NONKINSENSE
Adventures of an Analog Man in the Digital Universe, with a little help from my friends and relations.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Starriders with a Tribute to some Original Girls on Top.
Knockouts
Blame it on Roman, who recommended "Remember Walking in the Sand." But here comes a message worthy of Nonkinsense, which is why I'm sending it to Ira too.
Yesterday, while making up a chord chart for Remember Walking in the Sand, I figured I'd take a look and see what became of my youthful crush - Mary Weiss, the lead singer for the Shangri-Las. Mary seemed so grown up at the time, but looking back, I see she was only 16-18 during the Shangri-Las glory years. Of course, I was only about 10 or 11.
They came from Queens and went to Andrew Jackson High School, which I remember because a few of my older sister's friends, who also went to Andrew Jackson, knew them.
The way I remember it, the Shangri-Las were the original bad girls of rock, if not quite so bad as the later bad girls. They dressed in tight black leather, and sang about bikers, bad boys, and death. And yet there was an innocence about them. Mary couldn't really pull off the tough image, and even in black leather she still looked angelic. Still, if they'd made videos back then, it would have been in keeping with their image to finish "Walking in the Sand" with Mary wading out into the ocean as the music faded, suggesting that she was going to drown herself.
"Give Him a Great Big Kiss" has to be one of the first examples in which "bad" was used to desribe good, with the immortal words: "I hear he's bad." "He's good bad, but he's not evil." You know these girls were bad, and way ahead of their time, when they deliberately misspelled a word: "When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love, L-U-V."
But the corniest line in all music has to be this exchange: "What color are his eyes?" "I don't know, he's always wearing shades." Shades - the symbol of ultimate evil and cool back then, unless worn on the beach or baseball field. And yet the innocence implied in the same line - she's never even seen him without his shades. Unless he wore his shades to bed - which would be truly frightening, if not evil - we can assume they never made to bed.
I might be stretching this a bit, but it always struck me that there was a bit of a protest message in "Remember Walking in the Sand." Not exactly antiwar, but anti-draft. It's obvious that her boyfriend had been drafted. After all, he's been gone for two years and he's overseas. (The Shagri-Las didn't sing about the elite rich or even poor Rhodes scholars studying at Cambridge. They sang about rebels and bad boys). So there's really no other way to explain why she expected him to return after a two year absence, and is therefore shattered by his letter saying he's not coming back to her. If the record had been made just a year later, when the Vietnam War turned really ugly, though antiwar songs were still off limits (outside folk music), it would have been in keeping with the Shangri-Las to have gotten a letter saying he's not returning because he's been killed.
Yes, they are easy to spoof today. In fact, they invited spoof in their own day. Leader of the Laundromat was a spoof of Leader of the Pack. But in the next few years, their producer, Shadow Morton, would go on to produce such artists as the Vanilla Fudge, Janis Ian and Mott the Hoople. And that's cool.
Well, that's enough Nonkinsense for the moment.
Rob
