HOW MANY TEARS CAN YOU CRY?

I happened upon BBC1’s Breakfast yesterday morning – something I usually avoid but my partner has it on in preference to the rival fare – and who should be on the studio sofa but Bobby Vee. Ah, young Robert Thomas Velline of Fargo, North Dakota. Not so young any more: 65 in fact. Not cute any more either, indeed rather odd looking, but having had something extremely expensive done to his hair, of which he flourished rather more than when my friend and I saw him at the Albert Hall in 1985. The British tour, of which that gig was the climax, featured other rock and pop legends including Ricky Nelson whose stock had been low for some years. His career thereby revived, Nelson toured the southern States later that year and died (while apparently freebasing cocaine) in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve.

Vee’s career began because of a famous plane crash, the one that killed Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and, most significantly, Buddy Holly. The stars were flying to Fargo to play a gig and 15 year-old Vee (an authentic Holly fan) and his outfit (called The Shadows: yes, really) volunteered to stand in when news of the crash broke. It will be fifty years since that event next February.

Buddy Holly was five minutes before my time. Vee and his contemporaries were the big sellers when I first bought singles. They had a very short span. Sian Williams on Breakfast hazarded that “the mid-‘60s” was his main period but by the mid-‘60s Vee and his contemporaries were dead meat, swept away by the Beatles and the British invasion and the American groups who flowered at the same time. Just as Vee began as a Holly clone, his career went down the pan pathetically imitating the mop-tops: I bet there are very few who, like me, can muster a bit of Vee’s rip-off of ‘She Loves You’, carefully entitled ‘She’s Sorry”.

Months of pestering finally brought me my own record player for my 14th birthday in 1961, which was Vee’s annus mirabilis. A Brill Building product, he was lucky enough to be assigned several songs by the cream of Brill songwriters. Lyricist Gerry Goffin and composer Jack Keller wrote ‘Run to Him’, a simple up-and-downhill stroll (compare Cliff Richard’s later and very similar ‘The Next Time’) and hence enormously addictive. Even better, Goffin wrote with his wife Carole King ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’, one of the dozen or so greatest pop singles of all time with its brilliantly bouncy harmonic tensions and that genius discord in the accompaniment near the end. Vee told Sian Williams that he’d sung this imperishable hit at his daughter’s wedding “because it was so appropriate”. I’m afraid he’s not a very interesting man. And the choice was only appropriate at the most superficial level. ‘Take Good Care’ is not about losing your baby daughter but losing your baby doll.

This was the defining feature of Vee and his contemporaries. The great majority of them were young, white, American males of a boyish appearance. And, on single after single, they sang about how horribly women treated them. The tears shed in the singles of Gene Pitney, Del Shannon, the Everly Brothers, James Darren and the very unboyish Roy Orbison would have floated the US fleet. Self-pity was the order of the day. These chaps were utterly unmanned by their women and frankly presented their predicament as terminally woeful. Quite why this parade of tearful wimps connected to the 1961 Zeitgeist is pretty hard to figure. It was the first year of the Kennedy presidency: you’d think American youth would have their tails up.

There were other young male singers who indulged less frequently in lachrymosity. Bobby Darin, as old as Orbison and in the charts since 1958, was generally upbeat, but a self-penned B side, ‘Not for Me’ (not to be confused with the Gershwins’ wry and rueful ‘But Not for Me’), is as bitter an outburst as pop music has ever devised, reinforced by an astounding burst of Rachmaninovesque piano flourish right in the middle. Neil Sedaka – never hip or fashionable but a singer/songwriter of the highest class – could even make his partner Howard Greenfield’s most pleading lyric, ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’, into a sunnily clap-along number (and another contender for all-time great pop single).

But the prevailing mood was doomy and tragic. “I’m a-walkin’ in the rain,” sang Del Shannon in ‘Runaway’, just about the biggest selling disc of 1961. “Tears are fallin’ and I feel the pain”. Was it the girls who were buying these singles and feeling that they had the boys over a barrel?

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this curious sub-genre of pop came in the following year. Johnny Burnette, the most country-inflected of the pop idols of the early 1960s, was generally celebratory about women in his singles: ‘Dreamin’, ‘You’re Sixteen’, ‘Girls’. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a buttock-clenching tale of the public humiliation of a boy by a girl, quoting her with a kind of self-lacerating relish as she presents the gift that constitutes the song's title: “I bought these specially/For all your friends to see … In these you’ll look real smart/Because they match your heart”. The soaring melody and lush string backing only add to the small-town melodrama foregrounded in the yarn. It was written by one James Marcus Smith, who was later better known for the outlandish performing persona he adopted as PJ Proby. One of Smith’s Proby singles was called ‘I Apologize” and he should have done so for his complete lack of probity as the trouser-splitting Proby. But ‘Clown Shoes’ is a perverse work of genius.

At least Proby is a survivor, like Bobby Vee and Neil Sedaka. Several of the performers who sang of such heartache died prematurely: Burnette at 30, Darin at 37, Shannon, a suicide, and Orbison – whose life was marked by personal tragedy – before they were 60.

Gene Pitney suffered a fatal heart attack a couple of years back at 66. He died the classic showbiz death, alone in a provincial hotel room. Pitney was a songwriter before he was a singer – he wrote Ricky Nelson’s biggest British hit, the catchy, optimistic ‘Hello Mary Lou’ – but as a singer he favoured tragic material penned by others. His biggest hit in Britain was 1964’s ‘I’m Gonna Be Strong’, written by another great husband-and-wife team from the Brill Building, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. This song, built simply on a relentlessly rising figure, belies its own title with the lyric’s climax: “And you’ll never know, darling,/After you’ve kissed me goodbye,/How I’ll break down and cry”, the last word sustained over a succession of notes that rises into the stratosphere. Its opening musical phrase is identical to that of Chris Farlowe’s biggest hit two years later, Jagger & Richards’ ‘Out of Time’ (Pitney knew and worked with the Stones). Both songs deserve support as all-time-great-pop-single contestants, along with Colin Blunstone’s revival of the crushed boy threnody in ‘I Don’t Believe in Miracles’ of 1972. But Farlowe’s hit is the opposite of self-pitying, a disdainful dismissal of a “poor, old-fashioned baby”.

Of course Farlowe’s generation of heroes of popular music had their own share of casualties, as well as the odd song that wallowed in the fickleness and faithlessness of women. But I doubt that any other period of popular culture has ever announced itself as quite so sorry for itself or quite so sexually insecure.