(Pictured: the Byrds on The Ed Sullivan Show in December 1965; L to R, Crosby, Hillman, Clark, Clarke, and McGuinn.)

It is the last week of August in 1965. The Billboard Hot 100 is top-heavy with songs that will be considered classic for decades to come. Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” is #1, ahead of the Beatles’ “Help” and “California Girls” by the Beach Boys. The Top 10 also includes hits by the Righteous Brothers, Four Tops, Bob Dylan, and James Brown.

The list of songs that have already reached #1 in 1965 is astounding to an observer from the distant future. It includes “Satisfaction,” “I Can’t Help Myself,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” Stop in the Name of Love,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “Eight Days a Week,” “My Girl,” “Ticket to Ride,” and “Back in My Arms Again.” And also “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds, which spent the week of June 26, 1965 at #1. In a summer of ridiculous musical bounty, “Mr. Tambourine Man” was in the Top 10 for most of June and July. The Byrds harmonize beautifully on a truncated version of Bob Dylan’s original lyric over a track that’s mostly played by the Wrecking Crew; only lead guitarist Roger McGuinn (then still known as Jim) was deemed musician enough to play on the band’s debut single. The original plan was for studio musicians to make the entire album, but producer Terry Melcher relented, and the other Byrds, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and David Crosby, both played and sang on Mr. Tambourine Man, which was released the week before the title song hit #1.

But back to the last week of August. “Mr. Tambourine Man” has been out of the Hot 100 for a couple of weeks. The album of the same name sits at #12 on Billboard‘s Top LPs list, down from its peak of #6 the week before. A second Byrds single, Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” is at #47, down from #40 in the previous week, a disappointing performance for a band just off a #1 hit. A version of the song by Cher, which she and Sonny decided to record after hearing the Byrds perform it earlier in the year, has run the charts at exactly the same time, and it’s the bigger hit, at #15 in this week. But Cher had the best of it only in the States. In the UK, the Byrds’ “All I Really Want to Do” went to #4, and in fact the band spends two weeks of August 1965 playing shows up and down the sceptered isle.

Thousands of miles from the UK, in the last week of August in 1965, I go off to kindergarten. I can still see myself standing at the screen door waiting for the school bus on the first day. I’ve written about Lincoln School before: “I know now that it was a normal, human-sized building, but in my memory, perspective is distorted—ceilings are a mile high, hallways are yards wide, and I’m a tiny creature looking up from very close to the floor. Which, in fact, I was.” My mother says that when she asked me how I had found my way to the right room on that morning, I told her, “They opened the door and I just walked in.”

My kindergarten teacher was Miss Morgan. Honesty compels me to report that I do not have specific memories of Miss Morgan, a woman in her early 30s then. I am certain that she had the traits all kindergarten teachers require—unfailing kindness and endless patience—but at the same time she was taskmaster enough to get 30 half-feral five-year-olds to go willingly in something like the same direction every day. And I am also certain that to the extent I am capable of learning and growing today, I still walk the path that Miss Morgan put me on.

Now, 57 years and some months past the end of August in 1965, it happens that David Crosby, who became the most famous member of the Byrds, and Miss Morgan of Lincoln School, who taught kindergarten for 40 years, should leave the planet in the same week.

The coincidence of the Byrd and the Teacher feels like it ought to mean something, and maybe it’s this: as we all sail our respective oceans, we have people who stand like beacons on the shore, whether we know them personally or only at a distance, whether they lit up our lives for years or for only a brief time. Even after those beacons wink out, we still use the light they gave us to help us fare forward on our way.

(Pictured: Loretta Lynn, 1976.)

By now you know that Loretta Lynn died yesterday at the age of 90. As I write, I can think of four or five people whose takes on Loretta’s life I am eager to read. I have no doubt that they’ll be vastly superior to this one. The thing I can satisfactorily do, however, is to summarize her career on the record charts and noodle with some half-assed conclusions.

Loretta had 69 entries on Billboard‘s country Top 40, starting with “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” in 1960. Sixteen of those went to #1; the first, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” in 1967, staked out territory that Loretta would occupy for years thereafter: a woman not to be trifled with. Yes, she sang songs of love and devotion, but she also demanded love and devotion from her man in return. And she was not shy about standing up for herself and the life she valued: try to steal her man and you’re going to “Fist City,” the title of her second #1 song in 1968. As the 60s turned to the 70s, the iconic hits continued to flow, including the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and the humorous wife-and-mother drudgery of “One’s on the Way.” She recorded classic duets with Conway Twitty: “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” “As Soon I Hang Up the Phone,” and “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.” Her last Top 10 hit was in 1982; her last Top 40 entry was in 1985. Her last chart single of any sort was a tribute-album remake of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” with Sheryl Crow and Miranda Lambert in 2010. She released her final album, Still Woman Enough, in 2021.

Chuck Klosterman suggests that years from now, Chuck Berry will stand for all of rock ‘n’ roll music in the same way that John Philip Sousa stands for all of march music. Might Loretta Lynn eventually perform a similar function for country music? If that ends up being true, one record in particular might be a major reason why.

Birth control pills were an essential accessory for the liberated, urban woman of the 1970s. But what about women who were not, did not, or could not consider themselves to be “liberated”? What about those living in rural or small-town nowhere, places reached by the culture of the cities, but not necessarily the values? Lynn herself described the lives such women led in “One’s on the Way.” She knows what Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Raquel Welch, and Debbie Reynolds are doing with themselves, but “here in Topeka,” the housework and child-wrangling never end, and oh by the way, I’m pregnant again.

Her 1975 hit “The Pill,” however, offers an escape from that life: “There’s gonna be some changes made right here on nursery hill / You’ve set this chicken your last time cuz now I’ve got the pill.” How must that have sounded to women who had never considered that there was something more to life than being pregnant every other year? That’s a feminist concept, and a life-changing one, and it came in over the radio while the chores were being done. “The Pill” even slyly appealed to the roosters, suggesting there could be practical benefits for them, too, when Loretta sings, “Feelin’ good comes easy now since I got the pill.” “The Pill” also showed that country music could adapt to and reflect changing times without losing its way, or selling its soul.

There were radio stations that wouldn’t play “The Pill,” of course. It got to #5 on the Billboard country chart, the poorest performance (relatively speaking) of any Lynn record since 1970. It was the last of her four singles to cross over to the Hot 100, peaking at #70. (Her biggest pop-chart hit was a duet with Conway, “After the Fire Is Gone,” which got to #56 in 1971.)

Chuck Berry and John Philip Sousa influenced countless musicians who came after them. Loretta Lynn did too, and if modern mainstream country music is irretrievably broken from the past she represents, that’s not her fault. Her great achievement is that even though she became one of the queens of Nashville, with all the trappings of success, it was always possible to trace a line in her music back to the Kentucky holler in which she was born.

(Footnote: although Lynn wrote many of her songs, Shel Silverstein wrote “One’s on the Way,” and she shares credit on “The Pill” with three other writers.) 

(Pictured: Olivia Newton-John, 1976.)

For all of my most important time as a listener, Olivia Newton-John was there, from “If Not for You,” which I first heard during my long ride on the school bus in the fall of 1971, to “Let Me Be There,” which I bought on a 45 just before I stopped buying 45s, to “Soul Kiss,” which I played on the radio as a Top 40 DJ in 1985.

I’m not gonna tell you I liked all of her records. A 15-year-old boy was more likely to make fun of the corny lyrics of “Please Mr. Please” or her breathy-to-squeaky delivery on “I Honestly Love You,” and I did. I knew enough about radio in 1981 to understand the appeal of “Physical” and why it stayed #1 for so long, but it was never going to capture any of my jukebox money. Most of the hits from her imperial phase, post-Grease/early 80s, didn’t do much for me one way or the other—at the time.

But I go back and listen to that stuff now and I’m like, damn, she was really good. And she was. Nothing else sounds quite like “Magic.” “You’re the One That I Want” is pure joy (and the joy is thanks to her, since John Travolta mostly yodels the whole time). I saw somebody online call “A Little More Love” a new-wave record, and it’s worthwhile to listen to it again with that thought in mind. I am not sure she ever sounded better than on her version of the Bee Gees’ “Come on Over,” which came out at the height of her country-crossover period. (Bonus points for the album cover photo, which you can admire for three minutes and 45 seconds if you click that link.) And I find “Sam” to be pretty great, too, and I did so even when I was 17 and could never have admitted it to anybody.

“Sam” is a Hollywood pop production, not the sort of thing ONJ was known for, really. Although her 70s records were plenty slick, there was a straightforwardness to them also: what you see is what you get. As the 70s got further along and the going got weirder, her girl-next-door appeal is easy to understand. Between 1974 and 1976 she scored seven straight #1 hits on Billboard‘s adult-contemporary chart. All of them crossed over to the country chart, and six of them made the Top 10 there. For 1974 she won the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award—the year of “Let Me Be There,” “If You Love Me (Let Me Know),” and “I Honestly Love You,” which won Record of the Year at the Grammys for the same year, and was #1 on the Hot 100.

ONJ was never off the radio in 1976 and 1977, although she didn’t make much noise on the Hot 100. (“Sam” got to #20.) Then came Grease. After “You’re the One That I Want,” which was #1 quite literally all over the world, she hit #1 two more times in America and made the Top 10 seven times beyond that by 1984. Her last Billboard Top 40 hit was “Soul Kiss,” although “The Best of Me” was an AC Top 10 in 1986. In 1988, she got to #62 on the Hot 100 with “The Rumour,” written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, co-produced by Elton, with Elton on piano and vocals, and Davey Johnstone on guitar. (“The Rumour” is an absolute banger loaded with radio hooks, but it came along several years too late; on the video for “Soul Kiss,” she achieves levels of smokin’ hotness only hinted at by the likes of “Physical.”)

We have occasionally pondered here why Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy, two stars of unsurpassed magnitude in the 70s, did not find a place on good-times/great-oldies radio in the 80s and 90s. Hits by female rock and disco stars had more staying power than those by straight-up pop singers. Also, their biggest hits sounded fairly dated as soon as disco came to town, if not before. ONJ’s reinvention in Grease came at precisely the right time.

I am a bit surprised and more than a little pleased at the outpouring of affection and respect for ONJ on social media in the last 24 hours. Once again, history knows what we did not always recognize in the moment.

And Also: Lamont Dozier’s passing at age 81 won’t get the notice of ONJ’s, but as The 60s at 60 pointed out this morning, Motown as we know it would not exist without Dozier, Brian Holland, and Eddie Holland. The songs they wrote are as vital to our lives as oxygen.

Embed from Getty Images

(Before we begin: today’s post, like Friday’s, is one that has nothing to do with the ostensible subject of this blog. You are, as always, not obligated to read it. I promise to return to music stuff later in the week.)

Continue reading “To Absent Friends” →