Forgotten Pop Music

Since I’m now advanced enough in years to have sufficient rearward room to actually reflect on the things of my youth, it struck me that a number of popular songs, ubiquitous at that time, are almost as if they never were.

I’m sure there may be small devoted bands of followers who still cherish these now obscure tunes, but I haven’t heard some of them for several decades.

The first one I think of is Love Is Blue by the Paul Mauriat Orchestra.  You can listen to it here, although there are slight differences from the arrangement I can remember hearing night after night on the radio in 1968.  (This video is actually a medley that just begins with Love is Blue.)  Three teenage boys and their mother, living in a log cabin in northern British Columbia, at leisure after a day of chainsawing firewood or canning moose meat, spending long winter nights by kerosene lamp or hissing white gas lantern: we listened to the radio bringing in KGO from San Francisco or KJR from Seattle or KNEW from Spokane.  Love is Blue seemed to be everywhere on the air.

Something about the melody always grabbed your attention, even though it became a tune the radio programmers played to death, like one of those Sheryl Crow songs these days.

Mauriat was a French orchestra leader and composer of light music.  Love is Blue is the only one of his tunes I ever heard on North American radio.  Sadly he passed away last November.

Another nearly forgotten song, emblematic of that time for me, is Up-Up and Away by The Fifth Dimension in 1967 (which won five Grammy awards, for what that’s worth).  You can hear a sample of that and also their companion piece Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In from 1969 at this site.  Up-Up and Away was another composition by Jimmy Webb who also wrote MacArthur Park and penned a string of hits for Glenn Campbell, among others.

The Fifth Dimension were originally known as The Versatiles before they settled on the catchier name just before their first real hit, a cover of the Mamas and Papas Go Where You Wanna Go, in 1966.  Their repertoire could be described as R&B, soul and jazz.  They continued to perform with various personnel up to the present day.

A popular movie in 1967,  To Sir With Love was a British film starring Sidney Poitier and the singer Lulu in her first movie role.  This was about a black teacher (Poitier) struggling to communicate with a class of white, cynical teenagers.  The sexual and romantic tension of the actually quite innocent relationships between some female students and the teacher was not the awkward thing verging on criminal that it might be judged today.

I have to admit as a teenager being moved by the story and especially the song of the same name sung by Lulu.  (Get a glimpse of the movie and hear the song here.  The kids look incredibly clean cut.)

Lulu was the stage name of a girl named Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie who toured with the Monkees and married a Bee Gee… she’s had a successful career in British music and television.

I wanted to come back to Glen Campbell, who could never quite decide whether to become a pop or country star, but was wildly popular in the late 1960s, early 1970s with his music and television shows.

His performance of Wichita Lineman, a Jimmy Webb song from 1968, still stirs me.  It’s been called the “first existential country song,” which may explain its appeal for a bookish, melancholic teenager:

I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road
Searchin’ in the sun for another overload
I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

I know I need a small vacation but it don’t look like rain
And if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain
And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

The slightly wierdo guitar instrumental group Friends of Dean Martinez do an evocative version of this.  But I don’t hear the original song much anymore… (here’s a small sample).

Did you know Glen Campbell was a full member of the Beach Boys in 1964 and 1965?

Well, I could go on with this nostalgic journey, tuning in on Tiny Tim, perhaps, with his Tiptoe Through The Tulips, that unlikely falsetto with ukelele hit from 1968, or Helen Reddy’s 1972 hit I Am Woman, with the immortal line, “I am woman, hear me roar,” or even They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!, a catchy ditty on mental illness by Napoleon IV, from 1966.

But I won’t.

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