Personal Hits #1
The first songs to hit the developing pleasure centers of new brains are usually mom’s favorite tunes. Billy Don’t Be a Hero, with its simple chords and harmonies found easy access, apparently, to the developing nucleus accumbens of the kids on the block who were in the pool of fellows I had to make friends with. It’s hard not to imagine that inner ring suburban Kansas City matriarchs might not have bumped the signal from the portable Magnavox radio over the sink, dialed on 1030 KBEQ, when the martial drum beat came in and the adorable Bo Heywood sang, earnestly:
“The marchin' band came down along Main Street
The soldier blues fell in behind
I looked across and there I saw Billy
Waiting to go and join the line”
The song topped the charts on July 29th 1974. I was six with a lazy eye.
We had a game back then- one kid would throw any kind of available ball in a high arc to the other kid in someone’s front yard and the other kid would catch it while I was in between them, leaping to snatch the ball for whatever reason, then falling down hard. Probably didn’t have the idea that I couldn’t fly cat-like through the air and nab it. Maybe it was Kid One who started singing the song, maybe it was Kid Two, but the song became the theme of the game. Sometimes Kid Three from down the street would join in and make things super dark and chime in with Little Willy (won’t go home) by Sweet.
These were the afternoons I learned what it is to ‘have the wind knocked out of me’.
But I can’t hold my experience against the song. And I can’t begrudge the other juniors of the day. Its topical fruit hangs low. With its lachrymose anti-war lyric about a girl’s beloved enlisting in the army only to meet a tragic end, It was an easy international hit in the year before the fall of Saigon. Written by the powerhouse songwriting team of Mitch Murray and Peter Callender and covered by both Paper Lace and Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, it was factory pop, well engineered in the studio, engineered for the contemporary zeitgeist. The former was funneled through transistor radios in air tight American homes, the latter topped the charts in The Commonwealth.
It lives in a cluttered corner of my mind, playing through a Magnavox IR 1203 with an always-fresh 9volt, sung in the voices of my playmates. It’s a personal hit. It’s a scraped knee of a song, dragged through a dry lawn, through zoysia and crab grass, healed by a sweaty plastic cup of strong Country Time Lemonade in the breakfast room hours before dad gets home.
Great writing, Bill! Took me right back there. I was 8…
I wish I could manifest the smell of the times! All of this smells like cigarette smoke on rayon, miracle-gro soil and peanut butter🤪