Extolling the virtues of sloth is something very few in pop are able to accurately convey. John Lennon did it very well in many of his songs both with The Beatles and in his solo career. Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch had a couple of moments as well. Otherwise, the vast majority manage to miss the point. Take Otis Redding's excellent "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay": it's about a moment of respite that the singer clearly relished but that's all there is to it. It's great that pop stars are able to have fleeting moments to themselves but that sort of tells you all you need to know about the state of their lives: if they knew anything about being a good-for-nothing layabout then they never would have made it in the first place.
This is the first of many knocks to level against Spanky and Our Gang's "Lazy Day". Like Redding's "Dock of the Bay", it is about a one off bit of fun in the midst of a bunch of ageing folk music veterans hard at the task of finally making it. I may not like them but I'll respect the facct that they worked diligently at their craft and were entitled to a break along the way. It may be cliche-ridden and painfully cheesy but if that's how they enjoyed spending their rare bits of free time then who am I to begrudge them anything? Except that they don't know a thing about true blue laziness.
So, The Cowsills managed to make sunshine pop work but what about their competitors? As with most genres, the results are a mixed bag: The Seekers' "Georgy Girl" is excellent but The 5th Dimension's "Up, Up and Away" is lousy. What's strange about this, though, is that there seems to be a fine line between the two, with very little by way of all right or indifferent sunshine pop records to choose from.
Before I get to why I don't like "Lazy Day", I'd like to discuss how old the members of Spanky and Our Gang were which is a bit of a red flag. Guitarist and backing singer Nigel Pickering — who somehow wasn't British in spite of his name — is the one who really shifted the median here: he was thirty-eight years old in 1967. (Fun fact: he was a few months older than two of my grandparents; I admit this is only a fun fact if you happen to be a member of my family and mostly only on my mum's side at that) The rest of the band's original lineup was in their twenties but they still weren't exactly spring chickens in the world of pop music. At an average age of twenty-eight, they were older than your typical group.
But why is this a red flag? Well, first there's the name. Spanky and Our Gang? How were they not a quintet of twelve-year-olds who look like they'd been dragged in off the street? Couldn't this bunch of struggling folk musicians have thought of something better — or, failing that, just a mundane 'The Spanky McFarlane 5' or 'Spanky's Hoedown Minstrels'? I know that this was '67 when rock groups were taking on ever more eccentric names, many of which harked back to travelling medicine shows and the like from the days of yore but a tip of the hat to The Little Rascals doesn't go back nearly far enough.
More significantly, their advanced years do not do "Lazy Day" any favours. All this cumulative life experience and all these geezers have to offer is "blue skies, sunshine..." and all that crap? Granted, they didn't write it but that only brings up another issue: they weren't good enough to write this shit? All they could do was perform it as earnestly as possible which only makes the trite lyrics even that much more difficult to swallow.
I could go on but I'm a really lazy bastard and I want to wrap this sucker up. Let's just finish by trying to work out why it is that some sunshine pop songs work well while others suck something awful. "Georgy Girl" is addictive and you'd struggle to find a song that is as charming. "The Rain, the Park and Other Things" presents an almost "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Penny Lane" type dream presented by a clean-cut family act. By contrast, "Up, Up and Away" wills the listener into an escape but offers them nothing to imagine or dream of along the way. "Lazy Day", which admittedly is a slightly better song, has some images but doesn't tell us anything about how we got there. The first two have relatable scenarios; the other two just expect you to go along with them. I, for one, am not interested. Plus, I'm too damn lazy anyway.
Score: 3
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