While walking to my car after leaving work this past Friday, the horribly annoying song '65 Love Affair creeped into my head, which is what I assume happens to most Americans as they start their weekends, and I came to the realization that songs with a past year in its title usually chomp the big one. Others immediately sprang to mind (Bryan Adams's Summer of '69 and the Four Seasons' (December 1963) Oh ,What a Night- only the Young Rascals' fine Nineteen Fifty Six is an exception, but, then again, the Young Rascals were an exception to a lot of rules); funnily enough, songs with a future year in their titles usually rock, such as Paul McCartney's Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five, Prince's 1999, and, as a stretch, Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (from 2001: A Space Odyssey).
I really hate Paul Davis's '65 Love Affair, where the singer wistfully recalls a fleeting love affair. From the Sha-Na-Na meets eighties' drum machine production to the annoying chorus "do-wop-diddy, wop-diddy, wop-doo," which attempts to evoke nostalgic emotion in ways the naive lyrics do not, enough parts are in place to make one have an innate desire to just start shooting. What really gets to me, however, is the line "rock and roll was simple and clear." From my vantage point as a student of rock-and-roll history, 1965 was precisely the point in rock history where lyrics started getting more complicated. Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone reached 2 on the charts, the Byrds took Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man and Pete Seeger's Turn! Turn! Turn !to 1, the Beatles took Help!, We Can Work it Out/Day Tripper, and Ticket to Ride to the top of the charts and released Rubber Soul, the Stones released Satisfaction and Get Off Of My Cloud, and I haven't even brought up Motown and the Beach Boys yet. Lyrics would even get more complex in 1966.
(For a critique of the air-headed awfulness of Bryan Adams's Summer of '69, please read Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell's 1991 masterpiece The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time. Do I really need to break down why the Four Seasons' song is so wretched?)
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