What was with all these teen heartthrob Bobbys within the ’60s? : NPR

For fairly some time now, I have been often called Bob. However again within the Fifties and early ’60s, I used to be Bobby.

And you know the way little youngsters undergo a interval the place they suppose the entire world revolves round them?

Properly, again then, I kinda had proof.

It appeared like each time I turned on the radio, Marcie Blane was singing that she needed to be “Bobby’s Woman.” And he or she wasn’t alone. Darlene Love was utilizing Phil Spector’s well-known “wall of sound” to let everybody know she was going to “Wait ’til My Bobby Will get Residence.” Lesley Gore was warning me about another woman who was out to entice me in “Run Bobby Run.”

And so they had been apparently all going to need to struggle it out with the extra formidable Etta James, who was soulfully wailing about her one real love in “Bobby Is His Title.”

A child may get a fancy, proper?

Fortunately for my psyche, I used to be already too outdated to suppose any of this was truly directed at me. However there was one other Bobby phenomenon again then: earlier than some British guys named John, Paul, George and Ringo arrived on our shores, a cadre of American Bobbys had been topping the charts: Bobby Day did it with “Rockin’ Robin” and its B-side “Over and Over” in 1958, and Bobby Darin with “Splish Splash” that very same 12 months.

And earlier than lengthy, Bobbys had been in all places.

Bobby Vee had six prime ten Billboard hits within the Nineteen Sixties, together with “The Night time Has a Thousand Eyes,” “Take Good Care of My Child” and that one the place he hiccupped that like a “Rubber Ball, I am going to come bouncin’ again to you-ooh-ooh-hoo-ooh.”

Bobby Vee was shortly one-upped (or perhaps two-upped) by Bobby Vinton, who had eight prime ten hits within the ’60s together with so many blue-themed songs – “Blue Velvet,” “Blue on Blue” — that when you’d requested me who sang “the blues” again then, I would properly have mentioned him.

There was additionally Bobby Rydell, who parlayed a bunch of prime ten hits (“Volare,” “Overlook Him,” “Wild One”) into an performing gig as Ann-Margret’s boyfriend Hugo within the film musical Bye Bye Birdie (although he barely obtained to sing in it). And on the soul charts, Bobby Womack (“I am Lookin’ for a Love”), Bobby Lewis (“Tossin’ and Turnin'”) Bobby Freeman (“Do You Wish to Dance”), and Bobby Smith of the Spinners. Nation Bobbys included Bobby Goldsboro (“Tears of a Clown”), Bobby Naked (“Detroit Metropolis”), and Bobby Sherman (“Little Lady).

All these Bobbys had been teen idols, although most weren’t truly in their teenagers. They simply appealed to bobby-soxers, who mounted their hair with bobby-pins. Among the singer Bobbys had such skinny, adenoidal voices that you just needed to suppose they could not have had careers earlier than microphones. They had been a breed aside. A well-liked breed.

It is sensible that there would have been plenty of singers named Bobby as I used to be rising up, since there have been quite a bit Bobbys again then. Within the Nineteen Thirties, Robert was the preferred boys identify within the U.S. And within the Forties, it was the second hottest. (Only for reference, as of late it is barely within the prime hundred.) So there was nothing distinctive about Biggest Era dad and mom just like the Darins, Rydells, Vintons, Vees, Goldsboros, Womacks and Shermans calling their little soon-to-be-crooners that. It could nearly be unusual if there hadn’t been plenty of teenybopper Bobbys within the Nineteen Sixties.

However their time was largely over by 1970. That was superb by me. By then I would personally graduated to Bob, and was extra more likely to be listening to Bob Dylan or Bob Seger. Or perhaps to that “Splish Splash” Bobby — Bobby Darin — who’d graduated to a extra refined sound, discovering jazz and leaving teenybopper-dom behind with songs like “Mack the Knife.”

I used to be sufficient of a theater nut to know that that specific music was from an off-Broadway present known as The Threepenny Opera. I would been going to touring exhibits in Washington, D.C. since I used to be a child — they had been my music now — and in 1970 I lastly traveled to New York to catch my first musical on Broadway with out my people.

Sitting down in my seat on the Alvin Theater, I felt very grown up.

Then Stephen Sondheim’s Firm began, and what had been the primary lyrics?

“Bobby. Bobby. Bobby child, Bobby bubbi, Robby, Robert darling….”

This piece was edited by Clare Lombardo. The printed model was blended by Chloee Weiner with engineering help from Robert Rodriguez.