“I Dig Rock and Roll Music” by Peter, Paul and Mary (1967, #9)

One person’s view:  “It’s sad actually because in the shallow well of songs actually written by Peter, Paul or Mary this is one of their more memorable melodies.  It just happens to be attached to a really pretentious set of lyrics.” – Remtiw @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.80 / 5.00

Peter, Paul and Mary built their brand around acoustic folk music and enjoyed only a brief time on top before the public moved on to other genres.  Many people can sympathize with this.  One day you have a vibrant career in coal mining, Visual Basic programming, or giving DEI seminars, and then the world changes and you are left fighting for relevance.  You can either reinvent yourself or else you can cling to the old ways for as long as possible while complaining bitterly about everyone and everything.  I guess another possibility would be to embrace your status as a nostalgia act, but that only works for musicians.  There isn’t a lot of nostalgia for Visual Basic.

The three folksters had too much integrity to abandon their roots, and they weren’t ready to go out on the oldies circuit opening up for Tennessee Ernie Ford.  That left bitterness and complaining as the most appealing option for them in 1967, and the result was “I Dig Rock and Roll Music”.  Many critics derided this record as an elitist jab at the rock bands that had usurped Peter, Paul and Mary’s popularity.  Being called elitist by a music critic is like being called ugly by Shrek, but the characterization has stuck with this song over the years.  It continues to be one of the more divisive hit singles of its time.

If “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” was intended as a vicious attack against rock ‘n’ roll, it didn’t succeed.  The song’s satires of the Beatles, the Mamas & the Papas, and Donovan come across as playful style parodies much like those later perfected by Weird Al.  The imitations are too well-studied to be taken as mean-spirited, and the performers that the trio chose to mock were popular and highly regarded.  I get the impression that PP&M really did dig rock ‘n’ roll music, but were too embarrassed to admit it without using light sarcasm as a cover.  If Peter, Paul and Mary had truly wanted to make a snobbish point about music becoming overly commercial or devoid of any serious meaning, I think they would have picked on easier targets like Tommy Roe or the Monkees.

While the song is more of a good-natured roast of rock ‘n’ roll than a pointed insult, it is sincere in its criticism of the media environment that discouraged music with overtly political messages.  However, Peter, Paul and Mary were about to demonstrate the weakness in their argument by recording a song called “Eugene McCarthy for President (If You Love Your Country)”.  Radio stations had good reasons not to touch unsubtle material like this, otherwise they would be stuck giving equal time to eight other candidates.  Listeners would tune out after hearing “The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Deems Hubert Humphrey Tolerable” back-to-back with “Bobby Kennedy Has 11 Kids Who Will All Grow Up to Be Non-Insane People Who Treat Animal Carcasses with Respect”.  Meanwhile, DJs would be double-checking themselves constantly to ensure that they didn’t play a Motown record adjacent to “George Wallace Is a Groovy Guy”.

“I Dig Rock and Roll Music” wasn’t particularly effective as a protest, because any of the outcomes that might have been acceptable to PP&M were not going to work for anyone else.  Nobody wanted preachy music that told them who to vote for.  No radio stations were going to drop the Beatles in favor of Pete Seeger.  The Mamas & the Papas weren’t going to take a break from their drug binges to offer thoughtful observations on Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  Nonetheless, Peter, Paul and Mary’s upbeat and entertaining song can be appreciated despite the unreasonable expectations they had for society.  The resentment that went into it only makes it more intriguing.

My rating:  7 / 10

“Somewhere, My Love” by Ray Conniff and the Singers (1966, #9)

One person’s view:  “How did this sh*t ever get so popular?  You see these albums everywhere but no one wants them.” – ottoshutoff @ Tapeheads.Net, inquiring as to the appeal of Ray Conniff

The public’s view:  2.57 / 5.00

I could write a long essay about “Somewhere, My Love”, but reading it would be almost as boring as listening to the song.  Instead, I’m going to use most of this entry to tell you about a superior Ray Conniff record that I encountered in my childhood.

The story begins on a Christmas morning in that decade we like to call the 1970s.  Santa Claus had been duly apprised of my need for a Kenner Close ‘n’ Play, a children’s phonograph that was frequently advertised during my Saturday morning cartoons.  Judging by the TV commercials, a Close ‘n’ Play was the main ingredient of a happy life.  Simply close the lid to play music and open it to stop.  Hours of fun!

But there was no Close ‘n’ Play under the tree on that day.  Instead, there was a note from Santa.  This was highly unusual; lots of kids wrote letters to the old guy but this was the only time I heard of him writing back.  The note informed me that Santa was unwilling to tarnish the North Pole’s strong brand by delivering low quality junk such as Close ‘n’ Plays.  He had brought me a different record player which he believed was better.  It was trickier to use than Kenner’s model, but Santa said that I was a big boy now and could handle it.

This was a clear breach of my contract with Santa.  I had foregone many opportunities for mischief over the preceding months with the expectation that I would get a Close ‘n’ Play.  But before I could grab the Yellow Pages and look for a lawyer, my parents told me that Mr. Claus was right.  Kenner’s product might be a hot item at the moment, but this fad was doomed to oblivion in another 5 or 10 years.  I wouldn’t impress any ladies in 1995 by inviting them to my apartment to hear the latest Neil Sedaka single on a Close ‘n’ Play.  Modern, urbane men were expected to know how to operate a tone arm, so I might as well learn while young.

Santa gave me a couple of kids’ records along with the record player, and my parents soon augmented those with about three dozen 45s that they or other relatives had acquired.  Some of these were older hit songs that, even at my tender age, I rightly recognized as quality material.  B.J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling” was one of the best, as was the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”.  I also enjoyed Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia”, though it was many years before I figured out why Paul Simon was so keen on washing his face.  A few of the records had a more mysterious origin, as they didn’t seem like anything that would be voluntarily purchased.  They had likely been distributed free in cereal boxes or given to my grandfather as promotional items at the store that he managed.  The most curious of these singles was Ray Conniff’s “Begin the Beguine”.

This record was unlike the others.  It had only a small spindle hole in the middle and was designed to be played at 33 1/3 RPM, despite being the same 7” diameter as the 45 RPM singles with the gaping centers.  It was the musical arrangement, however, that made the record truly special.

The frenetic rumbling rhythm of Conniff’s “Begin the Beguine” sounds as though a cavalry brigade is stampeding past the listener on its way to a battle.  After a few seconds of this, singers join in with berserk war cries of “Fi-yah!  Fi-yah fi-yah!”  Some of the members of the chorus prefer diplomacy to fighting, however.  One of them calmly responds to the opposing horsemen with:  “Bah dah bah doo dah.  Bah dah doo dah.”  It’s tough to argue with a reasonable proposal such as that.  After a couple minutes of these negotiations, it seems as though war has been averted – but the lull is misleading.  The horns grow louder and more urgent as the détente ends and the battle rages in a brief but dramatic finale.  One of the horses releases a tremendous burst of flatulence, and it is over.

I didn’t fully appreciate how transformational Conniff’s arrangement was until I heard different versions of “Begin the Beguine” and learned the song’s history and original lyrics.  It began life as a wistful Cole Porter composition about the memory of a romantic dance.  Every other performer has treated it this way, as in the vocal renditions by Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, and Julio Iglesias and the well-known instrumental by Artie Shaw.  Porter’s melody is pretty, to be sure, but it is ultimately just a mundane love ballad to be enjoyed a few times and then forgotten.  Conniff creatively gave “Begin the Beguine” new life as the soundtrack for the human imagination, and it was on the agenda almost every time that my brother and I fired up the record player.  Sometimes we played it at 45 RPM and pretended that the Ray Conniff Singers were high on amphetamines.  I no longer envied the brats in the Close ‘n’ Play commercials, who spent much of their time playing a juvenile game of musical chairs while alternately lifting and closing the lid of their fad toy.  I was now a serious audiophile.

Conniff knew that his reworking of “Begin the Beguine” was amazing.  He produced several versions of it over the years, including one that used Cole Porter’s lyrics in place of some of the “bah dah bah doo dah” dialogue.  “Somewhere, My Love” isn’t in the same league.  Conniff and his chorus recorded this latter song for the film Doctor Zhivago, and it is perfectly fine within that context.  If your spouse has dragged you to a theater to watch a three-hour-long romance set during the Bolshevik Revolution, “Somewhere, My Love” is not going to make your bad day any worse.  It is, however, a run-of-the-mill easy listening song.  I guess the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer people told Conniff that they wanted some of his music for their movie, but they didn’t want any of his ingenuity.

When it came to the singles charts, Conniff was a victim of what I call Cheap Trick Syndrome.  Cheap Trick missed the top 40 with their beloved signature tune “Surrender”, only to later reach #1 with the forgettable ballad “The Flame”.  Similarly, “Begin the Beguine” never found its way onto the Hot 100 despite its importance to Conniff’s legacy.  It’s a travesty that the formulaic “Somewhere, My Love” was his only top 40 hit.

My rating:  4 / 10

“Don’t Just Stand There” by Patty Duke (1965, #8)

One person’s view:  “Let’s remember Patty for her incredible acting career and her work in helping remove the stigma from mental health issues.  And not for this.” – GuncleMark @ YouTube

The public’s view:  2.86 / 5.00

Why is there so much pressure on actors to branch out into singing when they are doing just fine as it is?  This rarely happens to people in other jobs.  No one ever says, “Ted, you’re the best forklift operator in the warehouse.  Hardly any accidents last year.  How’d you like it if we wrote you a pop tune and put you on American Bandstand?”  Judging by the short duration of Patty Duke’s music career and the minimal enthusiasm she had for it, she might have preferred to drive a forklift.

When I was a young child, Patty Duke was one of those vaguely important individuals in the same category as Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Mao Zedong.  These were celebrities who never did anything Muppet-adjacent, so it was a mystery why they were famous enough for me to keep hearing their names.  Maybe Patty Duke was in a movie once, or maybe she had caused a deadly famine while forcibly industrializing an agrarian society.  There was no way to know.  She continued to make no impression on me as I grew older, and almost every bit of knowledge I have about her was acquired just now while researching this post.

Duke’s best known song, “Don’t Just Stand There”, inhabits a special place of mediocrity in what was otherwise a pretty good year for music.  There’s a consensus that it’s among the worst major hits of 1965, but no one says it is the very worst.  You could play it 20 times in a row on the jukebox at a diner, and it might make all the food taste bland but it wouldn’t provoke anyone to violence.  It isn’t much fun to write about records like this, but they are a big part of the Bad Top Ten Hits ecosystem so I don’t have much of a choice.

Most of the reviews of this song compare Patty Duke to Lesley Gore, who I am only slightly more familiar with.  Patty’s handlers tried to position her as the new Lesley, which set up one of the more uninteresting rivalries in pop music history.  People of my age and younger know what a real music rivalry is:  Kendrick vs. Drake, Brandy vs. Monica, Neil vs. Barbra, Barbra vs. Megadeth.  But Gore’s career had already peaked by the time Duke began dabbling in singing, and there’s little indication that either of them paid much attention to the other.  There aren’t any stories about Lesley Gore’s bodyguards shooting a member of Patty Duke’s posse in a strip club parking lot, and if there was any bad blood at all between the two young women it didn’t linger.  Gore didn’t even bother to disrupt Duke’s acceptance speech when she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series at the 1977 Primetime Emmy Awards.

Duke’s “Don’t Just Stand There” and her follow-up, “Say Something Funny”, share a common lyrical theme with Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”.  In each of these three records, the singer is trying to salvage a dying romance by lecturing her boyfriend on what he needs to do to fix it.  Although I enjoy a lot of “angry woman” music, I prefer not to hear about the phase of a relationship that is dominated by nagging.  Music is supposed to be an escape from unpleasant everyday realities, not a reinforcement.  I would rather have Patty or Lesley skip ahead to the inevitable break-up record, or to the five-years-post-break-up song about what a jerk the ex is and how he and his sleazy new wife and their arrogant infant child all deserve to get tetanus.

While “Don’t Just Stand There” is one of the better compositions of the boyfriend-being-scolded genre, that is somewhat faint praise.  Meanwhile, Duke’s vocals do very little to make themselves appreciated – much like the guy she is whining at.  Today she is probably better known for the three guest appearances she made on Touched by an Angel than she is for her two top 40 hits.

My rating:  4 / 10

“What’s New Pussycat?” by Tom Jones (1965, #3)

One diner patron’s view:  “Goddammit!” – the reaction to hearing “What’s New Pussycat?” five times in a row, according to John Mulaney

The public’s view:  2.76 / 5.00

The story behind our next top ten hit reminds us that the descent into cultural vapidity started long before everyone was walking around with miniature distraction devices in their pockets.  Its title phrase “What’s new pussycat?” originated when Hollywood producer Charles K. Feldman overheard Warren Beatty greeting a girlfriend in this manner on the phone.  This barely even qualifies as an anecdote, as it was unsurprising that Beatty would have a line like that in his repertoire.  It isn’t like he was the pope.  However, Feldman thought this was a comedic goldmine and that other people would also be easily amused.  He gave Beatty’s expression a life of its own, stretching it farther than anyone could have imagined or wanted.

First the phrase became the driving motivation of Feldman’s 1965 film, What’s New Pussycat?, about a man who calls every woman he meets “pussycat”.  (Try that today and see what happens.)  The movie spawned the theme song that we are here to discuss, and What’s New Pussycat? would later also become the title of a Tom Jones musical play.  In 2009, comedian John Mulaney did a popular stand-up bit about repeatedly playing “What’s New Pussycat?” on the jukebox at the Salt & Pepper Diner.  It took several decades, with lots of casualties along the way, but finally – for the first time ever – Mulaney found a way to make this inside joke humorous to someone besides Charles K. Feldman.

To me, “What’s New Pussycat?” belongs in the same category as Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs”.  It has a terrible concept at its root, but then everything else is done with such perfection that you have to admire the resulting product even if you don’t enjoy hearing it.  Consider the constraints that Burt Bacharach and Hal David were working under when they wrote this.  This was to be the theme music for Feldman’s comedy movie that, from what I can gather, featured talented big-name actors but a so-so screenplay.  The song needed to have the same questionable title as the film, and it ideally needed to repeat that title numerous times.  Bacharach & David weren’t at liberty to call their tune “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music”, nor could they hand Feldman a solemn protest song about Vietnam.  The lyrics, at least, were going to be pretty bad no matter what they came up with.

The smartest thing that anyone did for “What’s New Pussycat?” was to recruit Tom Jones, though Bacharach first had to convince him that it wasn’t a joke.  Jones was probably the only man of his generation who could deliver multiple silly compliments about a woman’s “pussycat nose” in a way that was both classy and sexy.  Even Warren Beatty would be on thin ice if he expressed such a weirdly intense interest in a lady’s nostrils.  This song, more than any other, helped build Jones’s mystique.  He became known as a performer who could give any material a level of seriousness and gravitas, while at the same time implicitly acknowledging how ridiculous some of it was.

The Tom Jones mystique is even part of my family’s lore.  My grandmother and grandfather held sharply diverging views of the singer, and any mention of him was taboo when we visited their house.  Likewise, when any of us grandkids asked why their stereo didn’t work, all of the adults in the room would grow quiet and someone would quickly change the subject.  The details are murky, but I later learned that the broken stereo was connected in some way to the Tom Jones controversy.  I suspect that the Salt & Pepper Diner’s jukebox would also have suffered permanent damage if Grandpa had been there on the same day as John Mulaney.

In some respects, “What’s New Pussycat?” was quite a feat.  Bacharach’s music perfectly captures the frivolity of a comedy movie, and Jones’s singing is hard to top.  I’d rate it a 9 out of 10 on that basis.  On the other hand, it uses the word “pussycat” a dozen times before it is even halfway through.  That merits a 1 out of 10.  Let’s take the average.

My rating:  5 / 10