Letter to an Old Friend

I’m listening to my ‘70s nostalgia folder on Windows Media Player as I type, and Blood, Sweat and Tears is playing. This song is one of my old adolescent favorites—"Lucretia Mac Evil". Remember that one? I used to play my BS&T Greatest Hits album back in the day and whenever this song came on I would dance provocatively around the house, pretending to be a siren luring incautious men to their doom. You should have seen me, or perhaps it’s just as well you didn’t—you might have gotten hurt laughing yourself silly.

Now Lynyrd Skynyrd’s "Sweet Home Alabama" is playing—and it’s funny. Not the song; I mean I remember how much I loved this song the first time I heard it, and how appalled I felt upon later realizing that it was basically a redneck defense of the Old South.

Actually, that may not be a fair assessment of the song, but"Sweet Home Alabama" was written as a "backatcha", a thumb of the nose, a direct challenge (Well, I heard Mr. Young sing about her... Well, I heard ole Neil put her down...) to Neil Young’s "Alabama", a stinging criticism of entrenched Southern attitudes, from his monster 1972 album "Harvest", though "Heart Of Gold" was the album's big single, with James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt wailing back-up. Upon its release Joey bought "Harvest" and played that song over and over and over again (that one and the bittersweet "The Needle and the Damage Done") and I got good and sick of it, but the CD is sitting on one of my book shelves now.

Nowadays you hear "Sweet Home Alabama" and think not of the Deep South, race relations or rebel yells but of... Popeye’s chicken.

Unnhhh.

Isn’t it depressing the way Madison Avenue has latched onto Boomer and Gen X popular music, using one iconic sixties (and, increasingly, seventies) pop song after another to sell cars, fast food, beer, and you name it? This is not by any means a recent development, I know, but the practice seems in hyper-drive these days. I’m constantly grousing to my mother (who in response usually just chuckles sympathetically) that when I hear the Beatle’s "Revolution"--reportedly John Lennon’s wry response to The Rolling Stones’ swaggering "Street Fighting Man"-- or Marvin Gaye’s sultry"Let’s Get It On" I don’t want to think of overpriced sneakers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Bunnies!

Remember the commercials of sixties TV, Mike, and songs like "Kids" from the stage/film musical Bye Bye Birdie being used to sell floor wax? That one and "Will Everyone Here Kindly Step To The Rear (And Let A Winner Lead The Way)", from the (short-lived) stage musical How Now Dow Jones, which was used to sell Plymouth cars? And who could forget (well, okay, I haven't) "Hey, Big Spender", from Sweet Charity, to sell cigarillos—back when tobacco products were still being advertised on prime-time television, that is.

I loved those musicals, by the way. Loved them. At that time I especially loved any musical that starred or featured Gwen Verdon and Liza Minnelli. Redhead. Flora the Red Menace. New Girl in Town. I spent my whole 14th year in my bedroom pretending to be either a quavery, broken-hearted Gwen Verdon plaintively singing "Where Am I Going?" or a brassy Liza Minnelli belting "Cabaret" and "Liza With a Z".

Those songs coming out of the tradition of American musical theatre made the use of them for advertising purposes—to my mind anyway, you may not agree—more logical and acceptable, somehow.

The most memorable modern pop music reflects periods of flux and change in our lives and in the larger culture, don’t you think so? And though many of us adore musical theatre, I don’t think we have such exquisitely emotional memories attached to those kinds of songs, which is why I suppose I particularly resent the corporate co-opting of sixties and seventies pop, rock and soul music. That's the good stuff, the stuff that is, as one of the classic rock stations here in Chicago likes to advertise itself, the "soundtrack of our lives".

So whenever a TV commercial appears that features yet another memorable pop, soul or rock and roll song from my youth, I feel invaded, like something intensely personal is being yanked away from me. Back in the early eighties veteran rockers Neil Young and John Fogerty united to produce and perform "This Note’s For You", a protest song satirizing the selling out of classic pop music. The two did some local news interviews about the issue, and also made an accompanying video for "This Note" which, I'm guessing, may have made MTV execs a tad uncomfortable because I swear the song came and went in a blink, or at least that's how I remember it. I think I saw that video twice in total—twice, maybe three times—and this during the period when I was captivated by eighties “new wave” music and videos, watching MTV constantly.

Having said all that, I’m not completely disdainful of TV commercials. In the late sixties and early seventies some of my favorite TV shows were in fact commercials--because I was a kid and what the hell did I know--but also because many of them were so entertaining and were made especially memorable by original, catchy jingles written expressly for the product. If you watch programming on the TVLand or Me-TV channel today you will from time to time see these nostalgia commercials, like the kicky black and white oldie from 1964 for Polaroid Swinger cameras (Bobby Sherman sang this one with a chirpy female back up):

Bobby Sherman: Hey! Meet the Swinger
Chirpy Girl Back-Up: Swinger
Sherman: Polaroid Swinger
CG Back-Up: Swinger
Sherman: Meet the Swinger
CG Back-Up: Swinger
Sherman: Polaroid Swinger

Chirpy Girl Back-Up: It’s quite a good camera
It’s almost alive*
It’s only nineteen dollars
And ninety-five

Sherman: Swing it up
CG Back-Up: Yeah yeah
Sherman: It says yes
CG Back-Up: Yeah yeah
Sherman: Take the shot
CG Back-Up: Yeah yeah
Sherman: Count it down
CG Back-Up: Yeah yeah
Sherman: Rip it off
CG Back-Up: Yeah!

Sherman: Meet the Swinger
Chirpy Girl Back-Up: Swinger
Sherman: Polaroid Swinger
CG Back-Up: Swinger
Sherman: Meet the Swinger… (fade-out)


* At least I think that’s what they were singing (“It’s almost alive”). If you ever catch this commercial on television, tell me what you think.

The visual for that commercial was a winter scene featuring a group of lively young people with bright Pepsodent smiles, apparently on a unisex ski trip. There was a laughing, pretty brunette in that commercial that got a lot of face time—you’d recognize her instantly as the young Ali MacGraw.

I think this was when Miss MacGraw was married to Paramount Pictures honcho Robert Evans, shortly before box-office winners like Goodbye, Columbus and Love Story lifted her into the celebrity stratosphere. She was then cast in maverick director Sam Peckinpah’s gritty crime drama The Getaway opposite Steve McQueen, the American cinema’s King Of Cool (who in reality was reportedly anything but—Steve had a LOT of issues, turns out), and thereafter created a major Hollywood scandal—and I mean a BIG scandal, my dear; not since telephoto lenses caught Liz Taylor canoodling on a beach or sun deck or whatever it was with Richard Burton during the filming of Cleopatra a decade earlier did everyone make such a fuss about marital infidelities—when Ali left Bob for Steve during the filming. Remember that? My God, I remember that; in those years I swallowed whole all those Photoplay, Modern Movies, and glossy Rona Barrett's Hollywood and Rona Barrett's Gossip magazines--pics galore! Pics for days!

But I digress.

Remember the 1969 or ‘70 Budweiser commercial? There’ve been so many Bud commercials over time that I don’t blame you if you can’t recall the one I mean, but this one featured a night club-like setting where a Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell-type duo crooned to each other:


He: When you say Bud
She: When you say Bud
He: You’ve said a lot of things nobody else can say
She: Mmm-yeah
He: When you say Bud
She: When you say Bud
He: You’ve gone as far as you can go to get the very best

He: There is no other one
She: Other one
He: There’s only something less
She: Something less
He: Because the king of beers
She: King of beers
Both: Is leading all the rest

Both: When you say Budweiser—
She: Say it, say it—
Both: When you say Budweiser—
She: Oh, go on and say it—
Both: When you say Budweiser—
Both: Oooh, you’ve said it all

I LOVED this commercial, Michael, and apparently I wasn’t the only one—its popularity meant it aired constantly with a slightly abbreviated version of it playing almost as frequently on AM radio. I used to walk around the 52nd and Drexel apartment humming and twisting and warbling away about Budweiser beer, the actual taste of which I couldn’t stand, though you'll recall my grandmother, Mrs. “CLOSE THE DOOR!” Wimberly, sure loved her Schlitz. Does that Budweiser jingle ring any bells with you? I don’t know if the lyrics help jog your memory or not—sometimes this kind of thing just looks so weird on the page. I’ll bet though if you heard it you’d remember.

Actually, wait—you have heard it—about five Christmases ago you gave me a wonderful CD of classic TV jingles (“TeeVee Toons: The Commercials”) and “When You Say Bud” is included, though that one is the original, extremely white-bread version sung in a sprightly up-tempo by a solo female singer, not the swingin’ soulful duet I fell in love with.

The couple in the commercial wasn’t actually Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell of course, but they sounded uncannily like Gaye and Terrell in their soulful call-and-response style of singing. "You’re All I Need To Get By" and "Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing" were huge crossover hits at or around this time and the “When You Say Bud” jingle was obviously meant to evoke those tunes.

Pointless Bit of Trivia Alert: In 1972 Sonny and Cher made a record called “When You Say Love” with lyrics written to the tune of the “When You Say Bud” jingle. That’s how popular the original jingle was (or how goofy the times were, take your pick). I remember Sonny and Cher’s “When You Say Love”—I don’t know if you do—and, young as I was, knew it was pathetic, just pathetic. I don’t think it was a hit for them either, certainly not on the order of "I Got You Babe" or "The Beat Goes On" or even the bizarre "A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done" or the melodramatic "Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down".

Well.

Enough of all this, for now, anyway.

Yesterday was my mom’s 72nd birthday—72, Mike!—and we had a nice day, though it was only the two of us. I’d like to take her and her sisters out for lunch or dinner but we’ll see—we’ll see how the money holds up--needless to say, my (ah-haha) “stimulus” rebate is long gone now (have you yet received yours?) I made a nice dinner and a cake for her, and also bought her a Sony DVD player and several DVDs. She was delighted I'm pleased to report, especially with the DVDs—a nice Bugs Bunny “premiere collection” set and the original, hilarious Jay Ward-Bill Scott cartoon “George of the Jungle”. Mom’s always loved these cartoons, partly because they’re so wonderfully drawn and the dialogue is so slyly witty--most of the puns and asides still holding up after so many years--and partly, of course, because Joey and me loved them too, when we were growing up.


See ya; Love ya—

L