Weekday morning sounded the same as I boarded the bus during third grade in 1962, down in the desolate suburbs of southeast Houston. We lived so far out of town, the road into my subdivision was a one-lane shell road and horny toads ran free in the vacant lots. Today, Sabo Road has its own exit off the Sam Houston Tollway and horny toads are on license plates.
The upper elementary grade girls sat at the back of the yellow school bus and sang in youthful unison the hits that filled the airwaves of the day. There may have been as few as four, but it seems as if their ranks would sometimes swell to a dozen or so. The boys who weren’t jeering were ignoring them, but the girls sang unabashedly of love they weren’t old enough to know except in that fluffy pink way.
“She’s Venus in blue jeans, Mona Lisa with a ponytail.”
So they’d croon Paul Anka’s hit du jour to future heartthrobs and clap loudly and chant “yeah yeah” to Little Eva’s “Locomotion.” Tommy Roe’s Buddy Holly knock-off “Sheila” was a favorite, while songs such as Sue Thompson’s “James, Hold the Ladder Steady” were slightly more subversive for 6th grade girls to be singing given its subject matter about eloping.
A pudgy, sullen girl named Sandy led the chorus. Sandy wore glasses and always clutched a notebook of the blue fabric variety popular then. Scrawled across the front in ballpoint pen – that true adult tool of communication to the 2nd grader that I was – were names of various teen stars and phrases that bore cryptic meaning I labored to decipher, the secret language of teenagers.
“Go Team!” read the front of her notebook. “Flunk Now Avoid” decorated the back, squeezed in the fleshy crook of her pale arm.
“Flunk Now Avoid.”
Those words burned in my mind as I stared at them every weekday, pondering their strange meaning over that school year. “Flunk,” I learned, meant to not pass in school, so it became clear that “Flunk Now Avoid” was the order of the day, the protoype of “fail.”
“Flunk Now Avoid” I studiously wrote on my notebook the next year, swiping a ballpoint from my dad. I showed my handiwork to our worldly 14-year-old babysitter Virginia as she smoked a cigarette illicitly outside our house.
“Where’s the rest of it?,” she asked, blowing smoke rings then shooting a thin practiced stream of smoke through them as they dissolved in the air. I was mesmerized.
“The rest of what?”
“It’s supposed to say ‘Flunk Now, Avoid the Rush,’ silly.”
Virginia stubbed out her cigarette and sashayed into the house, ponytail twitching, without further thought to the mortified schoolgirl who’d been parading around with an undecipherable phrase penned on her notebook.
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Very quietly last year came a trio of lesser known heiresses to the girl group crown from Rhino Records: Shelby Flint’s The Complete Valiant Singles, Joanie Sommers’ The Complete Warner Bros. Singles, and Connie Stevens’ The Complete Warner Bros. Singles.
Connie Stevens is easily the best-known of the three, having been a teen idol back when it counted. Her roles in films and as Cricket on hip TV series Hawaiian Eye made her a star, singing with Edd Byrnes on “Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb.” Stevens’ voice wasn’t without substance, but the material is painfully, and her chirpy style pales next to Flint and Sommers on innocuous titles likes “Too Young to Go Steady,” “They’re Jealous of Me,” and “What Will I Tell Him.” Two discs is more than needed.
Joanie Sommers boasted the lengthiest singing career of the three, beginning in 1960, when she too took on the popular Kookie in “Kookie’s Love Song (While Dancing).” The exuberant ”Johnny Get Angry” in 1962 marked her brightest moment in the spotlight, though she continued as the voice of Pepsi in the Sixties and again in the Eighties, and what a voice she had.
Sommers was versatile, well-suited for soundtracks (“Theme from a Summer Place”), jazz (“Bob White”), standards (“Makin’ Whoopee”), and musicals (“June is Bustin’ Out All Over”). Though she was often drizzled in syrupy strings (“Since Randy Moved Away”), the new 2-CD set does the underrated singer justice.
Of the three, Shelby Flint is a cipher, and the one cited by Joni Mitchell for vocal influence, but little known outside her fans. More a contemporary of Carolyn Hester than Connie Stevens, Flint wrote some of her material, heavy on the love-struck themes (“The Lily,” “Somebody,” “The Boy I Love”). She also tackled the folkie favorites with her crystalline voice (“The Riddle Song”), especially on the lovely “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” The collection, like the others, is dated in theme and production, but easy on the ears.
Time hasn’t been kind to vocalists like Flint, Sommers, and Stevens. They weren’t flashy the way we think of young female performers today. The three were mostly in heir late teens and early 20s in these recordings.
Yet there’s a sweetness and innocence to them, like looking in a school yearbook and finding a pressed corsage. They were of another time, and so remain forever young.
This article appears in February 3 • 2012.