THE AIRWAVES BY STORM (to use a phrase  echoic of the late conflict, by then safely forgotten)  with a hit song called "Come Softly to Me".  Originally, at the sock hop in their high school gym, the song had been called, with better brevity, "Come Softly", but (again, Wikipedia) that same publicity-savvy manager made them change it, on the grounds that the original was... too... something called....  "risqué". (??!! Wh-wh-*what* ???????)  Anyway, it's a neat song, and if you listen to it, and tell your friends, they'll think it's really neat too.

 

*

 

You might gather from the above  that I am slighting this song;  if so, you gather amiss.  It was actually a major stepping-stone in my (thitherto minimal) musical education.

 

The poverty of our musical upbringing, on our little cul-de-sac  there in the suburbs, was astonishing.  If it were somehow translated into imagery, you would see a huddle of stricken children, wearing nothing but Keds, ribs showing, bellies distended, with the International Red Cross shaking their heads in the background, giving up the case as hopeless.  Later on, some kids had to take piano lessons, but I never did, and any music I was exposed to  came out of a little plastic slab, of the size, and essentially the function, of a cigarette pack. 

 

The song actually confused me, and I didn't like it at first.  But since it was NUMBER ONE, everyone wound up hearing it several dozen times a day.   It was almost my first introduction to multi-part singing -- songs like "The Little White Duck", till then the principle fare, tended to monody -- and my very first introduction to stretto -- the voices easing in and easing out, delicately overlapping like waves breaking softly upon waves.  And like, what was it up to?  It wasn't funny, like "Purple People Eater" or "The Chipmunk Song"; it didn't tell a story, like "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" or "Kisses Sweeter than Wine"; it didn't bounce up and down, like "At the Hop"; and it didn't have a simple "Hickory Dickory Dock" sort of tune, like "Rock Around the Clock".  And it certainly wasn't guy fare, like "Hound Dog". It was, you might say, kind of -- girly.

 

*

 

So once again I made the pilgrimage to Youtube.  And once again, learned something new and richly evocative, even though, again, I had remembered that song perfectly, note for note, for all those years.

 

Firstly, it turns out that Top 40 on a dirtcheap AM transistor radio (or, in the previous couple of years, off a little plastic crystal set that my dad put together from a kit, and that only got one channel) does not provide the full depth of musicality that one may derive  from either live performance  or some assemblage of digitized woofers and tweeters.  This little thin sound trickled out; and if the song had a good beat, you could hear the beat part, and sometimes make out some of the words.  The highest praise for a song was, "It has a good beat and you can dance to it"; only I couldn't dance to it, being shy and only nine years old.  As for "Come Softly", it wasn't clear how even teenagers could dance to it.  It wasn't jitterbug, but neither was it the sort of simple Slow Dance such as -- much, much later, when I was all of twelve -- we would dance to at Canteen, at the junior high, in gingerly contact with an individual of the opposite and complementary (and wholly unimaginable) gender,  simply rocking slowly from foot to foot until the music was over.  It was -- not syncopated exactly, more like... you couldn't put your finger on it.  It seems to have been scored for naiads.

 

Hearing it now, though only on the speakers of my PC, I realize that the kid Gary had a voice for which the gods sighed,  chins propped on hands as they listened, with eyes shut, over the clouds.  The song opens a capella, and you can hear why:  What accompaniment could possibly improve upon his voice?

 

Secondly,  learning the concrete matter-of-fact details  brings you up short.  Simply to learn that the trio is from an actual place (in the event, the state of Washington) is like a wake-up splash of water.  I don't know where I imagined singers came from, back then -- "from Hollywood" or "from Broadway", maybe.  But these three are from Olympia, not Olympus.  And they have just regular names, like other kids -- "Gary", not something made up, like "Elvis" or "Dion".  In fact their lead singer, whom I would have pictured, had I tried (though I did not, not being a girl), as a cross between Lord Byron and Apollo, turns out to look like somebody's kid brother (and his sidekicks might almost be his mother).  He has what I now recognize as a “bedroom voice”; but his babyface says rather, Tuck me in.  He looks like he just stepped out of a soda shop.

 

*

 

It suddenly occurs to me that soda shops no longer exist.  The younger among you can probably scarcely conceive what such a thing would even be -- the product-line seems strangely impoverished; as who should say, a "water shop", or a "bicarbonate of soda store". Yet for a teen in the years before the Great War, and then after the Great War, and then during the Big One that they had to give a number to, and then right on in through the 'forties and 'fifties, these constituted the principle cultural and anthropological institutions of the land.

 

No, I'm not being nostalgic. It was a time before either Google or Wikipedia, so that life was worth living only in a narrowly restricted and relative sense.  Still, its pop songs are even better than I'd remembered.

 

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(**) Note: For “Please Help Me I’m Falling”, see:

 

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html