If you grew up in Southern California in the sixties, you're going to thank me for this. Because since then, you've had a song running through your head…over and over, haunting you, pounding on you from within. It got into your brain during that decade because you innocently turned on a radio one day and heard it. And heard it. And heard it. And heard it some more. You couldn't go four minutes without hearing it because it was on every channel, mocking you and refusing to be denied.
Even when you didn't have your radio on, you often heard it because someone else had a radio on and it was always on their radio. At some point, there probably didn't even have to be a radio within earshot for you to hear it. It was a part of you. If a doctor had put a stethoscope on your chest, he would have heard it.
I am speaking, of course, of the Sav-On Drug Store jingle.
They may have had it in other cities, too…but they sure had it in Southern California. There were times when even though I didn't need anything at a Sav-On Drug Store, I went to a Sav-On Drug Store. Just because I had to. Other people had dogs barking in their heads. I had the Sav-On Drug Store jingle.
As jingles go, it wasn't one of the better ones. Whoever wrote it thought "parade" rhymes with "save." It didn't then, it doesn't now, it never will. The pounding kettle drum sound was addictive, though. Another local jingle writer named Stan Worth admitted to being inspired by it when he wrote the theme for the George of the Jungle TV show.
I don't know when they stopped using it on the radio…some time in the seventies, I guess. I just know I continued to hear it somewhere in my soul for years after…until finally, one melancholy morning, it just went away. I was amazed to discover that I missed it.
Just the other day, after all these years, I heard it out of my computer speakers. Someone sent me an old air check of a KFWB broadcast from 1962 and there it was in all its primal glory. I think this was the only version Sav-On ever recorded of it. I just had to edit a clip and put it up here for all of you, just so you could experience that memorable melody one more time.
Sav-On drug stores are still around but slowly going away. The two I used to go to are both now CVS Pharmacies and I suppose they're just as good if you need a bottle of Maalox or a bag of Baked Ruffles (the good kind, the kind with cheddar cheese and sour cream flavoring) or a pack of 9 volt batteries. But they don't have a jingle this good — and they never will…
