The Baton Twirler & The Red Army

 by whiteray 

One of the things about music that fascinates me is my reactions to pieces I’ve long loved. When one of those songs cycles randomly through the iPod or shows up on the radio while I’m driving down Division Street, what are the first thoughts, the first images that come to mind? 

Mostly, those long-loved records bring back people, times and places that are also cherished. Sometimes, the connections between the record and the images of memory are harder to figure out. “Desiderata,” the spoken-word record that was a hit for Les Crane in 1971, takes me back for just a moment to 1971 and a corridor outside the bookstore at a college in St. Cloud, Minnesota, my home town. I’m not sure why. 

Another record, one I like much more than I like “Desiderata,” presents me with an odd collage of images. Whenever I hear its percussive introduction and its swelling harmonies, I see in my mind – jarringly – Soviet tanks and troops entering Prague, Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, crushing the liberalization of government and life there, a period now known as the Prague Spring. 

And after a split-second of that, the strains of “Turn Around, Look At Me” by the Vogues bring to mind something far more normal: memories of a young woman. I see her first as a baton twirler in the South Junior High musical, and then I see her walking the school’s hallways, clearly looking for something. If only she’d turned around, I often thought during the following summer of 1968, the summer between freshman and sophomore years, the summer when “Turn Around, Look At Me” went to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and to No. 3 on the easy listening chart). 

With its strings piled on top of horns and its lush vocals (ending with what a musician friend of mine used to call “an MGM climax”), “Turn Around, Look At Me” is a beautiful record that is not at all of its time. Listening to it this morning, I pegged it as being far more appropriate for the years 1957-62, perhaps recorded by one of those male vocal groups with a number in its name: the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads, the Four Dorks. But that displacement in style and time probably worked for the record among the listening public. The week “Turn Around, Look At Me” reached its peak at No. 7, the other records in the Top Ten were: 

“People Got To Be Free” by the Rascals
“Hello, I Love You” by the Doors
“Classical Gas” by Mason Williams
“Born to Be Wild” by Steppenwolf
“Light My Fire” by José Feliciano
“Stoned Soul Picnic” by the 5th Dimension
“Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream
“Grazing in the Grass” by Hugh Masekela
“Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan

 That’s a great bunch of records, but the nearest things to the lush pop of the Vogues there are the Latin-tinged cover of “Light My Fire” and Mason Williams’ instrumental, and neither of those are really in the same block as “Turn Around, Look At Me.”

 For me, the lushness of the Vogues’ pop was certainly one of the attractions of “Turn Around, Look At Me.” Rock music was not yet my thing, and it was nice to hear something easy to listen to coming from the radio, and it was even nicer that the record spoke to my life. As the summer faded and the school year began, I still hoped that the baton twirler might figuratively turn around. She never did, and I guess I knew at the time that would be the case no matter how fervent my hope. 

So the song slid from the charts and quit coming out of the radio, but before it did, sometime during August, I must have heard the song at least once very close to the time when international news reporters were giving us the lowdown on what was happening in Prague and elsewhere in Czechoslovakia. Because for more than fifty years, when the first strains of that lovely song reach my ears, it seems as if I have to fight my way through the Red Army to get to the sweet object of my hope. 

And how’s that for a romantic notion?