Yesterday I rented a car and drove from New York City to Little Egg Harbor, NJ, to spend a day with my mother. It’s roughly a two hour drive, depending on traffic leaving the city. The car is a compact and as basic as it gets (manual windows!) except for one thing: it has satellite radio, with a gazillion channels. I caught a fantastic interview with Greil Marcus about his new book, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, which I am now eager to read.
When his interview was over, I decided to play a game with myself. I would rotate the dial among the pop stations to see how many songs of my youth and adolescence I could sing along with from memory. I was pretty confident about Motown hits, the Stones, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkle, The Supremes (“Love child, never meant to be/ love child, take a look at me. But I’ll always looooove you, I’ll always lo-ove you hoo hoo”) and certain songs that were popular before my time (Elvis, for example) but what surprised me was how quickly the one-hit wonders came back to me in a giddy rush. Like this one, from the canon of revenge songs(I apologize in advance if you get an ear worm):
— sdh