I thought we’d take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to take a trip down memory lane. Well, not my memories exactly, but if you happened to be born in the 50s or 60s, then there is a chance you might recall a musical group called Little Caesar & the Romans, although you could be forgiven for having done your best not to. In March 1961, they had a decent hit with the song ‘Those Oldies But Goodies (Remind Me of You)’, which I was first introduced to a couple of years ago by my dad in one of our regular sessions of showing each other songs on my little portable mono speaker, in my family home. He pitched it to me then as a recording that is infamously terrible on almost every level: production, vocals, rhythm, instrumentation, lyrics, and so on. Even the title is wrong, because the singer (Little Caesar, presumably) is clearly saying “those oldies but goodies reminds me of you” each time, not “remind” – which is of course a grammatical disaster in itself, unless perhaps it’s meant to be two separate clauses, like “ah, ‘those oldies but goodies’… [it] reminds me of you”?? We will sadly never know.
Listen for yourself. The problems truly are all-pervading. At numerous moments, the band are out of time with themselves, and the singer is straight-up out of tune throughout, something he lets you know right off the bat with the very first yelp we hear. He also has this particular, warbling delivery which seems to distort certain words even further; he keeps pronouncing “haunt” as “harnt”, and I particularly love how much he wavers on the “do” in “what can I do?”. These moments aren’t just incidental or passing, either. They comprise the most basic dynamic connective tissue of the song, like pretty much all of the transitions from quiet to loud, verse to chorus, etc, and back again. The music itself, and the lyrics, are also completely generic, as if the whole thing took about ten minutes to come up with. I’m not sure if it’s funnier to pretend that they all knew it was bad, and just didn’t care – like, let’s just push this shit out as quickly and cheaply as possible – or if they really were the good-natured idealists the wistful vibes suggest, and this was simply the best they had.
Some day, I would love to get someone possessing much more musical know-how than me to pore over this strange artefact in real detail and explain its every minor deficiency once and for all. For me, the most hilarious part comes about halfway through, when the chorus comes back in following the little spoken word middle eight section (around 2:10 in the video above). The singer has come close to redeeming himself here, because his speaking voice is far more pleasant than his singing voice, and the things he’s saying are actually quite sweet and do a good job of summing up the song’s message, which is an undeniably agreeable one. You’re just about arriving at a point where you could consider enjoying the thing – he’s driving us towards it, you can almost see it coming up right over the horizon – and then that momentum is just brutally lost when he sweeps back in with a truly off-key bellow of “THOOOSE”, and you remember what you’re listening to, and suddenly we’re right back where we started.
As you may be able to tell, I have been quite obsessed with this song for some time now. It’s easily one of my most-played of the last few years. I just never seem to tire of it; I can listen to it at any time, in any place, and it never fails to make me smile or cheer me up if I’m feeling down. Given its status as a relic from 60 years ago, there’s so little we know about the thing beyond a stubby Wikipedia article – so little we ever can know – and for me, that mystery, that sense that you’re listening to a ghost calling out from a world that we will never see again, and it turns out that all he’s doing is blowing a big raspberry, is a big part of the appeal.
Another thing is that it really makes me think of my dad. My whole life, I have associated him with two things: music, and an infectious, even compulsive sense of humour. So much of our relationship is and always has been shared and expressed through these two things, and of course, both are encapsulated in this silly little tune, courtesy of Little Caesar himself. Thankfully, at time of writing (checks watch) I still have my father, and hopefully will for many more years to come. But I know that one day, in all probability, there will be a time where I am listening to this, and those memories that it conjures are all there is.
All of which, funnily enough, turns what was almost certainly only ever intended to be just another half-arsed, cash grab pop song (and if anything disproves the common adage that pop music is worse now than it used to be, it’s this stinker) into a very real favourite song of mine; a genuinely moving testament to the unmatched capacity of music to evoke profound, powerful, and truly timeless feelings of nostalgia and love for our past. Which, of course, makes me think that maybe this song is actually very good. I suppose that when you love a piece of music, or any work of art, you tend to want to define it in terms of being fundamentally good or bad. But then you have a case like this, and it reminds you of how irreducibly personal our relationship with art is, how futile it is to try to find any kind of objective criteria in what is an essentially emotional reaction. Why do we love anything? Because it fits us. And you can’t argue with that.
Sing it with me now! “THOOOOOOOSE…”
~ GDH
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