Okay, it's 1967 — my freshman year in high school — and I have a crush on a certain young lady who's in several of my classes. She's a big fan of a group that's then in vogue called The Association…so I become a big fan of The Association. Sitting here today, I can recall several memorable tunes recorded by The Association and they'll be popping up later in this series. But what I can't recall is ever knowing anything at all about The Association.
I couldn't tell you the name of a single person in the group. I couldn't tell you how many of them there were or where any of them came from. I'm not sure I ever saw them perform on TV. I was became a fan of them because she was a fan of them and I wound up liking some of their songs enough to include them on my mixtape.
Wikipedia tips me to one reason I didn't know who was in the group. The membership was constantly changing. It also tells me that "Windy" topped the Billboard Hot 100 on July 1, 1967 and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. Not bad.
Here's some assemblage of Association band members lip-syncing the record on some TV show. When I see videos like this, I always wonder if the performers miming to the record are the exact same guys who made it. When I worked with the Bay City Rollers, current members of the group occasionally had to mouth the words to records they weren't on…
And as a bonus, I also liked the various versions of this song performed by The Muppets. Here's one from Sesame Street featuring what I guess is an early prototype of Cookie Monster…