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Fifty Years On: How Do You Remember the Music of 1968?
If you were too young to hear it in context, how did it sound to you later as Oldies?
Your Diary Soundtrack: Crank it up!
In 1968 I was an underdeveloped 12 year old who had inexplicably become part of a tight-knit group of four girlfriends looking forward to Junior High. The central gathering place of our little clique was at Ann’s house, which to my apartment dweller eyes looked like a mansion with its two stories, carpeted stairs and baby grand piano that her serene older sister Joan (a concert violinist) played classical music on.
Best of all, though, was the olympic sized swimming pool with a diving board, bordered by a vast green lawn and a cabana done up in rattan and tiki torch style that became our unofficial clubhouse in the summer of 1968. We held slumber parties in there, doing all the silly things girls do to other girls who have the misfortune to be the first to fall asleep. Southern California summers were desert hot, and we lived in the pool and sang along with KFXM, Tiger AM Radio which played the same Top 10 songs all summer long, to Joan’s eye-rolling dismay. Ann, like me, was a late-in-life youngest child, and her grey-haired parents had the same laissez-faire approach to child-rearing as mine and left us alone. If someone was drowning or spurting blood they’d step in; otherwise, they were mostly invisible.
The songs we most adored on AM radio pop charts were, I now see, awash in pathos or stern societal warnings and fell into the main category of:
The Melodramatic
Young Girl, Get Out of My Mind, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap: We were young girls— were we really so dangerously alluring? And what about this creepy old guy who was supposed to know better and could barely control himself? We took these lyrics literally:
So hurry home to your mama
I’m sure she wonders where you are
Better run, girl
You’re much too young, girl
Honey, Bobby Goldsboro: A song that dramatic was pure catnip for us pre-teens. That poor man! His beautiful young wife died and he’ll probably mourn her forever!
Love Child, The Supremes: Illegitimacy was still shocking in those days, and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy wasn’t just hard on the luckless girl but on the poor shunned child as well. Don’t. Get. Pregnant. was deeply internalized for yet one more reason.
I’ve Just Got to Get a Message to You, The Bee Gees: High drama, featuring an anguished murderer on death row, no less. One more hour and my life will be through! Hold on!
Harper Valley PTA: I couldn’t begin to imagine Mom bucking the local PTA with Well this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites. This brought out variations on the favorite put-down of our time, the chopped-you-so-low meme. Chopped you so low you’d have to look up to see down being the only specific one I now recall.
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay was romantically tragic because the singer had just died, giving poignant power to The Blues. We did try contacting Otis Redding by Ouija Board, but he was silent.
Staples of the 60’s: Beatles and Stones and Doors
Hey Jude: We bedeviled Joan to play this on her baby grand piano so we could stand around and sway and go na na na nananannaaaaa, just to rile her up. More eye-rolling.
Sympathy for the Devil: We adored singing the whoo-whoo chorus.
Hello, I Love You: Thank Gawd there was a new Doors song; we were all sick to death of Light My Fire.
Songs That Were A Little Edgy for Pop AM radio:
Born to be Wild (a little rough) and My Green Tambourine (a little psychedelic). My 6th grade boyfriend’s high school aged sister was a genuine hippie and we sneaked into her room to play her records, none of which got much play on our teeny-bopper station, Like Country Joe and the Fish, Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead.
I Heard it Through the Grapevine was about as Motown as our radio station got, and oddly, I’d never heard that expression and with literal-mindedness kept wondering how grapevines transmitted information.
Judy in Disguise With Glasses:Catchy, and we loved it, but since we spent half the summer singing Judy in the skies it was hard to glean the actual meaning. Pre-teen girls are a profoundly silly lot.
