#384) “Will You be Staying After Sunday” by The Peppermint Rainbow - I was born into a world of Sunshine Pop, man. Technically, its hey-day was the late sixties, but I was lucky for where I grew up. Those close chilly harmonies and striated string notes strung like clothesline between bright white clouds, that rummage closet assemblage of acoustic guitar, horns, harps and harpsichord, that tambourine rattle pairing so well with the simple metallic tap of a 3-piece kit, was still being played on our town’s small, isolated radio station through the Carter administration, still actively part of its morning and afternoon playlists, in between which painfully local spots and weather forecasts were heard.
Which meant that in any space where musical sound was tinkling and crinkling out of tiny, tinny, wired tweeters, Sunshine Pop was there, hanging around the periphery of my consciousness, trimming all hard edges like garland, and yes, helping me put faces with the names of the grownups in my life, whom it was only just yesterday I had started to really be aware of.
And if not from a radio, then some off-brand version of that oft-mimicked sound was sure to be heard in other places, from movie soundtracks to TV theme songs to commercial jingles and certainly children’s programming. From Saturday morning cartoons, to PBS at lunchtime to after-school specials, throughout the 1970s a veritable musical rainbow of Burt Bacarach/Roger Nichols/Paul Williams-inspired melodies and arrangements delivered an exquisite blend of information, comfort, virtue signaling and a little plainclothes angst to Generation X as they emerged from diapers and learned to ride bikes.
I’m happy to have been born into it, kind of relieved, actually, that my parents were easy listeners as opposed to rock and rollers. Sunshine Pop was extremely good music to be a little kid to, and no other song better exemplifies the auditory essence of the genre than “Will You Be Staying After Sunday?” by The Peppermint Rainbow, released in the spring of 1969.
That "essence" was propagated not only by the practice of prioritizing melody and harmony over vocals and rhythm, but also in being deceptively cheery. The subtext of so much Sunshine Pop often involved as much cloud cover as sunshine. On the surface, "Will You be Staying After Sunday?" is musically light and airy, almost sounds like the "sunshine" itself, but the woman singing, the protagonist if you will, is struggling with what's coming. There is a subtle element of foreboding afoot, a disquiet that sounds distant, like a storm on the horizon. You're not necessarily involved, and it isn't necessarily affecting you, but you're aware of it. Aware that the sunny skies might not last, that there is likely to be, at the very least, a sun shower.
That dynamic tension, heard as much in the music as in the lyrics, did nothing less than color the perception of this four to ten-year old Gen X'er as he emerged from diapers and learned to ride a bike.
"Don't let a lonely Monday come again ..."
#385) “Desert Moon” by Dennis DeYoung – This song haunts me. Not
so much for the song itself, although I do think that, for all it ever wanted or tried
to be, "Desert Moon", released in autumn 1984, holds up better than many other, "FM 95.7 Light Hits..." staples. Some of the lyrics are actually pretty good ... poetic.
But
what I remember most about it is the video.
In it, Dennis DeYoung returns home, presumably for a high school reunion, and over the course of a weekend, it would seem a real sun-drenched, “you can’t go home again” vibe is engaged by Dennis and his buddies. There was a girl he loved who moved away, and clearly he's not forgotten her, and this ongoing longing sullies the visit.
It's a video from the golden age of MTV, when, well, first of all, the "M" still stood for music, but also a time period when many new videos were trying cinematic themes on for size. That simply doesn't happen anymore. Not the same way. I mean, just the notion of depicting something so Alan Alda-ish as a high school reunion weekend seems unlikely ever to happen in a video for a Top 10 single nowadays. And even at the time, it might have been better suited for VH-1 than MTV.
I wasn't 28 or 38 in 1985, I was twelve (and a fan of Alan Alda's The Four Seasons, actually), so I responded to the sense of sumptuous melancholy depicted in the video, to the notion of times and people changing in some ways and not changing in other ways, and all of it right when I was feeling the anxiety of my older brother graduating high school and leaving the house for good. In fact, the brother aspect of the video is probably what initially got my attention. DeYoung is greeted home by his younger brother at the beginning, and his younger brother sees him off at the end, leaving him waiting for a train out of town, where they share these final potent words:
“Do
you know where you’re going?”
“I don’t
know ... maybe Chicago.”
I admit it reads a bit corny now, but it was nothing less than evocative when I was twelve.
And fine, I admit: it still kind of is.
"When a whistle cut the night, and shook silence from our lives..."
