This was my wife’s record. I liked the group enough that I bought their albums as they came out—I didn’t need their greatest hits. This is quite a collection. It is all so nice. My first reaction is that there is no teenage anxiety, a key ingredient of rock and roll. As I listened more, I realized it is very happy, but there isn’t any real emotion. I can’t tell what makes them so happy. There is content that is dark—sniffin’ glue, drowned my cat, didn’t want to be the one who said ‘the end,’ I’m leaving you today, don’t pass the cards to me to deal the crushing blow—but the music and the singing is so sweet I thought they were kidding. It’s not emotionless, the way ABBA didn’t know the meaning of what they were saying. It’s that I can’t believe the singer really was going to leave.
Maybe it’s me. When Younger Girl was out, I’d never had a girlfriend. Love was a foreign language. Maybe what they said lined up with everything I didn’t know—we were a good match. As I found out about how hard it can be to leave someone, I gave the Lovin’ Spoonful credit for putting it between the lines. I don’t know. There’s no sex in these songs. There is love, there’s breaking up, there’s knowing it’s not time, but there’s no next step.
They rhymed ‘beach boy’ with ‘hoi polloi’—the dictionary says hoi polloi is demeaning. Me, I say it’s funny. There are jackhammers in Summer in the City. Night Owl Blues is an instrumental—even a decent blues song sounds upbeat. The title of the song is You Didn’t Have to Be So Kind, but the song says ‘nice,’ not ‘kind.’
converselyspeaking 