As a proud baby boomer I feel it is my right — indeed my generational obligation — to shove my personal tastes in music, food, and clothing down the throat of every person who has the misfortune to be either older or younger than I. This is what baby boomers do, what we are called to do. And so I’m especially pleased to announce the beginnings of the Petula Clark revival. The singer of “Downtown,” “Don’t Sleep in the Subway,” and other hits from the late ’60s is about to see her career revived, whether she likes it or not, and herself become the object of semi-ghoulish curiosity. “My God,” a whole new generation of fans will cry, overcome with the joy of discovery, “is she still alive?”
Come to think of it, I don’t know the answer to that question. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that she is. A more relevant question is why the magic wand of boomer nostalgia hasn’t yet fallen on her. Many far less deserving veterans have already been reinflated, propped up, and wheeled out for public display. The Monkees, for example, are now ubiquitous on VH-1, the cable music-video channel that has become the favored venue for this sort of thing. If in idle moments you happen to switch it on after dinner, you’re likely to spot old episodes of the Mike Douglas or Dick Cavett show. These almost always repay re-viewing. One night I saw Mike sitting in a hot tub with Stevie Wonder, circa 1974. “What do colors mean to you, Steve?” Mike earnestly asked his guest. “I mean, you’re blind.” Some scenes verge on the surreal. I recently watched a Cavett show with Jimi Hendrix seated beside, I swear, Robert Young, of Marcus Welby fame, who looked at the great guitarist as if he were a piece of roadkill brought in by the family dog. This was a few months before Hendrix died, although you couldn’t really be sure. He seemed distracted by the potted plant next to Cavett’s desk, wondering whether he should smoke it.
Boomer nostalgia is indiscriminate; the cash register rings for the worthy and unworthy alike. Burt Bacharach has recently been the subject of a revival that is proceeding along classic lines: stories in People and Entertainment Weekly, tribute albums, a new musical revue. Bacharach wrote a dozen inventive, engaging songs, and the Aretha Franklin version of ” I Say a Little Prayer” is by itself reason enough to forgive him anything, even those Martini and Rossi ads he did in the 1970s. But for every Bacharach, there are three Tom Joneses. The puffy, midriff-thickened singer, fresh from lengthy sessions under a cosmetic surgeon’s knife, has squeezed himself into leather pants and a studded vest and gone gyrating across America, wheezing a half-tempo version of his only hit, “It’s Not Unusual,” as his graying chest hairs detach themselves and waft lazily to the stage. And he’s right: It’s not at all unusual any longer to see a 60-year-old man behaving this way.
If there is room in the capacious baby-boomer heart for Tom Jones, there must be a space the size of a football field for Petula Clark. She was not herself a boomer, but her songs could be enchanting. By the time of her three or four pop hits, she had entered her mid-thirties, which today must make her — what? — 150 years old? For a long time her records have mouldered in the category of “guilty pleasures” — a term developed long ago by baby boomers to describe songs, movies, and comic books they once loved but should have outgrown. In boomer revivalism, however, there are no pleasures about which one should feel guilty; all questions of merit and excellence are swept away in the joy of imposing one’s tastes on the rest of the culture. We Petula- lovers can even cite highbrow authorities. The eccentric classical pianist Glenn Gould, in an essay called “The Search for Petula Clark,” described her hit “My Love” like so:
“The only extradiatonic event which disturbs [the] proceedings is the near-inevitable hookup to the flattened supertonic for a final chorus — two neighborly dominants being the pivots involved. Indeed, only one secondary dominant, which happens to coincide with the line ‘It shows how wrong we all can be,’ compromises the virginal propriety of its responsibly confirming Fuxian basses, and none of those stray, flattened leading-tones-asroot implies a moment’s lack of resolution.”
Take that, you Tom Jones-lovers! I couldn’t have put it better myself. Within months, I predict, the Petula revival will be well under way nationwide. It’s already in full swing at my house, where her CD of Greatest Hits is a great favorite of myself and . . . well, myself. There have been complications. The other night I asked my children what music we should listen to during dinner. “I don’t care,” said my son. “Just no more Petula Clark, please.” Little does he know he has no choice in the matter.
ANDREW FERGUSON
