Pure pop: "Music to Watch Girls By"

We salute you Andy Williams, oh Tiki-headed god of easy listening. Andy had a big-time string of hits in the early ’60s, but what I have been endlessly fixated on was the number of times he “sang” instrumentals — as in, they wrote special lyrics to popular instrumentals for ol’ Anj to warble (or he just wound up warbling them). By the time I became aware of his existence (around the time I became aware of existence itself, in the early 1970s), Williams had sung a big number of songs to which they had added ridiculous lyrics. Probably the most memorably pointless example from the Seventies was his version of Barry White’s “Love Theme,” for which they simply added some feeble rhymes with the phrase “love theme” thrown in a bunch’a times. Andy had his own easy-lis’nin’ tracks that did blow me away in terms of their pure bubblegum spirit (”Happy Heart” being one of the highwater marks), but this little ditty, a lyricized version of a popular instrumental, is one of the catchiest of all. The lyrics are ridiculously grafted on but, hey, that’s the way it goes when you’re “making music to watch girls by….”



In searching for a proper link to “Happy Heart” above, I came up with an Andy impersonator (didn’t know there were any!), who mostly specializes in Fifties and Sixties rock impressions (it also turns out that venerable Eighties warbler Marc Almond tried the song on for size).

And because I’m daydreaming about the urban fantasies of the time in which I was born, lemme pass on this commercial, which became a hit instrumental (which, unfortunately, no one — even Andy! — wound up singing)



Here’s the instrumental, which was a hit for the T-Bones, accompanying somebody’s home-movie footage of L.A. in 1965 (scope out Sonny and Cher at the end):

A tad subtler than Musique's "In the Bush"

Been down a little lately, and there is nothing, and I do mean nothing, better to perk up a shameless mediaholic than some dippy tunes from the benighted Seventies (see posts below). This particular masterwork of silliness comes from the kitsch-fest to end all kitsch-fests, the Eurovision song contest. We never heard anything from Fredi and the Friends over here, but their “Pump-pump” is sheer genius. I do like the fat man — dubbed here el corpulento by the Spanish announcer — surrounded by two babes (it has the old burlesque seal of approval), but admit I prefer the leftover couple who had to sing the song to each other — it has that forced-duet quality that made so many variety show mini-musicals so blissfully embarrassing. The proto-Broadway show piano trills don't hurt any either:



Credit for discovering this goes to John Walsh (and his niece) over at the new site Bush League. John is truly a master of the “Web-find.” Regular viewers of the Funhouse will remember my journey through the land of the Furries, an odyssey that began with links provided by John.

Listening to the pump tune, I came in mind of this sweeter-than-sugar tune, which I heard again about two years ago on the Digital Choice music channels available on my cable service. I hadn’t heard it in over three decades, but found I could sing along with it. That bubblegum is some powerful stuff: