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 cherubs sighed, chins propped on hands as they
listened, 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.
========
(**) Note: For “Please Help Me I’m Falling”, see:
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/duet-at-distance.html
