The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of
’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Beach
Blanket Bongo- With The Falcons' You're So Fine –Take Two In
Mind
The Falcons
You're So Fine
You're So Fine
The Falcons
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you
I love you, I love you
I need you, I need you
I walk, and I talk, about you
There's nothing in the world as sweet as your kiss
so fine, so fine
Every time we meet, my heart skips a beat
You're my first cup of coffee
( my last cup of tea) Bass line
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you
Sax solo
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you
You're So Fine
The Falcons
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you
I love you, I love you
I need you, I need you
I walk, and I talk, about you
There's nothing in the world as sweet as your kiss
so fine, so fine
Every time we meet, my heart skips a beat
You're my first cup of coffee
( my last cup of tea) Bass line
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you
Sax solo
You're so fine, you're so fine
You're mine, you're mine
I walk, and I talk, about you
*******
Sometimes it is funny how people will
get into certain jags, will become aficionados, no, more than that will become
single-minded fanatics if you don’t watch them very carefully and keep an
appropriate distance say the distance you would keep from a cobra. Some of us will go all out to be the best at
golf or some such sport (or game, I guess you would call golf a game rather
than sport because sport sounds too rough, sounds too in-your-face for such a
gentile pastime, for the active mashing of some innocent white ball, yeah,
let’s call it a game and move on) or will devout endless hours to the now
thirty-seven, at least, flavors of yoga now passing through a rage period (no,
I will not name all the variants, all the exotically-named mostly
Hindu-sounding names, except to say
that such devotion at least makes health sense strangling some poor misbegotten
caddie for not providing the right club for that perfect golf shot you had
lines up) and others will climb straight-faced (theirs and the mountain’s)
sheer rock precipices (no further comment needed except perhaps a sane citizen
might just suggest that gentile pastime of golf to those sheer rocks). So be
it.
Take me for example
although I am not up for rigors of golf (or the premediated first-degree murder
of some errant golf ball either), yoga (although thinking back the Kama Sutra
came out of that same tradition so it might be worthy of some thought) or
mountain-baiting (I like my rocks strictly in museums where they belong) recently
I have been on a tear in reviewing individual[CL1] CDs in an extensive generic commercial classic Rock ‘n’
Roll series (meaning now the 1950s and 1960s) entitled Rock and Roll Will Never Die. The impetus for reviewing that
particular CD series at first had been in order to hear the song Your So Fine by the Falcons after I had
been listening to The Dubs’ Could This Be
Magic on YouTube. That combination was driven by a memory flashback to
about 1959 when I used to pester (I am being kind here) every available girls
in my seventh grade class by being timid boy flirty and calling her, well, “so
fine.” Available girls by the way meaning not going “steady” with a boy,
especially a guy who might be on the football team and who might take umbrage
with another guy trying to cut his time. Although let’s say that if she was
going with a golf guy I might cut his time since they live by some strange
honor system, you know count exactly the number of strokes you took to complete
the hole, including those three, not two, you clunked into the pond. Available girl also meaning in seventh grade,
unlike in sixth or fifth grade where the distinctions did not matter because
they were all nuisances, girls who had gotten a shape and broken out of
“stick-dom.” Those are the ones who were worthy of Jeff Sterling, that’s me,
“so fine” designation. Such is the memory bank these days.
While that particular review was driven
by a song most of those reviews that I was crazy to listen to and speak about
had been driven by the intriguing artwork which graced the covers of each CD, pinpoint
artwork drawn in such a way to stir ancient memories of ancient loves, ancient
loves, too many to count, anguishes, ditto, alienations, you give a number,
angsts, infinite, and whatever else teen–age life could rain down on you just
when you were starting to get a handle on the world, starting to do battle to
find your place in the sun. Starting to feel too that this wicked old world
might be a place worthy of the fight to preserve it but such thoughts were only
flushed out later, much later after the dust of angst and alienation
settled.
Moreover these artwork covers reflected
that precise moment in time, time being a very conscious and fungible concept
then when we thought we would live forever and if we did not at least let us do
our jailbreak rock and roll rock with the time we had, the youth time of the
now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer
generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in
as the case may have been, to the themes of those artwork scenes. That fit in
or didn’t fit in as the example of that flirty “your so fine” mantra that I
would pin on any girl (remember any available girl not going steady and not
with some big brute just in case that big brute is still holding a grudge).
Some artwork in the series like those
that portrayed the terrors of Saturday night high school dance wallflower-dom,
hanging around the you-name-it drugstore soda fountain waiting for some dreamy
girl to drop her quarters in the juke-box and ask you, you of all people, what
she should play to chase her blues away after some guy left her for another girl and she needed
a sound to shed a tear by and you there with that empty shoulder to ease the
way, or how about a scene down at the seclude end of Adamsville Beach with a
guy and his gal sitting watching the surf and listening to the be-bop radio
before, well, let’s leave it at “before,” and picture this a few beauties
sunning themselves at the beach waiting for Johnny Angel to make an appearance
need almost no comment except good luck and we, we of that 1950s demographic,
all recognize those signposts of growing up in the red scare cold war night.
This cover that I am thinking of though
did not “speak” to me, a 1959 artwork cover from the time when the music
died (meaning Elvis turned “square,” Chuck got caught with Mister’s girls and
Jerry Lee failed to check the family tree).
On this cover, a summer scene (always a
nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our
generational breakout, listening all afternoon to the transistor radio, trying
to keep the sand from destroying your sandwich, getting all or red and pretty
for Saturday night in white), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow,
were checking out the scene, the land scene for that minute they were not
trying to ride the perfect wave, or thinking about that possibility. That
checking out of course was to check out who was “hot” on the beach, who could
qualify to be a “surfer girl” for those lonely nighttime hours when either the
waves were flat or the guys had been in the water so long they had turned to prunes.
That scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform
you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, certainly
not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and
longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean
checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that
primitive time before we called them sisters, and women.
No question that this whole scene had
been nothing but a California come hinter scene. No way that it has the look of
my Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. This is nothing but early days
California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed
bikini girls. But hold on, see as little as I know about West Coast 1950s
growing up surfer culture I was suddenly struck by this hard fact. These pretty
boys are, no question, “beach bums” no way that they are serious surfer guys,
certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House La Jolla gang where those surfers lived
for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity
one needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short
these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of
those shes they are checking out into the humid night I will leave to the
reader’s imagination.
As I noted before and commented on in
the review the music, the 1959 music, that backed up this scene told us we were
clearly in a trough, the golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis,
Elvis, and Chuck Berry was fading, fading fast into what I can only describe as
“bubble gum” music. Sure I listened to it, listened to it hard on my old
transistor radio up in my lonely shared room or out on those surly, tepid
Eastern beaches mainly because that was all that was being presented to us.
Somehow the parents, the cops, the school administrators and, if you can
believe this, some of those very same bikini girls who you thought were cool
had flipped out and wanted to hear Fabian, Bobby Vee and Bobby Darin, got to
the record guys, got to Tin Pan Alley and ordered them to make the music like
some vanilla shake. So all of a sudden those “you’re so fine” beach blanket
blondes were sold on faux surfer guys, flip-floppers and well-combed guys and
had dumped the beat, the off-beat and the plainly loopy without a thought.
Leaving hard-boiled Harvard Square by night denizens like me homeless, and
girl-less more than less.
It was to be a while, a few years,
until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock engulfed
us. My times, times when I did not have to rely on some kids’ stuff flirty
“your so fine” line but could impress the young women of my acquaintance
(admittedly not the beach blanket bingo blondes of my youth but long straight
brunette-haired women with faraway eyes and hungry haunted expressions) with
eight million Child ballad, Village, traditional music, mountain music facts I
had accumulated during that red scare cold war trough before the break-out.
As the bulk of that CD’s contents
attested to though we were in 1959 in the great marking time. There were,
however, some stick-outs there that have withstood the test of time. They
include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re
So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite
then at the local school dances by a local boy who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr.
Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway
that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance),
The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated
singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for
a while).
Note: After a recent trip to the
Southern California coast I can inform you that those two surfer guys, who
actually did turn out to be landlubbers and were working the shoreline while
serious surfers with no time for beach blanket bingo blondes sought that
perfect wave stuff, are still out there and still checking out the scene.
Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect
wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. No artist would now, or
at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these
brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo
hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out
those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the
baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.
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