After watching Troubadours (BBC4, Friday) for about ten minutes, I was close to gibbering with rage. People liked this stuff? Worse, I liked it. I used to play James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and even Carole King’s mope-a-thon album Tapestry. I played them a lot. So, by way of apologising to myself for my past, I grabbed a copy of Balsamic Dreams by Joe Queenan, a magnificent 210-page rant against the Baby Boomers — he’s talking about m’m’m’my generation.
Here’s what he says about Tapestry:
The astonishing popularity of King’s LP (it eventually sold more than 15 million copies) provided incontrovertible evidence that at heart the boomers were as sappy and corny as their parents…it introduced three themes — general lameness (‘You’ve Got A Friend’), communal nostalgia for the extremely recent past (‘So Far Away’), and incessant and incorrigible repackaging (‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ — a gruelling reworking of a hit King had co-written years earlier, now performed at catatonic speed).
Now, to be fair, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ was a great pop record, as performed by the Shirelles. King was 18 when she wrote it, and the original version is a touching and plaintive song about a teenage girl who is about to lose her virginity and is both excited and terrified. Ten years later, King’s version is gruesome, a self-pitying wail by someone complaining that their life might not be perfect and it’s someone else’s fault.
The programme was named after a club in Hollywood, where the wave of folky singer-songwriters who followed the Beatles and the Stones all fetched up, to smoke marijuana and write songs about their own inner lives, though in most cases they might have been writing about the inner life of a particularly dense hamster.
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