The past in music

The lyrics coming from the other room weren’t exactly the sort of stuff that flowed from Shakespeare’s pen.
“Wouldn’t you agree,” some guy warbled, “baby, you and me got a groovy kind of love?”
“Who sang that?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”
“The Lemonpipers?” asked my wife.
“No, The Lemonpipers were from Oxford, Ohio,” I said. “That was an English group.”
And for that, I received a laurel and hearty handshake, the only door prize available on a December weekend evening.
The warbling, I soon discovered, came from a guy named Wayne Fontana, lead singer in the mid-1960s for a group named Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders.
And there he was on my television set, looking a lot less worse for wear than he had in the mid-1960s.
Warbling Wayne, decked out in a zebra-patterned fedora atop his shaggy, gray locks, was accompanied by a much younger group of musicians. I doubt there was an original Mindbender among them. (What, precisely, was a “mindbender” anyway?)
Two minutes later, in spite of myself, I was singing along. So was my wife.
It was one of those dreadful but addictive Public Broadcasting System pledge-week fund-raisers, a special reprise of the music of the “British invasion” while trying to squeeze donations out of aging Baby Boomers and simultaneously pitching a CD full of “Groovy Kind of Love” and its equivalents.
And, again in spite of myself, I soon joined my wife on the sofa and awaited the next group of decrepit, burned-out, off-key, should-have-retired-long-ago rockers to take the stage.
Back in the day, I took a certain amount of pride in the great rock musicians I’d had the pleasure of seeing and hearing live in venues that ranged from the Delaware County Fairgrounds to London’s Hyde Park.
As such lists go, it’s a pretty good one:
•Jimi Hendrix in 1968 in Muncie.
•Cream on its first U.S. tour.
•The Who at the Indiana State Fair.
•Herman’s Hermits, a group I detested, at the same Indiana State Fair concert.
•Led Zeppelin at a tiny club called Klook’s Kleek above a London pub.
•Fleetwood Mac at an open-air concert at Hampstead Heath in London, until some skinheads broke it up by throwing bottles at the band.
•Blind Faith at Hyde Park.
That’s just a partial accounting.
Add to that American rockers like Janis Joplin — Connie and I saw her in Cincinnati on her last tour with Big Brother and the Holding Company — and Rick Derringer, back when he was Rick Zehringer from Union City and The McCoys were still Rick and the Raiders, and you’ve got a darned good list.
The great music of the ‘60s wasn’t wasted on us.
So, there we sat on the couch, watching these old guys take the stage, one after another, performing the same music they’d performed when we were in high school for perhaps the ten thousandth time.
It’s hard to imagine a more potent mixture of nostalgia and a sense of one’s own mortality.
We cheerfully sang along when aging performers rose to the occasion: Lulu was pretty darned impressive, though we wouldn’t want to count the cosmetic surgeries. And the Zombies still rocked.
Others were cringe-worthy.[[In-content Ad]]