70) The Shirelles – “Soldier Boy”

One of the problems I have writing this blog is that of objectivity.  Of course, the question of whether or not a record is any good is oftentimes subjective; I know from reading the statistics on my blog that many people stumble upon this blog via Googling songs that they clearly like a lot more than I do.  Even what I’d write off as a “bad song” has its fans, many of whom also have personal attachments to the song that go beyond the question of taste.  Nevertheless, I listen to each song at least a dozen times before writing about it (unless it’s so truly awful that it’s painful to listen to), and try to analyze it as fairly as possible.  There have been several cases where I’ve changed my mind about a record between hearing it for the first time and polishing off the final draft.  No huge changes, at least yet, but a few points in either direction on the ratings scale, in an attempt to be as fair as possible to the musicians, songwriters, producers and fans. All of which makes me conscious of the musical prejudices I know I carry into this.  Even a brief glance over the ratings I’ve given so far in this blog make it obvious that I, for example, prefer rockabilly and R&B to teen idols and easy listening.

If there’s one genre that I feel particularly self-conscious writing about, though, its girl groups.  I’ve listened to hundreds of tracks in this genre (which isn’t strictly limited to actual girl groups, but also includes solo girl singers and groups with male members that follow the girl group template), and the number of records I didn’t derive at least some enjoyment from I can count on one, maybe two, hands.  So when a girl group single tops the Hot 100, I’ll give it a high rating, to the surprise of no one.  And when a pop song tops the chart that isn’t girl group, well, then I’ll compare it unfavorably with the girl group sound (as I did with “Johnny Angel“).  I confess it’s a thoroughly myopic look at a genre, as annoying as those reviewers on IMDb who give top marks to all sci fi movies and zeroes to romantic comedies.  But I genuinely think that this music was among the greatest pop music ever recorded, and given the musical heavyweights who have adopted elements of this sound (The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and The Ramones, for starters), I feel somewhat validated.

But when there is that rare girl group single that I don’t favor, well, there’s a good chance that it is genuinely, unequivocally bad.  And that goes double when it’s by a group that I otherwise adore.  In this case, it’s The Shirelles, who previously struck gold with the inarguable classic and first ever girl group number-one, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”  Give The Shirelles a top-notch Goffin and King composition, and they virtually create a market for girl group recordings.  Give them a mediocre song sung cloyingly and, well, they still have a #1 hit (albeit their last big hit, bar “Foolish Little Girl” a year later).  Their second and final number one, “Soldier Boy,” doesn’t just pale in comparison to that epoch-making single; it also pales next to their previous Top 10 hit, the slinky yet soulful “Baby It’s You,” and next to a good deal of the non-girl group pop of the era.  Even the always-dependable Shirley Owens sounds bored on the record, as if she recognizes that her talents are being wasted, her voice lacking its usual warmth and engagement.  The lyrics express an admirable sentiment (girl tells boy that she’ll be faithful while he’s in the army), but are dull, while the melody is too jaunty and trite to fit the subject matter.  The arrangement as a whole is pedestrian and doesn’t play to The Shirelles’ strengths.  Which is perhaps the record’s biggest crime: making The Shirelles sound like a generic girl group thrown together to cash in on a trend, rather than originators and leading lights of the genre. 4

Hit #1 on May 5, 1962; total of 3 weeks at #1
70 of 970 #1′s reviewed; 7.22% through the Hot 100

69) Elvis Presley – “Good Luck Charm”

Before the U.S. Army shipped Elvis overseas in 1958, he recorded a bundle of tracks to be parceled out as singles in his absence.  The intent was to keep him in the pop music scene so that he would still have a career when discharged – even the King of Rock and Roll couldn’t survive a two-year disappearance from the popular consciousness.  (That “A Big Hunk o’ Love” managed to hit #1 as late as August 1959 proves the savviness of that business decision.)  “Good Luck Charm” could be easily mistaken as a relic of these sessions, especially given the very un-rock and roll sound of his post-”Stuck On You” number ones.  Yet the fact that “Good Luck Charm” was recorded in 1961, not 1958, puts Presley in the same bind as Connie Francis – this is the sound of an artist whose enormous popularity shielded them from noticing that the pop audience was moving on to something else.

The difference between Presley and Francis, though, is that Elvis had changed his sound.  His three previous number ones sported the influence of the European ballads and arias that he had discovered while posted in Germany, each one more baroque and melodramatic than the last.  But once you’ve released a hit single featuring a rambling, faux-Shakespearean spoken-word monologue, there isn’t much higher on the bombastometer you can go.  So like so many bands who follow a bloated sophomore album with a stripped-down, back-to-basics “return to form,” Elvis sought refuge grounded in the sound that had initially made him famous.  But, as many of those bands have found, it’s difficult to recapture that raw spark once you’ve lost it.  Which isn’t to say that “Good Luck Charm” is bad – it’s perfectly capable – but compare it with “A Big Hunk o’ Love” and the latter has a vitality, a freshness, that the former lacks. This is Elvis treading water as much as it is a return to his roots.

Like Francis’s “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You,” “Good Luck Charm” signals the end of Elvis’s reign atop the pop charts – with one exception, which scraped in during the twilight hours of the ’60s. He would continue to record some great singles, many of which charted high – “Return to Sender,” “Blue Christmas” and “Viva Las Vegas” among them – but these would be overshadowed by his decreasingly meritorious movie career and the mediocre-to-terrible singles that soundtracked it, many of which actually were leftovers from his pre-Army sessions. But unlike Francis, the King of Rock and Roll would successfully rejigger his sound – and, with it, reclaim his throne at the top of the Hot 100. 6

Hit #1 on April 21, 1962; total of 2 weeks at #1
69 of 970 #1′s reviewed; 7.11% through the Hot 100

Ray Charles’s versions of standards and country hits are records

68) Shelley Fabares – “Johnny Angel”

Generations, in the over-arching cultural sense, are roughly delineated in 20-year segments.  But in pop music, the passage of time is accelerated.  Never was this truer than in the 1960s, when “revolutions per minute” could refer not only to a lone record on a turntable, but to pop radio as a whole.  Connie Francis may have been only 23 years old when her final #1 hit topped the charts, but she felt like a relic of an older time.  Indeed, while her fanbase in the late ‘50s stretched across the generations, Francis would primarily pursue the adult pop market for the rest of her career.  The common culture shared by adults and adolescents had begun to splinter around the birth of rock and roll, and was well on its way to becoming a full-on generation gap.  Francis, born in 1938, predated the Baby Boom; her successor to the top of the Hot 100, born in 1944, was a product of it.  This new generation wanted music that spoke (or, rather, sang) explicitly to the experience of being young – and the nascent girl group explosion, made by teenagers for teenagers, had exactly the right sound.

Thus when the producers of The Donna Reed Show decided to have their teenage star Shelley Fabares record a tie-in single, they took a bog standard, fill-in-the-blanks teen pop song and dressed it up with the backing vocals of The Blossoms.  While The Blossoms weren’t a household name, the tight harmonies of Darlene Love and her fellow group members added a jolt of relevancy to the pop-by-numbers “Johnny Angel.”  Nevertheless, the result isn’t a very convincing.  Fabares, firmly an actress and not a singer, was reportedly unenthusiastic about recording a single and felt intimidated by The Blossoms’ vocal chops.  Her voice is fine here, actually; if anything, it presages the girlish vocals of Lesley Gore and Mary Weiss that would form the white counterparts to the girl groups produced by Motown and Phil Spector.  But the vocals of Fabares and The Blossoms never meld in a way that sounds organic.  The bulk of the successful girl groups had, in some form or another, been singing together for years, in high schools and churches, before they cut their first singles.  Here, Fabares’s voice floats out limply in front of the backing singers.  Further, “Johnny Angel” is, if possible, too pop to be real girl group material.  The genuine girl group hits drew to varying degrees from other genres, whether they be R&B/soul, rock and roll, gospel, or even country. This cross-genre pollination led to more complex and exciting singles, which attracted listeners outside of the teenage girl market and, in turn, influenced the genres the girl groups had originally borrowed from (e.g., The Beatles covering The Shirelles, The Marvelettes and The Cookies).  “Johnny Angel,” however, owes strictly to the limpid, syrupy pop of Frankie Avalon and teen idols who followed in his wake.  Essentially, this is “Venus,” but from a female POV – and one just as dull and vacuous. 3

Liner Notes:

• The Blossoms would again top the Hot 100 just a few months later – albeit with a single falsely credited to another girl group.

Hit #1 on April 7, 1962; total of 2 weeks at #1
68 of 970 #1′s reviewed; 7.01% through the Hot 100

67) Connie Francis – “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You”

While researching this entry, I was surprised to learn that Connie Francis had the most successful chart run of any female solo singer of the 1960s.  Over the 40 years since the decade ended, collective cultural rewriting of the ‘60s has caused it to become associated with singers like Janis Joplin, Diana Ross, and Grace Slick – but all three of those spent most of the ‘60s in groups, and only Ross had any real pop chart success.  Still, successful solo artists Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield all spring to mind as more representative of the period’s pop landscape.  Yet it was Connie Francis who had three Hot 100 #1’s.  So why has her chart impact become diminished in retrospect? For one, her three most iconic hits (“Who’s Sorry Now,” “Stupid Cupid” and “Where the Boys Are”) are not the three that topped the charts (“Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” and “Don’t Break the Heart the Loves You”).  But what probably played a larger part was timing: her final #1, “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You,” hit in 1962, before the pop cultural megalith of “the ‘60s,” as it has been redefined and recast, actually began.  (Which, for someone who wasn’t alive during the decade, doesn’t really start until The Beatles invade America.)

Further, Francis’s singles often owed more to the Great American Songbook than to contemporaneous pop and rock and roll.  Her first success, “Who’s Sorry Now?,” was a cover of song first published in 1923.  And the more singles she released, the more her records grew indebted to pre-rock sounds.  The rockabilly-lite kick of early hits like “Fallin’” and “Lipstick on Your Collar” was almost completely absent by the ‘60s, replaced by smooth strings and echo chamber production.  Now Francis just needed an original hit that would become every bit the classic that “Who’s Sorry Now?” had been when she recorded her version of it.  Therefore, she hired Benny Davis and Ted Murry, two former Tin Pan Alley songwriters whose greatest successes dated from decades earlier.  The result was “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You,” a record that finds Francis’s voice in typically lovely form, but in a style that already feels a few years out of date.  The slick countryish pop of Connie Francis and Brenda Lee was being replaced on the pop charts by urban girl groups and brighter, punchier arrangements.  It doesn’t help that “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You” lacks personality – it’s pretty much the standard pop-country ballad ca. 1958, complete with requisite woozy spoken word bit.

The single that replaced Francis atop the Hot 100, also by a solo female singer, is clearly inferior, but the outmoded details of “Don’t Break the Heart” – and Connie Francis herself – stand out in stark contrast.  In her mere four years as a chart presence, Francis had a steady run of quality singles, and she would continue to have great singles afterward (1964’s “Don’t Ever Leave Me,” in which she adopts the girl group sound that had displaced her, is a particular highlight). Connie hadn’t changed, but the pop charts had moved on. The ‘60s would continue – or start – without her. 6

Hit #1 on March 31, 1962; total of 1 week at #1
67 of 970 #1′s reviewed; 6.91% through the Hot 100