"Hi - Thanks to you and my many wonderful friends for making my first record a hit!
Love, Lesley Gore"
- From the original "It's My Party" 7" sleeve, Mercury Records 72119
I've been thinking about Lesley Gore. I became accidentally high before a recent radio show and it was no fun at all. It was a Saturday night and our College U. basketball corps was playing its rival in a home game. What I thought would be a Zen three hours in the radio station turned out to be a horrible sea of minute responsibilities. Responsibilities which a sober person would, of course, handle and be able to somehow think through, and even enjoy fulfilling. It was overwhelming: the microphone; turntables (2); their needles and styli; the CD players (3!); the faders on the control board; their cue lights, the flowsheet; the public service announcements (too long); the VU meters (indecisive!); the hour breakpoints; the operator's log... I almost drowned. After a few hours I let the long tracks spin, and just kinda started at the back of "The Golden Hits of Lesley Gore" album sleeve.
At least three of Lesley's golden hits are about crying. At least. Asserting the right to cry in "It's My Party," demanding to be allowed to exercise the right to cry ("Just Let Me Cry"), universalizing the right to cry ("Judy's Turn To Cry"). The songs are atrocious:
"Judy and Johnny just walked through the door,
Like a queen with her king.
Oh what a birthday surprise,
Judy's wearin' his ring.
[Refrain]
You would cry too if it happened to you."
What offal. Top of the U.S. charts in 1963. Savored millions of times by millions of Teenage-Americans over root beer floats, in soda institutions across the nation, as they attempted to relativize their values to those of Ms. Gore's narrator. Yet the more I looked at the photographs on the back of the sleeve - Lesley looking apprehensively at a young Dick Clark on the set of American Bandstand, Lesley spoon-feeding a poodle - the less convinced I was that this music represented Lesley Gore. Who was this reluctant-looking starlet? Born to a Jewish family in Teaneck, NJ, the Lesley Gore of the "Golden Hits" album cover appeared positively Iowan in her cornflower blue-checkered shirt, hip-hugging blue jeans, and Stormtrooper perm. Who are the blonde celebrities at Lesley's side on the back cover? I do not recognize their names. Their smiling bodies tower over her.
I grew deeply unsettled. The more I listened to "It's My Party" (I played it five times on my show), the more the final line of the refrain began to sound like a candy-coated cry for help, like a prisoner of a certain war blinking the testimony of her torture across the airwaves in a macabre Morse code.
Why is Lesley Gore crying? We will find no definitive answer in the lyrics of her song. "It's My Party" was written in 1962 by three male employees of the Aaron Schroeder Music Firm. This is no ordinary teenage suffering. Gore's youth was little more than grist for the mill of an infernal entertainment industry. Was she crying because she was forced to watch her youth's attendant passions and sufferings be spun into an emotionally pornographic male fantasy, and be broadcast to the world in her own voice, all in the pursuit of a passively-received conception of success? We are drawing nearer to the mark, but still we miss it by miles.
I can only offer my best answer obliquely, by means of an anecdote. It so happened that while I was walking to campus from my apartment, maybe a week or so after my radio show, walking with the arboretum on my right, with the winter sunlight strobing through branches, I turned to my left, and my gaze landed upon the driver of a white Prius at the exact moment that her face scrunched up in a silent burst of tears. I had one thought, and it gamboled through my mind to the tune of a well known song: "you would cry too if it happened to you." Do you now know?
Enjoy!
Mix 4 (clicky)
- "It's My Party" - Lesley Gore, The Golden Hits of Lesley Gore, MERCURY RECORDS (1965)
- "Leslie" - Gross Ghost, Brer Rabbit, GRIP TAPES (2012)
- "The Minotaur's Song" - The Incredible String Band, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, ELEKTRA (1968)
- "Sheba's Return / Lion of Judah" - C.O.B., Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart, POLYDOR (1972)
- "Thief" - Can, Delay 1968, SPOON RECORDS (1981)
- Sun Ra speaks, from the ESP Sun Ra Radio Tribute, compiled and presented by former Arkestra member and official Sun Ra archivist Michael D. Anderson, "The Good Doctor." Fourteen hours in six parts.
- "Krausend" - Bitchin Bajas, Krausend 12", PERMANENT RECORDS (2013)
*Note: This mix would have been posted this past weekend, but I was trying to figure out a way to upload more hours of music to SoundCloud without having to pay 9 Pounds Sterling. And by "figure out," I mean I was sitting in my chair being angry. Also, I was doing some thinking.
** Post-Note: Grumpy @ SoundCloud, please enjoy the MediaFire link. All mixes up on MediaFire by this Friday, along with a new mix this weekend.
