"Kinda Wild and Free": the Good Little Bad Girl in '60s pop music

This is one of those posts that has been kicking around in my mind forever. There is a certain genre of vintage pop that can only be described as "class distinction morality tales". Songs like Down in the Boondocks and Dawn ("go away, I'm no good for you")  are nothing but self-pitying screams from "poor boys" who can never be good enough (economically? Socially?) for the wispy, likely virginal maidens they yearn for.

Then there's that other kind of girl.

Not on a pedestal. She don't have no money, her clothes are kind of funny, her hair is kind of wild and free. . . You know the kind. 

Windy. Eleanor. Rosemary. Sloopy. And those others, literally nameless, the "rag doll" and the "brown-eyed girl", immortalized in song and trapped forever in the fiery amber of 1960s youth.

There's something sweetly loose about these girls, the swingin' hair and slightly raggy, thrift-shoppy clothes, a free spirit who might be a little more than free with her sexual favors. It's there, not spelled out, but implied. In some ways this is only a celebration of non-conformity and breaking free from the dreadful shackles of convention. It's as if these guys (whoever they are - there must have been a lot of them) can only find personal freedom through these barefoot waifs who wade right into the public fountain and don't mind getting their (long, swingin') hair wet.

I can't possibly get into all the lyrics of these things - you can play them if you want! But there are themes which can be gleaned from taking a closer look at them.

Windy (The Association)

Who's trippin' down the streets of the city, smilin' at everybody she sees? Everyone knows it's Windy. It's a strange name, and I wonder if she was actually called Wendy in the first draft. This is the quintessential free-spirited-girl anthem, and it's fairly unremarkable except for a couple of truly memorable lines: "And Windy has stormy eyes/That flash at the sound of lies." This is startling, and reveals the core of morality in this raggedy girl who cannot stand phoniness and posing. Windy is going to be a bit of a challenge to anyone who can't see past her out-at-the-knees jeans and split ends. She'll find you out, catch you out, even as she reaches out to capture the moment. 

Eleanor (The Turtles)

This is kind of a strange one: "Eleanor, gee I think you're swell, and you really do me well, you're my pride and joy, ET CETERA". This is the ultimate blow-off of someone you care about: "I love you, etc. etc." - but it's also uniquely '60s, that offhandedness which is a thin disguise for a profound yearning to be captivated and captured by a free-spirited girl. The title of the movie Love, Actually seems to borrow from this sentiment. 

Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes)

"She ain't got no money, her clothes are kinda funny, her hair is kinda wild and free. . . " Oh yeah. You might not take this girl home to meet your mother, but you'd take her to the park, maybe even in the dark, smoke up, and get down to basics. "She talks kinda lazy, people say she's crazy, and her life's a mystery" - a common element among these characters, later immortalized in John Lennon's magnificent line: "It's a love that has no past." Like a lot of these girls (and by the way, they ARE girls, not women), there is an element of magic power and even mysticism about them: Rosemary  "really has a magical spell/And it's workin' so well" - that he can't get away.

Hang On Sloopy (The McCoys)

This is the true nitty-gritty, a real wrong-side-of-the-tracks scenario in which Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town, and "everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down". Sloopy reminds me a bit of "sloppy", of course, but a sloop is also a boat, and thus a symbol of freedom (remember the Beach Boys' sublime Sloop John B?). For some reason, in picturing Sloopy, I think of a girl in a torn grey sweatshirt hanging off one shoulder, and jeans so tight they look painted on. Long black hair and thick Cleopatra eyeliner, like very early Cher. 

The most provocative line, "Sloopy, I don't care what your Daddy do" makes you wonder: just how bad IS he, anyway? A thief, a pimp, a drug dealer, or just the local rag-and-bone man doing a dirty low-status job because somebody has to do it? The repeated chorus of "hang on, Sloopy/Sloopy, hang on" is a strange one - does he mean "hang on to your self-worth", or what? A loose girl hanging on - to what, we can never be sure. 

Along Comes Mary (The Association)

This one has a VERY interesting lyric, which I will actually reproduce here because to me, it has elements of Mariology (the study of apparitions of the Virgin Mary). The tune is basically one note, which is intriguing as the lyrics tumble over each other in one long blurt. But the words are unusually complex, a long skein of poetry with a subtext that is almost disturbing. This song was quoted in one of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts as an example of the Dorian Mode, though I doubt if The Association was thinking in those terms when they wrote it. You know you are NOT in typical pop-music-land when you hear lines like these: 

And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains she left the night before

Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more

Every time I think that I'm the only one who's lonely
Someone calls on me
And every now and then I spend my time in rhyme and verse
And curse those faults in me

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to give me kicks, and be my steady chick
And give me pick of memories
Or maybe rather gather tales of all the fails and tribulations
No one ever sees

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks
Whose sickness is the games they play
And when the masquerade is played and neighbor folks make jokes
As who is most to blame today

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to set them free, and let them see reality
From where she got her name
And will they struggle much when told that such a tender touch as hers
Will make them not the same

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed
And flaccid kids are flung across the stars
The psychodramas and the traumas gone
The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains
She left the night before
Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch 

Brown-eyed Girl (Van Morrison)

This one is literally about "makin' love in the green grass/Behind the stadium," which doesn't get much more nitty-gritty than that. It's all about having sex on the ground, outdoors, in public. The brown-eyed girl automatically has connotations of a girl who ISN'T blue-eyed/blonde (Aryan? Just kidding) - in fact, this may even be a way to racialize her in a subtle way, or paint her as a little exotic. Hey where did we go, days when the rains came? Down in the hollow, playin' a new game. Laughin' and a-runnin', skippin' and a-jumpin'. . . You know the rest. 

Rag Doll (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)

We're not even pretending that this girl is respectable. She's nicknamed "Hand-me-down" by the mean, judgemental folks in town, and is likely called much worse things. "Such a pretty face," Frankie Valli croons in that supernatural falsetto voice of his, "should be dressed in lace". This song has elements of fairy tale about it, portraying a sort of hidden worth that transcends rags and tatters, an inner purity and nobility which. . . well, maybe not. Cinderella this girl ain't, in fact she sounds kind of iffy to me. 


The rest of the town sees her as "easy", but Frankie insists she's so much more than that, and does not even want to change anything about her: "I love you just the way you are." But the last verse takes a pretty dark turn: "I'd change her sad rags into glad rags if I could/My folks won't let me 'cause they say that she's no good." It doesn't get much more graphic than that.

Baby Don't Go (Sonny and Cher)

This is one of my all-time-favorite songs by a vastly underrated pop duo, Sonny and Cher. Sonny wrote most of their hits, including Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, Little Man, Bang-Bang, and A Cowboy's Work is Never Done - all sharply witty, even edgy songs with smarter lyrics than people seem to realize. He's just dumb old Sonny Bono, isn't he? But without Sonny, there never would have been a Cher. 

He created her, Pygmalion-like, and she even acknowledged the fact long after they parted. She practically climbed up on his funeral pyre when he died skiing into a tree, and completely hijacked the funeral with her sobbing histrionics, embarrassing his widow who was sitting right there watching the production. At any rate, this time there's a twist to it and the song is from the girl's perspective, a teenage girl who has been traumatized by unspoken abuse. She comes across as an orphaned waif who "never had a mother" and hardly knew her Dad, and (of course) buys her rags and tatters at the second-hand store. 

The plaintive chorus "baby, don't go" seems to come from a phantom lover in response to her truly poignant and soul-baring soliloquy. It's as if she must spell out or even insist that "you're the only boy I've had" to try to defend her tattered reputation. The tight chords in the chorus with their astringent dissonance have the plaintive pull of a train whistle in the distance, the train she's about to catch as she leaves that intolerable place, that town without pity (to quote another classic). "When I get to the city/My tears will all be dried/My eyes will look so pretty/No one's gonna know I cried." Those are great lines, along with her promise to "be a lady some day". 

So what IS the scenario here? She has to go away - where, and why? To have an abortion? To evade a vagrancy charge? To get away from an abusive stepdad, or maybe just to prove that the town is wrong about her? It's never spelled out, but like Sloopy and Rag Doll, she has been surrounded by judgement and disapproval all her life just for being who she is, and must escape, must run for her life.

But the melancholy half-promise to that phantom lover adds another level of poignancy: "Maybe I'll be back some day." The implication is that she can't return until she has made herself worthy. I love this particular video from a '60s pop music show in which the dancers, all doing the jerk and the shing-a-ling, are photographed in a kind of kaleidoscope effect, while Cher, eyes rimmed in black Cleopatra kohl, sings this knockout song with a kind of expressionless deadpan. But my oh my, how Cher could sing back then, before she ruined her voice with that godawful forced-sounding vibrato. She sang with warmth, clarity and passion. As with the best poetry, so much is left unsaid, and we must fill in the blanks with our own yearnings. 

SPECIAL BONUS VIDEO! This is the clip with Leonard Bernstein playing an excerpt from Along Comes Mary, a song he was said to have admired for its dynamic chord structure and complex lyrics. Sweet as the punch!