157) The Righteous Brothers – “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration”

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil began work on “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” for The Righteous Brothers as a follow-up to “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” but soon abandoned it for being too derivative of the previous hit. (Phil Spector enlisted Gerry Goffin and Carole King to write the equally beholden “Just Once in My Life” instead.) Once Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield cut ties with Spector and jumped to another label, though, a near-facsimile of their greatest hit seemed like the ideal way to kick off the next phase of their career: a reminder of their finest moment and proof they could do it themselves. Mann and Weil dutifully completed the song for the duo, even as they sensed they were writing their own knockoff. In Fred Bronson’s The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, Weil praises Medley’s production on the record but remains less enthusiastic about the song itself: “It will always be ‘Lovin’ Feelin” sideways to me.”

While “Soul and Inspiration” is better than Weil gives it credit for, her assessment isn’t too far off. “Soul and Inspiration” feels as though it had been assembled from the Ikea instructions for “Lovin’ Feelin’”; the end product more or less resembles the original model, but the connections between the pieces don’t fit together quite right. Both songs open on Medley’s bass-baritone croon plumbing the depths of his despair over a lost love. From there, “Lovin’ Feelin’” builds gradually as subtle behavioral changes pile up, one by one, until the weight of the evidence forces a painful but undeniable conclusion. There’s no such process of discovery in “Soul and Inspiration” – the narrator knows before the song even begins that she’s leaving him. As a result, the Brothers are basically treading water, begging her not to leave, until the mandatory explosion of a chorus, in which they beg louder.* The rest of the song sticks to the “Lovin’ Feelin’” template: a hushed moment of pleading (here, a spoken-word monologue by Hatfield); a re-escalation in which Medley cries in anguish for her return; and one final chorus where the Brothers are reunited and no stop is left unpulled. “Soul and Inspiration” compresses this trajectory into under three minutes – a full minute shorter than “Lovin’ Feelin’,” but without the valleys and gentle slopes that gave the previous hit its impact. Instead, the Brothers rely on an extended wordless coda to round it out to an acceptably epic running time.

Even if “Soul and Inspiration” misses some of its predecessor’s subtlety, though, its foundation is so solid that it mostly winds up working anyway.  Medley doesn’t just imitate Spector’s production style; he understands how such intense feeling needs a Wall of Sound to shore it up. Not only do Medley and Hatfield have voices distinctive and powerful enough to compete with string crescendos and cymbal crashes, but there’s a sincerity to their delivery that keeps the song just this side of over-the-top. It’s easy to believe that the Brothers could have carried on making hits in this vein for years, especially as Spector, their greatest competition, would retreat from the recording studio just a few months later. Instead, the record ended up as their final Top 10 hit of the decade, and the duo split in 1968. By the time of their reunion and comeback hit, 1974′s “Rock and Roll Heaven,” their fondness for looking back on past glories had ossified into permanent nostalgia, the gracefulness and dramatic swell of their classic period replaced by generic AM Gold sheen. 7

* “Soul and Inspiration” can’t even get that quite right. The great melody leap in the chorus, which should be the peak of emotional intensity, instead lands awkwardly on the word “my,” chopping it into two syllables (“mah-hah”).

Hit #1 on April 9, 1966; total of 3 weeks at #1
157 of 1016 #1′s reviewed; 15.45% through the Hot 100

156) SSgt Barry Sadler – “The Ballad of the Green Berets”

To try to analyze “The Ballad of the Green Berets” as a pop song is to miss the point. The people who bought this record didn’t like it because it had a catchy chorus or a charismatic singer. They didn’t buy it to dance to at parties or to marvel at the production through headphones. They bought it for what it represented: a show of support for troops overseas; cultural pushback against a tide of apparent unpatriotism; a voice for the Silent Majority who remembered the victories of the Good War and believed the US would triumph again. This is a record that rose to #2 on the country charts not because it contained any identifiable C&W elements (unless you count its folk ballad structure), but because its pro-military stance hit home in conservative Middle America. For both creator and consumers, the song existed primarily as a vessel to champion the US Army Special Forces and, by extension, America as a whole. Any thoughts toward art were relegated to distant second place, perhaps even treated with vague suspicion. After all, plenty of antiwar folk and rock records spread their subversive content through hummable melodies and poeticized lyrics. Sadler’s musical unsophistication just made him seem more honest.

But even if “Green Berets” didn’t become a massive hit – the best-selling single of 1966, in fact – by being a great pop song, it’s not entirely without its merits. The minimalist, snare-heavy arrangement lends the record an appropriate degree of martial gravitas. Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s voice isn’t particularly distinctive, but its everysoldier quality suits a song praising collective heroism. Unlike many of its more opportunistic contemporaries (“Dawn of Correction,” for instance), “Green Berets” feels sincere – the product of an actual Green Beret recuperating from injuries in Vietnam – and dignified by not namecalling or taking direct swipes at its opponents.

Even though the song never mentions the Vietnam War by name, it became the closet equivalent the conflict had to an “Over There,” an affirmation that the US was fighting the good fight. The problem is that “Green Berets” isn’t actually all that inspiring. Too slow to rouse like a Sousa march and numbingly repetitive (despite efforts to add a little variety by injecting a new musical element in each verse), “Green Berets” drags on far longer than its breezy 2:27 running time suggests. Its lyrics aren’t a galvanizing call to arms but a dry list of facts and generalizations, delivered with a grim determination that befits an elite soldier but makes for a leaden pop singer. There’s a last-minute bid to elict emotion in the final stanzas with the introduction of a fallen Green Beret, but it comes out of nowhere, making the soldier seem less like a hero who sacrificed his life than a cardboard figure created only to be killed.

The fact that “Green Berets” so blatantly acknowledges the human cost of war – something typically the province of protest songs – proves how differently Vietnam was already being perceived compared with earlier conflicts. The popular folk revival’s leftist activism, combined with the post-WWII rise of mass media (specifically television and recorded music), granted anti-war music an unprecedented ubiquity. Even though the majority of Americans still favored US involvement in Vietnam, “Green Berets” feels defensive, insisting on the necessity of war in the face of waning public support.* As such, it’s as much a product of changing times as any of its anti-war counterparts. The negative side of war could no longer be ignored and popular support could no longer be assumed, leaving pro-war songs in a difficult position. “Green Berets” splits the difference by trying to be both somber and stirring, rugged and sentimental, but it lacks the artistic proficiency to fit these competing impulses together. If something this stiff and staid was the best its side had to offer, it’s no surprise that the more visceral and inventive songs against the war began to seem a lot more appealing. In cultural terms, “Green Berets” may have won the battle for chart dominance, but it couldn’t win the war.  2

*In March 1966, the month “The Ballad of the Green Berets” reached #1, 59% of Americans polled believed the US sending troops to Vietnam was “not a mistake.” Two months later, that percentage had fallen to 49%. (source: William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War)

Hit #1 on March 12, 1966; total of 5 weeks at #1
156 of 1016 #1′s reviewed; 15.35% through the Hot 100

155) Nancy Sinatra – “These Boots are Made for Walkin’”

It would be neat symmetry to think of “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” as a rebuke to the previous number-one’s questionable sexual politics. But even if there had been a gap between the two records’ releases, you get the sense that “Boots” would’ve been too cool to pay that melodramatic throwback any attention. Whereas the conventional gender attitudes and Four Seasons-esque falsetto leaps of “Lightnin’ Strikes” fit squarely within the mold of early ’60s pop (even as its weirdness elevates it to some other dimension), Nancy Sinatra’s self-assured sexiness and tart, plainspoken vocals epitomized the increasing directness of the latter half of the decade. Even the fact that she was singing about boots – rugged men’s footwear co-opted as ultra-mod women’s fashion, both covering legs and emphasizing their form – felt hip and transgressive.

The tension between the masculine and the feminine recurs throughout Sinatra’s ’60s discography, particularly in her collaborations with songwriter/producer Lee Hazlewood. Their duets emphasize the gender divide by casting them as extreme archetypes: him, the hard-bitten rambler; her, the dewy-eyed siren. (The 1967 single “Some Velvet Morning” even fluctuates between time signatures depending on who’s singing.) On “Boots,” though, Sinatra is left to inhabit both roles by herself. By wedding her girlish purr to Hazlewood’s terse, tough-guy phrasing, Sinatra both confirms and subverts conventional expectations of femininity, turning “Boots” into a cross between a come-on and a threat.

Any hint of danger in the record, however, is mostly defused by its sense of humor, from the childlike vernacular (“truthin’,” “samin’”), to the flamboyantly upbeat horns, to Chuck Berghofer’s heat-warped doublebass slide, at once foreboding and absurd. Even Sinatra’s warning that “one of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you” is delivered with a wink. Is this playfulness meant to assure listeners that her forwardness is just role-playing, that they don’t have to take her seriously? Or is the song tripling back on itself, smuggling in a pro-feminist message in the guise of just kidding? (Sinatra’s wry delivery does suggest she’s telling a joke to someone who’s not getting it, and relishing the thought of how hard the punchline will land once he does.) Perhaps “Boots” and “Lightnin’ Strikes” aren’t so different after all. In an era where traditional gender roles were being questioned, both songs offer ambiguous answers, muddying the waters between what’s intended to be ironic and what’s just camp. 8

Hit #1 on February 26, 1966; total of 1 week at #1
155 of 1016 #1′s reviewed; 15.26% through the Hot 100