The Toys: "A Lover's Concerto"

October 25, 1965 (2 weeks)

I spend a fair amount of time on the social media app Threads. While far from perfect, it isn't close to the dumpster fire that is Twitter. I don't post a whole lot on it but I do some lurking and I will reply to music topics on occasion. I try not to post anything that engages with those obnoxious clickbait types (the sort of people who ask questions like 'Who has the best 3 album run in history?' or 'Which death in music affected you the most?' and who never respond to anyone) but, otherwise, I am not above hitting the like button or even posting a comment.

One account I follow posts a lot of polls — and, thankfully, they never bother posting inane questions like 'Do you think The White Album should have been a single disc?'. A recent one involved pop and rock songs inspired by classical music compositions. The options they gave were:

a) Elvis Presley: "It's Now or Never"

b) Procol Harum: "A Whiter Shade of Pale"

c) The Beatles: "Because"

d) Other — please specify

Taking it in a landslide was Procol Harum with over fifty percent of the vote. While I figured it would do well, I thought that the results would have been a lot closer between them and The Beatles, if only for the fact that Abbey Road is now the consensus (though undeserved) most popular Fab Four album with "Because" being one of its most beloved tracks. As much as I adore The Beatles, I'm glad it finished in a distant second. It's nice and all but there's not much to it, a fragmentary piece that could've used the input of  Paul McCartney in order for it to have been more fleshed out. Yet, I'm clearly in the minority. I think people bask in those tremendous harmonies which gives them an excuse to overlook just how incomplete it is.

(I'll get to whatever it is I have to say about "A Whiter Shade of Pale" before long but a quick word on "It's Now or Never" (a song I already blogged about that I was rather indifferent towards): its source isn't a classical music composition, unless of course your definition of 'classical' is anything written more than a hundred years ago. "O sole mio" is a famous Neapolitan piece from the end of the twentieth century which I think qualifies it as "pop")

Songs like "Because" and "A Whiter Shade of Pale" sure don't try to disguise their classical roots. This is, of course, fine but there is something to be said for taking an old piece of music and adapting it into pure pop. To be fair, we really only know about "Because" due to John Lennon describing how it had been inspired by Yoko Ono playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on the piano which prompted him to request her to play the chords backwards. Still, the fact that it appears on side two of Abbey Road alongside a giant suite inspired by classical music does give away the game somewhat. Nice as it sounds, I can't quite get past my suspicion that "Because" could have been a whole lot more.

By contrast, "A Lover's Concerto" is a magnificent piece of fully realized symphonic pop, reminiscent perhaps of classic Motown had Phil Spector been in charge of the Detroit record label's production duties. It almost doesn't even matter that the lyrics are so banal. (It is remarkable how the words read so badly yet sound so good on record, proof that pop lyrics aren't exactly poetry) Lead singer of The Toys' Barbara Harris finds a nice balance between girlish fantasy and grown-up, grounded reality, which makes her reading preferable to Sarah Vaughn's far more serious and weighty take. (Plus, the song's shiny melody gets lost in the rather dour jazz arrangement)

There's a memorable scene — among many — in the 1995 film Mr. Holland's Opus in which the titular Glenn Holland attempts to connect with his students by playing them a passage of music that they immediately recognize as "A Lover's Concerto" by The Toys. He corrects them by pointing out that it had originally been written by Johann Sebastian Bach as "Minuet in G Major" (even though it was in fact composed by Christian Petzold). He then goes into informing them about the "connective tissue" between centuries-old classical works and modern day rock 'n' roll. We can conclude that much of this was down to clever individuals like composers Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell sneaking Bach onto a hit single like "A Lover's Concerto" but I think there's more to it than that. What if Bach himself had a pop sensibility to rival John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Smokey Robinson and Brian Wilson? What if he was never classical at all? While I roll my eyes whenever classical enthusiasts try to claim that "Mozart was the original rock star", I am much more open to the idea that the old fashioned music was every bit as pop-based as it is today.

Score: 9