Thursday, July 24, 2025

LONG SONG TITLES, PT. 3 (Love)

 
Rich here with the last part of my series about songs with long titles. 
 
If Jan & Dean were affecting no countercultural aspirations when they recorded "The Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, and Timing Association" and Simon & Garfunkel were responding directly to the new-found fame and influence of Bob Dylan when they recorded "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)," by the time Love came along in the mid-Sixties, folk rock with all of its pretensions was in full swing, and they were trying to show that they were as hip as anyone.
 
At the time, Love was one of the biggest bands in L.A., and many thought of them as the inheritors of The Byrds' crown among Folk Rock Royalty. Unfortunately, due to a series of self-inflicted injuries to the band's  career by their mercurial leader Arthur Lee, Love never made a huge national splash, but they did, however, record several albums that are considered Folk Rock Classics, especially "Forever Changes," an adventurous album that expanded the boundaries of folk rock and which is considered by many critics to be the "Sgt. Pepper" of the genre.
 
And in those "take me where my boot heels would be wandering" times, what would a folk-rock masterpiece be without the tangled lyrical logic and meandering melody of a song with a long, unseemly title like................

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