This was just the funniest moment to me. I was listening to an interview (on NPR) with Dion, of Dion and the Belmonts, teen idol of the 60s, and he was talking about how he came to write such deep introspective hits like Runaround Sue and The Wanderer. Come to find out, The Wanderer is about a guy with tattoos of all these girls' names. Now, after all these years, these words finally make sense to me.
"Well there's Moe on my left and Mary on my right,
And Janie is the girl well that I'll be with tonight,
And when she ask me which one I love the best,
I tear open my shirt and I show Rosie on my chest,
'Cause I'm a wanderer, yeah I'm a wanderer
I roam around around around around hmmm"
It's so silly but I've thought about that interview a lot. The songs of the 50s and 60s were so mindless that I never gave much credence to them having thought going into them. And yet as simple as they were, they stirred real emotions in me as a teenager. They made me cry and they made me happy. They were so much fun to sing along with. It was easy to know all the words -- even if they didn't make sense.
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