Within the Sixties, hearthrobs named Bobby had been in every single place. Clockwise from prime left: Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Goldsboro, Bobby Womack, and Bobby Sherman.
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For fairly some time now, I have been generally known as Bob. However again within the Nineteen Fifties and early ’60s, I used to be Bobby.
And you understand how little youngsters undergo a interval the place they suppose the entire world revolves round them?
Nicely, again then, I kinda had proof.
It appeared like each time I turned on the radio, Marcie Blane was singing that she wished to be “Bobby’s Woman.” And she or he wasn’t alone. Darlene Love was utilizing Phil Spector’s well-known “wall of sound” to let everybody know she was going to “Wait ’til My Bobby Will get House.” Lesley Gore was warning me about another woman who was out to entice me in “Run Bobby Run.”
They usually had been apparently all going to must struggle it out with the extra formidable Etta James, who was soulfully wailing about her one real love in “Bobby Is His Title.”
A child might get a fancy, proper?
Fortunately for my psyche, I used to be already too outdated to suppose any of this was really directed at me. However there was one other Bobby phenomenon again then: earlier than some British guys named John, Paul, George and Ringo arrived on our shores, a cadre of American Bobbys had been topping the charts: Bobby Day did it with “Rockin’ Robin” and its B-side “Over and Over” in 1958, and Bobby Darin with “Splish Splash” that very same 12 months.
And earlier than lengthy, Bobbys had been in every single place.
Bobby Vee had six prime ten Billboard hits within the Sixties, together with “The Night time Has a Thousand Eyes,” “Take Good Care of My Child” and that one the place he hiccupped that like a “Rubber Ball, I will come bouncin’ again to you-ooh-ooh-hoo-ooh.”
Bobby Vee was shortly one-upped (or possibly two-upped) by Bobby Vinton, who had eight prime ten hits within the ’60s together with so many blue-themed songs – “Blue Velvet,” “Blue on Blue” — that should you’d requested me who sang “the blues” again then, I’d effectively have stated him.
There was additionally Bobby Rydell, who parlayed a bunch of prime ten hits (“Volare,” “Neglect Him,” “Wild One”) into an appearing gig as Ann-Margret’s boyfriend Hugo within the film musical Bye Bye Birdie (although he barely received to sing in it). And on the soul charts, Bobby Womack (“I am Lookin’ for a Love”), Bobby Lewis (“Tossin’ and Turnin'”) Bobby Freeman (“Do You Need to Dance”), and Bobby Smith of the Spinners. Nation Bobbys included Bobby Goldsboro (“Tears of a Clown”), Bobby Naked (“Detroit Metropolis”), and Bobby Sherman (“Little Girl).
All these Bobbys had been teen idols, although most weren’t really in their teenagers. They only appealed to bobby-soxers, who fixed their hair with bobby-pins. A number of the singer Bobbys had such skinny, adenoidal voices that you just needed to suppose they could not have had careers earlier than microphones. They had been a breed aside. A preferred breed.
It is smart that there would have been a number of singers named Bobby as I used to be rising up, since there have been quite a bit Bobbys again then. Within the Thirties, Robert was the preferred boys title within the U.S. And within the Forties, it was the second hottest. (Only for reference, lately it is barely within the prime hundred.) So there was nothing distinctive about Best Era dad and mom just like the Darins, Rydells, Vintons, Vees, Goldsboros, Womacks and Shermans calling their little soon-to-be-crooners that. It will virtually be unusual if there hadn’t been a number of teenybopper Bobbys within the Sixties.
However their time was largely over by 1970. That was tremendous by me. By then I might personally graduated to Bob, and was extra more likely to be listening to Bob Dylan or Bob Seger. Or possibly to that “Splish Splash” Bobby — Bobby Darin — who’d graduated to a extra refined sound, discovering jazz and leaving teenybopper-dom behind with songs like “Mack the Knife.”
I used to be sufficient of a theater nut to know that that exact track was from an off-Broadway present referred to as The Threepenny Opera. I might been going to touring exhibits in Washington, D.C. since I used to be a child — they had been my music now — and in 1970 I lastly traveled to New York to catch my first musical on Broadway with out my people.
Sitting down in my seat on the Alvin Theater, I felt very grown up.
Then Stephen Sondheim’s Firm began, and what had been the primary lyrics?
“Bobby. Bobby. Bobby child, Bobby bubbi, Robby, Robert darling….”
This piece was edited by Clare Lombardo. The printed model was combined by Chloee Weiner with engineering assist from Robert Rodriguez.
