I heard a song today I hadn’t heard for quite some time, and it brought back a very pleasant memory.
There are four ways I can listen to music when I’m in the car. It’s rare that I play CDs, but I have satellite radio, an old iPod with 17,000 songs on it and my iPhone 13 (which duplicates two and three).
I was listening to Sixties Gold on satellite radio, and I heard one of the lesser hit from one of the lesser groups of the British Invasion. Everybody knows the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the other greats, but Herman’s Hermits really didn’t live on the same level.
There were certainly some good songs, like “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” but most of what they did were just cute pop songs. The one I heard today was one of the goofiest.
Lead singer Peter Noone was just 17 and looked younger when the group performed on the Ed Sullivan Show. If you listen to the performance, you’ll hear a cute line after the first verse.
“Second verse, same as the first …”
And that brought back a wonderful memory from the spring of 1965. That was my sophomore year of high school, and I had a wonderful friendship that lasted only one year. Steve Forner lived on the next street over from me, and in fact, the back of his house and the back of mine faced each other.
My two oldest and longest friendships both began around that time, and I think Steve would have been a third except for one problem. His family moved to Israel that summer and I never saw him again.
But he said two things I have never forgotten.
One day that spring we were listening to Herman’s Hermits, and when Noone sand “Second verse, same as the first,” Steve responded in perfect pitch with “Two times louder, two times worse.”
Of course I laughed and of course I still think it every time I hear the song. But Steve said something else that summer that lasted a long time. We were at the community swimming pool and we met another boy who lived a block away. He was three years younger and his name was Keith. He had a deep summer tan, so deep that Steve decided he must be Mexican.
He called him Pancho, even though it turned out the deep tan was because he was half Italian. The nickname lasted several years after Steve left for Israel and was the first of many nicknames Keith would have over the next 58 years.
As for Henry the VIII, a few years back I learned something about the song that most of us didn’t know when it came out in 1965. Most of us Americans, anyway.
It wasn’t a modern pop song at all. A few years back I bought a collection of British Music Hall songs and I learned that the original version of the song had been performed by the great Harry Champion in 1910.
No second verse, same as the first.
Just a great old song they used to sing back before the Great War.