LITTLE ROCK — Ever wonder what makes you the way you are today? I’ve come to believe I’m the result of being a willing victim of 1960s puppy-love songs.
It was the music—you also may recall—that launched expectations of undying love soaring to unrealistic yet eternal heights.
Those melodies and simple lyrics represented a lifelong inoculation for someone like me who by nature has always been a ridiculous romantic. Embarrassing at 64? Yes. But, I’m afraid, also true.
As an English Leather-soaked teen in the mushy, doo-wop ’60s, I apparently absorbed as reality all those love songs we swayed to at the carport parties and sock hops.
After all, the music we memorized that fueled our hormonally charged imaginations wouldn’t lie to us just to boost record sales, would it?
Dick Biondi at WLS in Chicago and Wolfman Jack offshore in Del Rio, Texas, were the most popular disc jockeys of the era. They regularly nurtured my fantasies, especially on weekends when my friends and the girl who back then wore my ring ’round her neck were at the local drive-in movie listening to a steady stream of the heartfelt love songs.
Pat Boone touted the intoxicating allure of “April Love.” Tommy Edwards said many a tear has to fall in romance but “It’s All in the Game.”
There was so much more. Ruby and the Romantics (there’s that word!) assured us “Our Day Will Come.” Skeeter Davis validated that losing her boyfriend’s affection could mean “The End of the World.”
Elvis was strumming his love songs like “Love Me Tender.” Buddy Holly wailed how “That’ll Be the Day” after Cupid shot a dart at his heart and “Oh Boy,” ’cause Buddy was about to unleash all his love and kissin’ that she’d been a missin’.
I remember how taken I was with Ritchie Valens’ laments of how he’d never be the same without his lost teen love “Donna.”
There were the Righteous Brothers and their heartrending “Unchained Melody.” Texas crooner Roy Orbison was applying four remarkable octaves to how he’d been “Running Scared” of losing his main squeeze, before explaining how “Only the Lonely” understood why his broken heart suffered without romance.
The Everly Brothers promised that in order to find the soul mate we all search for “All I Have to Do is Dream” and how they hadn’t lived “’Til I Kissed You.” They also said after a breakup, they’d be doing all their “Crying in the Rain.”
The great Nat King Cole sang “When I Fall in Love,” it will be forever. I believed Nat too.
The list of my indoctrination to fantasy-soaked romance literally could fill this page.
Anyone else recall how Bruce Channel asked “Hey Baby,” would you be his girl? The Platters sang how “My Prayer” was to be with their girls at the end of the day. The Supremes wondered “Where Did our Love Go?” The Beatles wanted to “Hold Your Hand” and reminded each of us teens that “All You Need is Love.” Pianist Floyd Cramer had his “Last Date.”
Remember how she went running back for his class ring in “Teen Angel?”
Among my most vivid memories from those years is a July weekend carport dance at the Harrison home of our late classmate Pebble Daniel (who went on to become a successful singer in Nashville).
That humid night, a herd of us going-steady, pimply 15-year-olds clutched and perspired to “Sealed with a Kiss” by Brian Hyland. We wound up drenched.
But we weren’t giving up the shuffling and squeezing because Hyland was reminding us how long and lonely the summer would be without his girlfriend.
If bonding messages are deeply imprinted in the feelings of innocent puppies, I assure you they also exist in passionate young human beings, especially when reinforced with all that melodic poetry of love and loss and dreaming and such.
I listened to the point where their common message of undying love apparently infiltrated my molecular core. I believe I must have left the front and rear doors to my brain and heart unlocked and standing wide open.
Now I’m not making excuses for my often admittedly unrealistic views that linger even after 50 years. It is what it is. I am faulting my naive willingness to so openly accept all that positive romantic musical reinforcement was real life.
We were promised that all we had to do was dream to forge a relationship rooted in undying affection. Some of us believed puppy love could overcome everything because it felt good and right to believe that.
For the life of me, I can’t recall a 1960s hit about paying the mortgage, managing a budget, raising kids, cleaning the house, or grinding out a living.
Wait. Come to think of it, Lesley Gore did try to yank our adolescent chains with her remake of “What Kind of Fool Am I.”
It’s also lots more fun to dream of an overly simplified life with a partner through innocent, romantic lyrics and poignant melodies about uncomplicated attachments as they saturated daily life 50 years ago.
I’m sure they sold more records with that message, too.
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Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 10/25/2011