I spent significant amounts of time with my grandparents who retired to Chetek, Wisconsin. This song transports me to a summer I spent with them, pining over a boy upon whom I had a crush while eying a couple of other guys in a bar.
I’ve had some fun finding versions of this song online, although the version I remember was Bobby Vinton, I cannot find him just singing this song (in 1972 or whenever he recorded it). Although there is a video of a depressingly old Vinton singing it along with other songs. Like a medley. Of old love songs.
I did however find a cover by Brian Hyland from 1966.
I didn’t watch much television when I was in high school. Not sure why, but I didn’t. There were two programs that I did watch, however. Religiously. I put up a fuss if was forced to miss them.
Sunday nights were my TV nights. Homework was done and I’d earned a break. At 8:00 I watched Masterpiece Theatre. It was a perfect program for the Anglophile I was turning into. I don’t watch it much anymore, but the theme music still makes me shiver with delight.
Right after Masterpiece Theatre, WETA in Chicago, ran Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The theme music for that program cheers me up. I occasionally watch an episode of the Flying Circus. It doesn’t give me the belly laughs it used to. Either I’ve lost my sense of humor, or I know all the jokes. My kids still laugh at the episodes though.
Where I first heard about Donovan is a mystery. It could have been at Cindy‘s – her parents were the closest to hippies that I knew – Cindy and her mom were vegetarians and Buddhist and they named their house Walden Oaks. Wherever I heard of Donovan, the idea of him caught my fancy. I bought myself his Essence to Essence album and played it in my attic bedroom, reading the lyrics as I listened to the songs.
When a friend and I decided it was time Woodruff and Edwards, one of the local factories in town, stopped polluting the air and river, we made picket signs with some of the words from this song (which we were also going to shout to passersby):
Don’t pour filth into rivers, Rivers are like the blood in our veins. Don’t pour filth into the air, Air is the best thing that we can breathe.
We tried to talk our other friends into joining us on our protest – we had signs made and even a chant planned, but no one was interested (not even Cindy). We chose a day that we’d be off school and were ready to do our bit for a better world.
My friend decided, the afternoon before our scheduled protest, to call the factory to tell them they’d better fix their factory or we were going to come down the next day and picket in front of it. That they needed special anti-pollution caps on their smokestacks to stop their smoke from causing air pollution. She also said she suspected they dumped their waste into the Fox River.
She called me that evening and said our picket was off. The factory representative she spoke to told her that if we came down and picketed that the factory might close down because they couldn’t afford to put the special caps on the smokestacks. Then the workers would be out of jobs. Did she want that on her conscious? She didn’t and canceled our protest.
But I still liked that song, and would sing it when I passed the factory – or any factory for that matter. It wasn’t until last year that I found out that the song was named after a book by R. Buckminster Fuller.
Clutch Cargo Lips 