For me, there are really two songs.
BE MY BABY (The Ronettes) reminds of the first boy I came as close as a fifteen-sixteen year old can come to loving.
The second one is WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? (Supremes). I was sixteen also and newly finished with that boy. I had a summer job working as a waitress in a resort town. That song blared from every car radio that summer. It epitomized the end of that going nowhere relationship and the beginning of being on my own. Of course, another n'er do well boy came along...
I wonder if most songs you love as a teenager do this. What about you?
35 comments:
Patti - I'll have to think about that one for me personally. But I am always amazed at the way certain music seems so powerful just for that reason. It takes us back to a pivotal time in life.
The Flamingos, I Only Have Eyes For You. I think it's the melancholy and yearning in the arrangement.
Oh, God. That was a very romantic song.
I know for my late teens, it would be something Disco or perhaps pre-Disco. The BeeGee's Jive Talking or the songs in the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. For my mid-teens, there are so many, I can't narrow it down. Perhaps America's Horse with No Name, which was staggeringly popular when I was in junior high.
Deb
Bee Gees define my young motherhood.
It would have to be almost anything by The Beatles. Puberty hit me about the same time they were making a splash in the States.
Great song, Ron, but before my time.
From teenage years:
Runaway (still my favorite)
Sealed With a Kiss (first girlfriend, summer of '62)
Summer in the City (boy, was it a hot summer!)
Happy Together (when Jackie and I started going out, in '67)
Jeff M.
Yes, the Beatles certainly made the most lasting impression. I was fifteen and in our new car when my Dad turned on the radio and "SHE LOVES YOU" was playing.
RUNAWAY is the perfect rock song, isn't it?
Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan-Sounded like nothing anyone else was doing. Also Satisfatction by the Stones, I Can't Explain & My Generation by The Who. So much going on in the 60's.
Yeah, I guess social unrest and war produces good music.
As a teenager, I developed a love for MOTOWN music: Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Temptations, the Supremes,
and Smokey Robinson. I couldn't get enough.
Too many songs to pick a teen favourite but I enjoyed listening to Abba, BeeGees, Cliff Richard, John Denver, Donna Summer, Laura Branigan, Frank Sinatra, Peter Frampton, and Neil Diamond.
I just read a piece - I think it is in the Sunday NY Times - where Brian Wilson is quoted as saying the "Be My Baby" is the perfect record. It is definitely one of the songs I most remember from those years along with "Chapel of Love" (1964) and "Satisfaction" (1965) among others.
Besides the Lovin' Spoonful song mentioned above one that epitomized summer in the city for me was "Groovin'" (1967). When I hear it, it takes me back to that time and place every time.
Jeff M.
There is nothing more evocative than a song. It shoots you back to a time and place like nothing else.
This:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFi7p6NB3LY
Of course, once I had a car...the "Mystery Dance" lessons were mor frequent.
K
Joy Division, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart.' I feel like the baby here, and the song came out five years before my graduation.
Cherish the days, Kelly, It will turn around soon enough.
I'll pick three: "Blue Moon" by the Marcels and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by the Tokens and "Surfin' by the Beach Boys.
My teenage years spanned some big changes in rock music, from Carl Perkins to Motown to Surf to the British Invasion, so it very tough. From "Tequila" and "(Who Wrote the) Book of Love" to "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch", "Up on the Roof" and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" and all the rest of the Supremes, Four Tops, Temptations etc. Also there was the surf music. I went nuts when "Surfin'" by the Beach Boys came out, then "Surfin' Safari" and all the rest of that music. So I guess it was rock-motown-surf-British, because then came "I Want to Hold Your Hand" "Please Please Me" and "Satisfaction" and "Get Off of My Cloud".
I may have been in my early 20s by the time I was listening to the Turtles, Crosby Stills and Nash, Bee Gees and Cream.
Sadly the ec song does not ring a bell, Where was I?
Ditto, Rick .
It came along late in my teen years, but I'd probably have to go with "A Horse With No Name". That was a huge song.
"Light My Fire" would be right up there, too. The Doors were my favorite group from the Sixties.
Oh, and "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night. I'll stop now.
From my high school years in Westwood CA: "Be True To Your School" by the Beach Boys and "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones.
(The band at my senior prom asked for requests and was asked to play "Satisfaction"--it had been released a week or two before and the band couldn't because they didn't know it well enough...)
From my college days (and from the days and nights with my first love):
"Darling Be Home Soon" by the Lovin' Spoonful; and "Yesterday's Papers" by the Rolling Stones.
These shifted wildly from early to late teens, from sappy (California sound) to rebellion (Sex Pistols), for instance.
Motown is always groovy in a wistful kind of way.
Is the question which song describes our lives as teenagers or which song we loved as a teenager? I thought it was the former. If so, "Mr. Blue" would be mine. I have a special place in my heart for the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better" because it was the song I sang (with Joe Travis) that secured my place as the lead singer of The Violations.
"What Do I Get?" by Buzzcocks (note: there's no "the" in "Buzzcocks"). Cap'n Bob suggested two interpretations of the topic and this song works either way for me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EEPvXlTUnU
Beer drinkers and hell raisers, by Z. Z. Top
Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" is the first song I think of that reminds me of my best teen years. Most of my teen years were horrid and I prefer not to remember them.
"The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia" was the very first 45 I purchased. That also reminds me of my teen life for a variety of reasons. It's also a murder mystery set to music and I thought that was brilliant at the time.
If you ask me about my college days and my 20s and I might be able to write a 25 page essay on how music helped define me.
"Panama" by Van Halen was the anthem of my teenhood. Still a great song, but now I think - really? THIS was me at 15?
"Life" by Flipper ("Life is the only thing worth living for...")
"Anne Frank Story" by Human Sexual Response (since being at the periphery of both huge and small historical events seemed like human destiny...a suspicion that doesn't seem too much different now)
I can actually remember that tune, Todd. The Flipper one
It is remarkable how much that drunken punk band got around. It helps when you have a point that's hard to argue with.
A related question you might want to ask is at what age people finally lost interest in contemporary pop music. Or to rephrase it - which was the last pop song you really liked?
Sad but true, Anders. I pretty much bowed out after the early seventies. Oh, there is the occasional song I happen to hear, and my kids' music got my attention in the late eighties and early nineties, but on the whole...
"I guess social unrest and war produces good music."
I think it was more the size of the audience. Same audience responsible for the success of "Hanky Panky" by TJ and the Shondells, and a little earlier had supported "Short Shorts" by the Royal Teens, and would go on to buy "I Started a Joke" by the Bee Gees...all incentive to never listen to pop music again.
Pop music is always a mixed bag.
There are always some good items floating around, but I first engaged passionately with a lot of rock music by digging around in mid-'60s and slightly later recordings...while also catching up with punk and "new wave" (having been drawn to protopunk in the '70s, and mightily put off by most 1970s AOR and CHR radio...).
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