Courtesy Free Press
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair With ’50s Pop Music
By Karen Schoemer (Free Press)
Review by Jennifer Howard, March 2006
, March 2006
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Admit it: When you were a kid, you thought the music your parents listened
to was…square. Old-fashioned. Bo-ring. If they put on Glenn Miller, you
wanted Elvis. If they liked Elvis, you screamed for Uncle Bob. (That's Mr.
Dylan to you, buster.)
It can come as a shock then to look back and realize that maybe you
didn't hate the Mom and Dad Hit Parade quite as much as you thought you
did. Sometimes their soundtrack turns out to be your soundtrack too.
That's what happened to Karen Schoemer. Now in her early 40s, she grew
up listening to Tom Petty, the Kinks, and Stevie Nicks, but Bruce Springsteen
was her god. In college she got turned on to R.E.M. and other then-indie
rockers. By the 1990s she was a rock critic writing about them for Spin, Creem,
and The New York Times. "I promoted the cause of unheralded bands that I
thought deserved a chance, and worshipped heroes like Paul Westerberg, Nick
Cave, and Robyn Hitchcock without apology," she writes.
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If Springsteen's "Born to Run" was the anthem of
Schoemer's youth, the Connie Francis hit "Where the Boys Are"
summed up her mother's—along with songs by Frankie Laine, Pat Boone,
Fabian, and other prefab popsters whose tunes ruled the airwaves of the
'50s and early '60s. Her mom also liked Elvis, while "dad
remembers driving around during the summer of 1957 with Paul Anka's
'Diana' on the radio, his 17-year-old mind enthralled by the song's
racy depiction of an older woman and a younger man."
Connie Francis faded away, and so did Schoemer's parents'
marriage—it was yesterday's Billboard news, baby. Then, in 1995,
Schoemer got engaged to a man her mother didn't approve of—which
triggered a mother-daughter Big Chill. In search of a project that might also
be therapy, the rock critic decided to take a closer listen to the pop music of
the '50s, the music her parents had courted to. If she rediscovered the
songs they loved back then, maybe she could rehabilitate her relationship with
her mother.
There was just one problem: "How was I going to reconcile my desire to
rescue teen-idol music with my honest critical assessment that the music
wasn't very good?" A lot of soul-searching, disk-spinning, and
interviews later, Schoemer had her answer. Sometimes it doesn't matter what
the critics say; what counts about pop music is what those songs tell you about
yourself, your life, your hopes and fantasies.
Schoemer mixes personal history in with accounts of her visits to Fabian,
Pat, Frankie, and Connie, as well as Patti Page, Tommy Sands, and Georgia Gibbs.
Her recaps of how they made it big and what happened when they weren't so
big anymore make for fascinating reading. Patti Page produces organic maple
syrup products on a farm in New England. Tommy Sands, battling mental illness,
can barely make it through lunch. Pat Boone turns out to be so relentlessly,
honestly charming that even the Boss-loving Schoemer falls for him.
As she goes about her project, Schoemer offers up insights into her own
history that make one long for more Frankie, less frankness. In the interviews,
and especially in the personal history sections, she feels and behaves more
like an awkward groupie than a serious journalist. When she finally faces up to
that dirty little secret, it isn't pretty: "Writing about music, for
me, was basically a way to avoid myself and the emptiness I encountered when I
looked in the mirror."
No wonder she developed a crush on Pat Boone and on the music her mother
once loved, with its promises of "unsullied, abstract, uncomplicated"
romance. By the book's end, she's learned it can't fix a broken
heart, or a broken family relationship. But, she writes, "I understood why
this music had drawn me in. I loved it because I related to it."
Like the teen favorites that inspired it,
Great Pretenders has more heart than art to it. But as a reminder that
our pop dreams aren't really so different from our parents', it's
sweet and soulful.
Jennifer Howard is a staff writer at The Chronicle of Higher
Education and a contributor to the story collection D.C. Noir
(Akashic Books).
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