“Antiques!” That’s the first yawp of Prefab Sprout’s excellent, underplayed song “Faron Young” from 1985. Rock music creates the perception that it’s covered every sound and sentiment under the sun, while at the same time, how many rock songs delve into the subject of antiques? Even in the Prefab Sprout lyrics, the word antique is more figurative than literal. For the most part rock wants to be cool or so uncool that it becomes cool. Antiques are the kind of uncool that are hard to ever make come off as cool.
For that matter, older people rarely get much play in rock music — and particularly older women. When an older woman serves as the central figure in a rock song, it’s often a stark portrait of loneliness and/or mental decay, such as in Pearl Jam’s “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” Elvis Costello’s “Veronica” and the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
Can a rock ’n’ roll song make older women seem cool? Sure, just go right ahead ask Jan and Dean. (This is meant in a figurative rather than literal sense. Jan Berry died in 2004.)
Jan and Dean’s music is often seen as banal, as they were always looking to cash in on what was happening in the early-to-middle 1960s rock ’n’ roll (car songs, songs about girls, surfing tunes) as a way to make it big, and they did make it big. (Don’t get us wrong, we love Jan and Dean!) At their zenith, they hit Number 3 on the Billboard charts in 1964 with “The Little Old Lady (from Pasadena)” — their best selling song they wrote themselves alongside Don Altfeld and Roger Christian. (Their top sell and most popular, “Surf City” was written by Brian Wilson.)
What’s extraordinary is that with the refrain, “Go Granny, go Granny, go Granny, go!” Jan and Dean made a spunky older woman with hella attitude into the hero of a rock song. It captures the “Terror of Colorado Boulevard” in all her late-life glory — Granny has many decades but not a bit of decay. As far as I know, the figure of an older woman as rock ’n’ roll hero has only been done just one time — by Jan and Dean.
A cynical mind might say that rather created with genuine sentiment, it’s nothing more than a novelty song. Certainly, the ironic jokiness of “there’s nobody meaner than the little old lady from Pasadena” — and the out-of-tune screechy harmonies that your parents would hate — helped make the song popular. On the same album, they also make a hero of “Horace, the Swingin’ School Bus Driver,” which lends itself to the idea that, yep, these are novelty songs. But I’d like to think that the two on-top-of-the-world cool-as-F young, handsome surfer guys are also paying authentic tribute to members of an older generation otherwise completely ignored by 60s cool teen culture, even with a touch of comedy thrown in. Jan and Dean are nice boys.
Speaking of uncool subjects in rock songs, the lost gem on Jan and Dean’s Little Old Lady (from Pasadena) album is a cut called “The Anaheim, Azuza, and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, and Timing Association” — try saying that three times fast. It’s a song that handily packs quite a few uncool places and things into one title. Again the heroes are edgy older women: Patience Proper and Prudence Prim who read Playboy magazine and Hot-Rod News. Soundwise, it’s pure Jan and Dean.
As someone who has written more than 100 book reviews and listened to thousands of rock songs, “The Anaheim, Azuza, and Cucamonga … ” stands as the only song I know with a reference to “book review.” Silly as the song is, it’s nice to get even a tangential shout out in a song that was recorded years before I was born. (The song really has nothing to do with book reviews.)
Jan and Dean, bless ’em, with all their free-spirited fun, take their music to places where no other rock song dares to go, and they do it with verve and aplomb. Now we just need one good song about a notary public.
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