Friendly Forebear #1: Marty Wilde: "A Teenager In Love"

We are now in the summer of '59; the last summer of the 50s and a time when the charts were very slow...and also the time when the UK started to have its own idols battling for the hearts (and pocketbooks) of those new creatures, teenagers. They were powerful (so many of them!) and yet powerless; brave enough to fall in love, to cry, to sigh...and understandably myopic enough to have a song boldly empathize with their sometimes sorry plight. Being in love is hard work, Pomus and Shuman remind us, but the narrator in question is loyal and true, long-suffering and ultimately philosophical.

Why must he be in love? Is it to fight and make up, only to fight again? To learn to be more forgiving, perhaps? Love here is one big starry-eyed existentialist ordeal, and while Dion and the Belmonts* do a more than fine version of this song, Wilde's version is about as close to New Pop as the song could possibly get; his is the right proper way of saying all at once "this is a fine life alright, being a teenager, SIGH" and "you know this song is sort of meta, right?" His performance of this practically gives this away, his minimalism as striking as anything coming out of Swedish furniture design at the time. He makes Cliff look like the earnest worker bee that he was (and is). It should be no surprise, then, that Wilde is a literal father to New Pop (via his son Ricky and daughter Kim) as well as a friendly forebear of it here, looking like a cross between Edwyn Collins and Martin Fry, just barely moving and yet saying it all, just as teenagers always want to do.

*If anyone was wondering if I was able to fully appreciate the work of Phil Spector, well, I do! And not just for his work with girl groups, either. In 1975 he produced Dion's tremendously awesomesauce Born to Be With You, which deserves more praise and attention (such as it gets here).

The Original Thing: The Four Aces: "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing"

Having successfully avoided being stomped to death by the seemingly-endless marching chorale of Mitch Miller, let’s go, dear readers, to a place far more desirable – a high, windy and misty hill. It’s the morning, and no one is around – it is blessedly quiet and beautiful, exactly the kind of place for a lovers’ rendevous. Is the world standing still? Is the man wearing a crown of gold? When the lovers kiss the world indeed does stand still, and when fingers touch, the heart learns to live and sing.

The word ‘splendor’ comes from the Latin word for ‘shine’ – thus, love creates things that are shiny, that reflect back to the world a richer, newer and yet fragile world that may well start on that high and windy hill but also may end there, if circumstances surrounding it – such as, in the case of this novel/movie, the girl’s family – don’t agree that he (a British reporter in the book, but in the movie since he’s played by William Holden, an American one) is an acceptable, desirable mate. Obstacles to love only increase it, however – and if the love has to come to a halt, that doesn’t mean it has to come to an end. Shiny ever-new love, rare and dogged, will continue, just as nature itself does.

This song marks a first here for the list – a song that attempts to define what love ‘is’. Never before, at least in this narrow channel, has love been talked about in any direct way – lovesickness, yes, joy and contentment, sure, but not love itself. (Well okay, but 'amore' is different and what is happening here isn't falling in love, so much as being in love, particularly of the doomed-but-dogged kind.) For those of you wondering when I am going to get to New Pop and then chastising yourself for being too early – well, you’re not. It is exactly this kind of song in particular that New Pop built itself on. (It could be called Original Pop.) Granted, the cliches of love are not a new thing in late ’55, but it is the putting them into a song part that counts. What is love? It is a many-splendored thing. It has many shiny parts (some most definitely yellow), it glows and twinkles and is a power unto itself. It is the same no matter if you are in the exotic world of Hong Kong or London or Pennsylvania, where the Four Aces were from. A high, windy, grassy hill; a clear proclamation to the world; a gentle melody full of soaring notes. The hills may be alive here, but it is the feeling of love, inside and out, that matters.