We all have certain silly tunes that linger in our memory but defy identification. You heard the song somewhere and it stayed with you…but you have no idea what it's called or who recorded it. If you did, you could maybe procure an actual copy and play it a few times and satisfy some trivial part of your brain and get it out of there forever. But you don't know what the heck it's called and when you try to hum it for your friends or (even more embarrassing) a clerk at a music shop, they don't know what the heck it is, either…and not just because you can't hum.
And then one day if you're fortunate, the mystery is solved. Here is one such story.
Years and years ago — we're talking late sixties/early seventies here — I heard this silly, catchy instrumental that went in my ear and stayed there for decades. I don't know where I first heard it but there's a brief snippet of it in the movie, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and when I was once introduced to its maker, Russ Meyer, I immediately asked him about it. Mr. Meyer made it clear that he had no idea what song I was talking about, and that even if I could narrow it down for him, it still wouldn't do any good because he didn't know where any of the songs in his movies had come from and why the hell was I asking him about that instead of about the bustlines of his leading ladies, like everyone else did? I sighed and asked him about the only thing he then seemed interested in discussing.
I continued to hear The Song popping up on cheap videos and radio commercials, and I got the idea that it was from some music library. One can purchase for a modest fee, recordings of royalty-free (or low-royalty) music that can be used freely to score movies or commercials or whatever. The places I heard the song were the kind of venues that would use cheap music libraries…but even assuming I was right about his, there was still no way to identify it.
Then, a year or two ago, I was doing a flurry of radio interviews to promote a book I wrote called Mad Art. In case you're never done one of these, the way it works is that you're home on your own phone, available at the appropriate time. If the interview is at 9:00, someone phones you at 8:55 — usually the show's producer but sometimes it's the on-air host, calling during a commercial break. They greet you, check the pronunciation of your name, and then you're patched into the broadcast. You hear a minute or so of the radio show over the phone and then suddenly, the host is introducing you and asking you the first question and it's up to you to be witty and charming and to mention the book as many times as possible. The spot is always over sooner than you expect and then they thank you and hang up.
So one night, I agree to be on a late night radio show in some other city. I think the show started at 3 AM their time, which was Midnight my time. At 11:55, the producer called and I provided the usual pronunciation guide…and then she said, "We'll be to you in about three minutes. You'll hear us playing a short song to lead into the spot." I said fine and waited…and when the short song began, I couldn't believe it: They were playing me on with The Song! The very song I'd been trying to identify since 1971!
I resisted the temptation to answer the host's first question by saying, "Never mind my stupid book. What's the name of that song you just played and who recorded it and where can I get a copy?" But I didn't. I waited until the spot was over and asked the producer who replied, "I don't know. I'll check and call you back!" Thirty minutes later when she hadn't called back, I called her only to have her say, "I'm sorry…no one here knows. It's on a reel of stuff we use all the time but it's not labelled." I asked her if she could at least make a CD of it for me. She said she would but never did. So close and yet so far.
A few months later, I was telling the story to a friend in the radio business. He said, "You think it's early seventies library music? I have a lot of that stuff. I'll send you some CDs." The next day, he did. He sent me thirty CDs, each with 20-30 music cuts on it.
I got lucky. It was the fifth or sixth song on the first CD I checked. I played it about twenty-seven times and after that, I never had to think about it again.
Okay, so you probably want to know: What was this song and where can I hear it? It's called "Pop March" and it was recorded by Johnny Pearson, about whom I know nothing other than that he recorded a lot of songs of this kind. Not long ago, it was released on a CD called Music For TV Dinners: The Sixties. If you click on that name, you'll be transported to an Amazon page that sells the CD but that's not why I'm providing the link. The page has audio samplers of the tunes on the CD, and you can click on the appropriate one and hear about a minute of "Pop March," which is Track #16. That oughta be enough to (a) cause some of you to go, "Oh, that song!" and/or (b) cause it to run through your head for the next 35 years. If nothing else, you can marvel at how a tune can so perfectly capture the sound of its era. It'll make you want to go watch Laugh-In, protest the Vietnam War and take your Pet Rock for a walk. (And if anyone reading this has any info on the song or Johnny Pearson, please share.)