When The Music Died- With The Late Bobby Vee’s Take Good Care Of My Baby In Mind

When The Music Died- With The Late Bobby Vee’s Take Good Care Of My Baby In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

  

As I usually do at the end of every year I check out in the newspapers which provide such information to fill space at that time I looked to see what singers and songwriters had passed on during that year. You know people like Prince and Leonard Cohen in 2016. Looking at the list for 2016 I noticed that the name Bobby Vee came up, a singer from the late 1950s and early 1960s who was a member in good standing of what I have called elsewhere the “musical counter-revolution.”

Let me explain that last term. I am a proud member in good standing of the now classic age of rock and roll, a child of the 1950s beat that drove us over the top. The stuff that got us through, even those of us who were just a shade too young in those post-World War II baby-boomer days to full appreciate what was going on. The stuff from sexy, hungry Elvis, duck-walking Chuck Berry, who put the rock in rock and roll Bo Didderly, madman Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly and several others. The stuff that many parents, including mine, called the “devil’s music.” And calling it that made us love it even more.

Then all of a sudden, or it seemed that way, the music stopped, the beat “died, what with Elvis in the Army, Chuck away for “playing house” with Mister’s daughters, Jerry Lee over the top with his kissing cousin and Buddy down in some Iowa cornfield. But music, as many things, abhors a vacuum, a man-made vacuum in this case since the powers that be in the record industry fell down under that parent and governmental pressure and made rock just another vanilla genre.

That was where Bobby Vee (and others like Fabian, Bobby Darin and Slim Jones) got their big chance. Got to give us stuff like Devil or Angel which we could have given a damn about (whether the girl was a devil or angel as long as she paid attention to me and “put out” when the time came). Sure we listened to it-what else were we to do when that was what the rock stations we were glued to played during those doldrum times. Worse, worse of all from a personal point of view the girls, those fickle girls loved these guys, thought they were “cute” and got all dreamy over their gooey lyrics. What was a guy to do when one of those platters like Bobby’s Take Good Care Of My Baby was the democratic choice for the last chance, last dance come Saturday night.

I, as you can tell, am still bitter about that little coup even if I didn’t know what was behind it then. But funny thing a recent listen to on YouTube of Take Good Care Of My Baby sounded, well, sounded pretty good. Go figure. So long Bobby.