“Cherish is the word I use to describe
All the feelings that I have hiding here for you inside."
That lyric opens up “Cherish,” a number-one hit for the Association in 1966. It isn’t a good lyric. At least, I don’t think it is.
It is a forced construction. No one talks like that. That’s not how you would say it to your best girl or guy. Of course, I realize that songs aren’t bound by the rules of common speech. But the best lyricists can speak in the vernacular.
Even “poets” like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen adopted a more conversational tone. They certainly never would have said “Cherish in the word I use to describe…” That sounds more like an improperly phrased Jeopardy answer.
Five truly awful hits from the 1960s
“Cherish” was written by Terry Kirkman, vocalist with The Association. According to Billboard, it was the seventh biggest song of 1966. I am not going to include it on the following list of bad popular songs from the 1960s because … well ... I really don’t think it’s all that bad a song.
If it comes on the radio while I am driving, I will most likely switch the station in search of something I like more, but I don’t automatically think “I must run screaming from this song.”
That is the radio test. I know that for many younger people, the car radio is a quaint, outdated notion, like cotillions or the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. But if you are of a certain age, you know this feeling. A song comes on, and you think one of three things:
This is awesome
I think I can do better or…
I could not possibly do any worse.
You change the station in either the second or third scenario. Today, we look at songs that are firmly housed in option 3. They have to be hits, loosely defined as a Billboard top 100 from the year of release. And they have to make me switch stations instantly.
“Little Children” by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (1964)
Billy J. Kramer was one of the first beneficiaries of the Beatles’ largesse. He scored a number of hits in the early ‘60s with Lennon/McCartney songs – most notably 1963’s “Do You Want to Know a Secret.”
He branched out the following year, recording a track co-written by successful Brill Building songsmith Mort Shuman. It was called “Little Children” and was Billboard’s 18th most popular song of 1964.
The lyrics, though ultimately benign, are about as creepy as a pop song can get.
“Little children, you better not tell what you see
And if you’re good, I’ll give you some candy and a quarter
It you’re quiet. Like you ought to be
And keep a secret with me.”
Now, we will come to find out that the singer just doesn’t want the kids in question to tell how he was kissing their (presumably) older sister, but this does kind of sound like something far more insidious. Add it to the music, which somehow manages to be sing-songy and ponderous at the same time, and you have the recipe for a song I never need to hear again.
“Last Kiss” by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers (1964)
There is a fine tradition of pop songs about your lover dying. Some of them can be quite touching. Others …. not so much.
Wayne Cochran originally recorded this happy/whiny tune about a dead girlfriend in 1961, but J. Frank Wilson made it a huge hit a few years later. It finished in the top ten for the entire year. It is tuneful, with its jazzy high hat and some background voices swirling above (I suppose they are meant to be angels), as Wilson croons...
“Where oh where can my baby be? – The lord took her away from me.”
... and promises to live a clean (celibate?) life so that can be worthy of her one day in heaven.
The song goes into intimate detail about the actual death and Wilson ups the octave to share how serious he is.
Now, as I said, these types of songs can be good or they can be bad. The Shangri-Las had a major hit the same year with “Leader of the Pack.” And Richard Thompson’s “Vincent Black Lightning 1952” is one of the best acoustic guitar songs ever written. The boyfriends in both songs end up dead. But they die in motorcycle crashes, which is apparently a cooler way to go in a rock song.
Or maybe “Last Kiss” just needed more gravitas in the performance. You know, so that the downbeat subject matter wouldn't seem so frivolous. You know who would be perfect for this song? Someone like Eddie Vedder. Eddie could pull it off. If anyone is Insta friends with Pearl Jam, you might suggest they try covering “Last Kiss.”
“Sweet Pea” by Tommy Roe (1966)
Pre-British invasion, the kind of pop-rock that Tommy Roe did sounded pretty good. Witness “Sheila” from 1962. I can get into that song, even with the somewhat stilted, babyish vocals.
Fast forward two years. Now, Roe is singing a love song about the girl with the single worst nickname in pop music history. And he has an annoying melody and accompanying organ that sounds a bit like a dentist’s drill.
But Roe didn’t stop there. After “Sweet Pea,” which was a major hit in the USA, he followed up with “Hooray for Hazel,” which is an update on the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown,” only about 67 times worse.
Alas, though both songs were hits, the era of Tommy Roe-style pop was at an end.
“Little Green Apples” by O.C. Smith (1968)
When my son was little, we bought him a toy called Pianosaurus. It was a little plastic “piano” shaped like a dinosaur. All the keys basically played the same note. It sounded hollow, tinny, and thin. But it was a kids’ toy, and we all had fun pounding on it, Jerry Lee Lewis-style.
I suspect that producer Jerry Fuller used a pianosaurus to play the keyboard part of O. C. Smith’s “Little Green Apples.” Now I need to distinguish something here. The song “Little Green Apples,” as written by Bobby Russell, is perfectly fine, if a tad sentimental. Roger Miller did an early version with just a gentle acoustic guitar, and it borders on beautiful. Patti Page did a slightly more energetic version herself, which is very sweet.
The song itself is fine. And veteran soul crooner O.C. Smith knows how to sing. The problem comes from Fuller’s massively overwrought production. Not only do we get Pianosaurus, but we also have a supremely annoying soprano choir hovering over Smith’s vocals. Any time he threatens to make the song listenable, that orchestration or those backup voices swoop in to rain on the parade.
“Young Girl” by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap (1968)
I really didn’t set out to pick on Jerry Fuller. I mean, he wrote Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” for god’s sake. That scores some points in my book. But that was in 1961. By the end of the decade, Fuller had become a producer. When he wasn’t busy ruining “Little Green Apples,” he was launching Gary Puckett & the Union Gap on the world.
Puckett and his band had a Civil War gimmick. Yeah – I don’t really get it either. It’s not as if they were singing old-timey bluegrass-tinged songs. They were singing generic late-‘60s pop, often penned by Fuller. The songs played on Puckett’s powerful baritone and his apparently unquenchable thirst for young women.
I suppose Fuller had been diving in there since the days of “Travelin’ Man,” but it somehow didn’t seem as cringey when Ricky Nelson was singing it.
In “Young Girl” and its follow-up “Lady Willpower,” Puckett (or Fuller) is fighting the epic moral battle over whether or not to bed a naïve young woman. In the latter song, she may simply be inexperienced. In the former, it’s pretty clear that she is underage.
Yet in classic fashion, he warns her she “better run, girl,” because, of course, being an adult man, there is no way he can possibly be trusted around her.
I don’t want to sound like a prude or a revisionist. There are rock songs that I like that have similarly troubling subject matter. I sang Jimmy Buffett’s “Livingston Saturday Night” for years before I understood what the lyric “Fifteen may get you twenty, but that’s all right” meant. And I didn’t stop singing it when I did learn.
But Puckett and Fuller turn the whole thing into such a maudlin melodrama. Like “Little Children,” which shares a similar ick factor, it’s just not a very good song.
But you know what is a good song? “Along Came Mary,” by The Association. I figure that since I dissed them at the beginning with my underwhelming endorsement of “Cherish,” I’d throw a little love their way at the end.