I Wasn’t There

 by whiteray

A while back, writing in another location and pondering the music of the years between Buddy Holly’s death and the arrival in the United States of the Beatles (1959-64), I wrote “[I]t wasn’t quite the desert that some writers have claimed it to be,” which is probably as good an example as you’ll ever find of praising with faint damns. That praise should have been louder. 

(A confession: I borrowed that phrase – “praising with faint damns” – after recalling it this morning and then finding out it came from a 1980 headline in Time magazine, though I suppose it might have originated earlier. I only wish I were that clever.) 

A reader then dropped a note about those years, 1959 to 1964, reminding me of a genre I’d not mentioned: rock instrumentals, leading to surf instrumentals. He didn’t mention any performers’ names, but he didn’t have to; as I read his note, I thought instantly of the Ventures and of Dick Dale. And if I wanted to think a little harder, I could come up with many others. And in the course of thinking about that era over a few days, I realized that I’d given short shrift – actually no shrift at all – to the wonderful era of American pop that sprang from the Brill Building in New York and places like it. And that includes the early work of Phil Spector and his acolytes. 

Add in the early stirrings of Motown and Stax, and it was a far better era than I often think it was. 

And there lies the key word: “think.” I don’t remember that era, at least not musically. From the time the Beatles arrived here in the U.S. in early 1964, rock and pop surrounded me. As I’ve said before, I didn’t really listen to Top 40 at the time, but my sister, my peers and their siblings did. From 1964 onward, the sounds of pop and rock and soul and R&B were an inescapable portion of my environment, even if I didn’t pay much attention. 

So when I think about, say, “This Diamond Ring” (which happens to come to mind), I remember hearing it when it hit the charts in 1965 and went to No. 1 for two weeks. I remember hearing it while visiting friends. I recall who liked it and who didn’t. I was there. But when – to pull another one out of the hat – the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (the No. 2 record for the entire year of 1961) shows up, it’s different. 

I know the record, and I’ve read a fair amount about it: I think it’s a Gerry Goffin/Carole King song. (It is, but I had to grab a reference book to make sure of it, and to make certain I had his first name right.) I know that Dave Marsh wrote an interesting essay about the record in The Heart of Rock & Soul, which I probably would refer to if I wrote about the record. But I don’t know how it felt to hear it coming out of the radio as I hung out in my pal Rick’s basement or in our kitchen or in my bedroom. I wasn’t there. 

When I began digging into record collecting, I unintentionally set 1964 as my starting date for pop and rock, because that’s what I remembered. When I got interested in blues, I dug back through the early 1960s and into the 1950s and the years before that. Then I started digging into early rock & roll, the 1950s stuff that evolved from R&B and its cousin, the jump blues. And then I followed rock & roll along the evolutionary path as far as Buddy Holly and 1959. And I stopped. Most of what I have from the years from 1959 to 1964 is blues, deep R&B and instrumental pop, things that didn’t frequently make the Top 40. 

The same thing happened when I got my first modern computer in early 2000 and began to collect mp3s. I was aware that I was ignoring much of the popular music from those years as I borrowed CDs from the library and from friends and ripped them to put into my collection. As I began that collection, I had, of course, no inkling that I would eventually be writing about (mostly) music from the 1960s and the 1970s. Would I have altered my collecting patterns had I known? 

Maybe not. I’ve been writing about music for more than fourteen years now, and I still don’t have a great deal of pop-rock and popular R&B from those years. I’ve got some, and I’ll likely get more. But I doubt if I’ll ever love the Top 40 music from that time the way I do the music of the years that follow it. And I doubt I’ll ever be as comfortable writing about the Top 40 music of those early years as I am writing about the sounds of the years that came after. 

I wasn’t there. 

And we may as well listen to “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis & The Playboys. Produced by Snuff Garrett and arranged by Leon Russell, it was the first of seven straight hits for the group in the Billboard Top Ten over a period of about three years. They hung around making records for another six years, but with generally diminishing returns.