One critic’s view: “[H]is light, ingratiating manner, applied in the same way to every song, was pleasant without ever becoming really involving.” – William Ruhlmann, in his AllMusic review of the Please Love Me Forever LP
The public’s view: 2.21 / 5.00
Bobby Vinton is the man who became massively successful by being oblivious to the changes in the world around him. I wonder what his life is like today at age 90? I bet he still has a Diners Club credit card. He probably drives a Country Squire station wagon. His friends told him there were some good movies being streamed, so he hooked his Betamax machine up to a creek. And now he’s being made fun of on a blog, like it’s 2004 or something.
In the era of guitar rock, Motown, protest songs, and psychedelia, Bobby released an album with covers of bygone ballads like “It’s All in the Game”, “Young Love”, and “Who’s Sorry Now”. This was out of touch even by Vintonian standards. Nonetheless, the title track “Please Love Me Forever” somehow earned a prime spot at the 1967 musical dining table and pushed the Polish Prince back into the top 10 after a three-year absence.
Vinton was the third act to bring “Please Love Me Forever” to the Hot 100, following versions by Tommy Edwards in 1958 and Cathy Jean & the Roommates in 1961. Edwards’s rendition is the best of the three, because it focuses our ears on the singer’s rich voice and not on the blathering sentiments that he is expressing. These lyrics have less intellectual heft than a Valentine’s Day poem written by a 6th-grader, and it is best not to ponder them too deeply. One of Bobby Vinton’s trademarks, however, is his clear diction that places the words of every chorus and every verse out in the open to be scrutinized. In Bobby’s iteration of “Please Love Me Forever”, each line is conveyed with accuracy and sincerity, much in the way that his fellow Pittsburgh native Mister Rogers would speak. This forces us to pay attention to the schmaltzy content. When he gets to the bridge, I think: “He’s alluding to the ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ prayer. He isn’t going to recite the whole thing, is he? Aw crap, he is.”
I also object to this line: “You’re in my dreams nightly.” This sounds romantic until you realize just how freaky and weird dreams are. If you’re in a relationship with someone, and it’s progressed to the point where you’re asking them to love you forever, they will not be in your dreams nightly. They will show up only rarely, and even then they will be miscast as a supporting character. Your girlfriend might play the role of Annoying Classmate in your dream about repeating the 10th grade at age 36, or appear as Horrified Spectator #3 in your recurring nightmare about using a toilet that is inexplicably installed in a restaurant’s dining area. When you finally get to enjoy an erotic dream, the star of it will be the scary bald woman with the face tattoos who you see gesticulating and cursing at random people at the bus stop by your office. Too bad that the phrase “scary bald woman with the face tattoos” never fit into the meter and rhyme scheme of any of Vinton’s songs.
One common criticism of Bobby Vinton is that he didn’t grow as an artist despite having a long career. His fans would say that was a good thing. They didn’t want any surprises, and – aside from the scandalous use of foreign language lyrics in his 1974 hit “My Melody of Love” – he didn’t deliver any. Most of Vinton’s songs were sappy love ballads, and he performed them all in that same Fred Rogers tone. He embraced his identity as the Polish Prince without ever changing the “Prince” part of his nickname to an unpronounceable symbol. He deserves credit for not chasing every trend that came along, or really any trend that came along, but I wish he hadn’t picked the crooner days of the 1950s to get stuck in.
My rating: 3 / 10
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