songs for broken hearts, no. 25

The Neil Diamond kick I've been on has me thinking about Jeff Barry (nee Joel Adelberg). Barry produced many of Diamond's early hits on the legendary Bang Records label, including Solitary Man, Shiloh, and Cherry, Cherry, and along with being a key Brill Building guy and collaborator with Phil Spector, he was the evil genius behind the Archies... It wouldn't be an exaggeration for me to say that the Archies are one of my favorite bands – if, that is, they were in fact a band. To this day, I have an image in my mind of Jughead on drums, Reggie playing bass, Betty shakin’ the tambourine (and her hot miniskirted bod), Veronica on keyboards (foxy raven haired teaser), and Archie belting out the lead vocals and playing guitar. But the music was really just the work of various groupings of studio musicians, assembled by Don Kirshner, and playing Barry’s unrelentingly upbeat songs, which almost always clock in at less than three minutes and are each crack-like in their addictiveness. With Ron Dante assuming the real-life singing voice of Archie, the songs offer up a sanitized version of 60s youth culture, about three or four years behind the curve, and they sound like the theme music for a California GOP convention, which is to say that the rebelliousness is completely scrubbed clean, and any allusions to drugs or social strife are strictly verboten. Sex figures into things only to the extent that teen romance is the dominant theme throughout. Like the cartoon and the comic book, the music is truly manipulative stuff, but I bow down before it as my master. Rip any one of the dozen or so Best of the Archies compilations into your iTunes and I guarantee you’ll be walking around like a teenage zombie for weeks. And sometimes when you’re hurting, or when things aren’t going like you hoped they would, or maybe if you're just depressed because the world today seems to be such a cold and bitter place, it helps to get in touch with your inner teenage zombie...