Hi everyone!
I'm just going to jump in here and say a little bit about Johnny Rivers and me. In a previous post Wes was talking about his record "Freeze," that he performed on Dick Clark's American Bandstand live, and that inspired a dance craze across the nation. He mentioned that as a kid me and my neighborhood friends used it to play a game as we ran through the lawn sprinklers. The idea was to get through before he sang the words "freeze!"
I was a kid who was into music young, and the sounds coming from the record department in the five and dimes that my mother took me shopping in drew me to the back of the store. It seems to me that I learned a lot about the music the late 1950's and early 1960's because of the hand-me-down records that came through the neighborhood. The very first record I ever heard that seemed to speak to me about love was Johnny River's American chart topper from 1966, "Poor Side of Town."
"... That rich guy you've been seeing must have put you down, so welcome back baby, to the poor side of town..."
When I heard it when I was just beginning to understand that I was poor and I don't know who the rich guy I was seeing was, as there were none in my neighborhood, but I knew Johnny understood! I loved Johnny's voice on it and the guitar rifts, but more than anything I felt like Johnny was singing to me! "Poor Side of Town" got a lot of play on my plastic record player from Sears.
"Poor Side of Town" is still one of my favorite all time songs.
I'm just going to jump in here and say a little bit about Johnny Rivers and me. In a previous post Wes was talking about his record "Freeze," that he performed on Dick Clark's American Bandstand live, and that inspired a dance craze across the nation. He mentioned that as a kid me and my neighborhood friends used it to play a game as we ran through the lawn sprinklers. The idea was to get through before he sang the words "freeze!"
I was a kid who was into music young, and the sounds coming from the record department in the five and dimes that my mother took me shopping in drew me to the back of the store. It seems to me that I learned a lot about the music the late 1950's and early 1960's because of the hand-me-down records that came through the neighborhood. The very first record I ever heard that seemed to speak to me about love was Johnny River's American chart topper from 1966, "Poor Side of Town."
"... That rich guy you've been seeing must have put you down, so welcome back baby, to the poor side of town..."
When I heard it when I was just beginning to understand that I was poor and I don't know who the rich guy I was seeing was, as there were none in my neighborhood, but I knew Johnny understood! I loved Johnny's voice on it and the guitar rifts, but more than anything I felt like Johnny was singing to me! "Poor Side of Town" got a lot of play on my plastic record player from Sears.
"Poor Side of Town" is still one of my favorite all time songs.
Christine
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