This morning, while rebuilding a fire in the woodstove, Sweetheart asked one of those questions which turned out to be made of many layers, or staircases, or free-falling...
"Do you remember that song that went "In the year..and there'd be some date?"
Nothing was yet ringing a bell on that question with the rising cold of the floor boards starting to run up my legs. At knee level.
Then I sort of did. It was 1969. That great pivotal year. I don't think I ever bought the single but when the song came on the radio, I turned it up, and if I didn't, someone else did. And maybe we wanted to hear it again so we could get all the dates straight and what was happening when what was happening when.
It wasn't "Light My Fire" which consumed us years earlier. It was a decade ending tribute to maybe a haunting forthcoming, which if you actually listen now to the lyrics, them boys Rick Evans and Denny Zager were quite ahead of their time. Space rockers. I think we should take off that sandwich board put onto these two and made to wear as the 'one-hit wonders' (though true) and 'one of the worst rock 'n' roll songs of all time' (you decide). Rick Evans claims he wrote the song in a half-hour in 1964. It would take a record label in Odessa Texas (Truth) to first press and release the song in 1968, then it was picked up quickly by RCA which shot it up to #1 on the pop charts for a few weeks in 1969.
Many covers have been made since: REM, Ian Brown, Fields of the Nephilim, and if you have an industrial moment try on Laibach and their method.
The song appeared (July 1969) one month before Woodstock and Charles Manson, and all within the same year as the first manned moon landing.
Locally, Sweetheart brought it up — perhaps not quite out of the blue — eight hours after I posted a Birdhouse for Nebraskan poet William Kloefkorn. Zager & Evans hail from Lincoln Nebraska.
