Yes, it’s a little shameless self-promotion. But this is also my personal tribute to the Apollo 11 mission. Last summer I recorded a track called “Lunar Landing,” wherein I tried to capture some of the spirit of the late ’60s and the excitement of space exploration. The track was completed on July 16, the 39th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.
Now, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the mission, and using mostly newly-restored footage just released this week by NASA, I’m publishing my first ever YouTube video, with this footage set to my music. It’s amazing what you can produce in an evening with modern technology.
I was going to save this until Monday, the actual anniversary of the landing, but I decided to release it today in honor of Walter Cronkite, the TV news legend who died today at age 92. Be sure to watch the video to the very end!
I’m not sure why the video got squished down into letterboxed widescreen format. I didn’t edit it that way. Somewhere between fumbling around in the latest version of iMovie (which I hadn’t used before) and uploading the video to YouTube, things got fouled up. I don’t know what went wrong, but maybe next time I’ll figure it out. It’s not rocket science!
I will admit that it is a long stretch to call this song prog rock, but I do think that there’s a hint of what would soon congeal into that genre in the so-called sunshine pop of the late 1960s. But mainly I am featuring this here because it’s my only reasonable outlet for this oddity.
Most people have probably never heard of the Peppermint Trolley Company, and that’s just fine. Why should you? Well, probably because even though you may not realize it, if you’re of my generation, you almost certainly have heard them. Countless times. They’re responsible for the sickeningly saccharine version of the Brady Bunch theme song from that show’s first season. We’ve been watching DVDs of The Brady Bunch a lot lately in our house, partly to feed SLP’s own obsession with blog-worthy Brady topics.
I remember as a kid watching the show all the time — it was in heavy rotation in syndication, along with the likes of Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie. And I also remember how, in so many ways, the first season of the show stood apart from the rest. I was too young to know anything about the ’60s or, for that matter, the early ’70s. But I could just tell that first season, from 1969-1970, was different. It wasn’t just that the kids were younger. The clothes were different. The hair was different. And, for the love of God, the theme song was unbearably different. Who did these warbly-voiced interlopers think they were, singing about the Brady kids’ experience of a mixed family in the third person? Not the Brady kids, that’s who!
It wasn’t until we bought the first season on DVD last week that I noticed “Theme song sung by The Peppermint Trolley Company” during the closing credits. What an appropriately douchey (to use the term Colin Meloy employed so well during The Decemberists’ appearance at Rock the Garden here in Minneapolis a few weeks ago) name for a totally douchey band singing the ultimately douchey version of a fundamentally douchey song.
Anyway… I was even more surprised tonight to discover that they had actually released other music, in the only time period where music more idiosyncratic than that of the early ’70s (i.e. prog) would have a chance at commercial success: the late ’60s. And so we have the ultimate representation of why the first season of The Brady Bunch is so different from the rest: that bloody “sunshine pop” version of the theme song inextricably ties the first season to the culture of the late ’60s, whereas the remaining four seasons were firmly entrenched in — and, to the mind of someone who grew up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, defined — the early ’70s.
Just as sunshine pop was a prototypical precursor to certain varieties of progressive rock, so too was the first season of The Brady Bunch a precursor to the true Brady era that would go on to define a generation.
And, yes, as a final measure of this music’s worthiness for this blog, like much of “true” prog rock, sunshine pop got skewered in This Is Spinal Tap, with the song “Listen (to the Flower People).”
Try as I might, I can’t find a way to justify calling anything Michael Jackson ever did “prog.” Nonetheless, despite the tabloid drama his life became in his later years, it’s impossible to overstate his impact on the world of popular music, especially in my childhood. So prog or not, his death today at age 50 is shocking, and sad.
I was just really getting into popular music — and therefore, at the time, MTV — when Thriller was released. For years, the title track’s looooooong video was always #1 on MTV’s “Top 100 Videos of All Time” countdowns, but for me Michael’s best song, and coolest video, was always “Billie Jean.” There are a few poor quality “bootleg” versions of the video on YouTube I could have included here, but since there’s an official one (“embedding disabled by request”) that’s of pristine quality, I’ll just settle for linking to it.
