Sounds Like Spring

Song 303: This week on the playlist you can hear the sound of Green Grass by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. This song is a companion to last week’s track Monday, Monday by The Mamas and The Papas. I heard both of them on a bus day trip to the Bronx Zoo with a bunch of my classmates 50 years ago, in May of 1966, and whenever I hear this one, the first image that comes to mind is of a spot on the NYS Thruway in the Bronx, climbing the hill on the northbound side, on a bright, sunshiny spring afternoon. It felt very good to be alive at that moment, and this cut seemed to encapsulate the moment perfectly, even though, unlike the lyric of the song, I had no lover by my side. As I mentioned last week, the music I heard on that bus ride in May of ’66 sounded so good to me that I gave up any further attempts to resist rock and roll, despite whatever my family might have believed about it being the devil’s music and threatening my soul. My friend Brian and I discussed plans for a band of our own, my mother bought me an acoustic guitar not long after the beginning of the summer break, and I started writing songs as soon as I got that guitar. On a car ride soon after, heading up to visit relatives in Syracuse, I sang and played a few of my new songs in the back seat, and told my parents, who were sitting in the front seat, that I had written them. My mother, sitting on the passenger side, gave me a small smile and said, “That’s nice,” but my father, who was driving, frowned, and he said, “It sounds just like that junk they play on WENE.” (WENE was, of course, our local top-40 radio station.) I would bet that he had no idea how good it made me feel, hearing him say that, because that’s exactly how I wanted my songs to sound. I managed to snag a couple of Gary Lewis 45s during my HS days, though I don’t think I had this one in my small collection, but one of my good friends had the GL greatest hits package that included it, and when I visited him, I would often ask him to spin that LP while we played pool in the family’s basement, so this track brightened every spring of my HS career. Gary Lewis is, BTW, the son of famous comedian Jerry Lewis.