Saturday Night Prayer Meeting

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To limber up the blogging muscles again, I present a 50-year-old gem from the twilight of Kennedy Rock.



NPR had a piece about this tune on Friday, which I half-heard out of the corner of my ear. It comes from the brief era of Top 40 radio when adult middle-of-the-road hits could chart alongside hot rod and surf music on Clark Weber's Silver Dollar Survey countdown. I've always loved the spring-loaded trombone ensemble schmaltz mixed down just right.

The genre of Kennedy Rock is a personal conceit that popped into my head about 20 years ago. Examples fall along a spectrum of jazz-inflected pop and slickly produced pop with soft-rock "sonorities." Many examples, such as Bobby Vee's "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes", are arranged around nifty chamber orchestras and recorded in rooms whose acoustics you can actually hear. Other, like "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby and The Romantics, start exploring the use of the studio as an "instrument" instead of just a room to record in. I imagine that Kennedy Rock was targeted at young housewives and working girls who hung onto their AM radio listening habit after graduating high school.

All of this is strictly in my own head, you understand. I've been meaning to systematically analyze the "genre's" characteristics, though, because I actually feel that it's a real thing. Two difficulties I've had: one is that this flavor of oldie gets very little airplay, so it's just plain hard to call examples to mind; the other is that I've found it risky to buy MP3 oldies singles because companies that license these songs for reissue often ratfuck the original mixes, thereby spoiling the listening experience. So my research and enjoyment of this (imaginary) genre has been thwarted by sleaze merchants.

Anyway, go ahead and revel in this one, from the age of "Sputnik" bubble gumballs, Universal Studios monster trading cards, and bald, bespectacled AM rock disk jockeys.

Sukiyaki, Kyu Sakamoto (1963, Capitol Records [catalog number not known]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Friday Night Prayer Meeting

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Buddy Holly performing in a sub-genre that I've christened as "Kennedy Rock":



I have an iTunes placeholder playlist that I intend to populate with Kennedy Rock, which to me is evocative of a period during the dawn of my pop musical consciousness that roughly corresponded in time to the Kennedy administration. To make my playlist, a song must showcase a strong melody performed by a distinctive, youthful pop voice, and is usually accompanied, at least, by a studio chamber orchestra. Additionally, they may display unusual studio production methods that, technologically, are uniquely of that period. An example of the former would be "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes," by Bobby Vee; examples of the latter would include "It Might As Well Rain Until September" by Carole King or "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby and the Romantics. What they all have in common is that most of them bounce and the sister formerly known as Oscar would think they were swell. I imagine these songs to have been marketed to girls graduating from high school during the Camelot era and launching their lives in the typing pool or as homemakers, listening to the radio while ironing their A-line skirts or their husband's monogrammed hankies.

While not a huge fan of Buddy Holly, I don't have anything against him, and do highly esteem a few of his performances, especially this one. It's a highlight, in my opinion, of "The Buddy Holly Story," and the recreation of it in the movie may even be better than his original. Of course it's hard to ignore that this cut is not rock and roll in any elemental sense --- it's adult middle-of-the-road pop performed by a rock idol (which is another way to describe Kennedy Rock, I guess). Nothing wrong with that it the sound is nice, but it makes me wonder what we'd think about Holly today if he'd flown out of Iowa alive in February 1959. Would he have totally fallen into this "pretty" style of music on his agent's advice? And what then, after that --- Vegas? Branson?

True Love Ways, Buddy Holly (1960, Coral 57326/757326), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.