Flower children

From a New York Times obituary for lead singer Rob Grill (H/T Ann Althouse) we learn that a couple of songwriters wrote a song and then recorded a demo and they gave a the dummy name "The Grassroots" to the band. When the song became a hit, they needed to find a band to be "The Grassroots". So the Grassroots were astroturf.

Or, to put it another way, they were the Monkees. Lots of bands were. There were so many Monkee-like bands in the late 1960s there is a point where you begin to suspect bands like the Grassroots were more significant culturally than anyone wants to admit. And they were.

You want social significance, there is a whole lot of it in this video. Start with Jimmy Durante introducing it. He's wearing a suit and fedora! The contrast with the band is amazing.





Why do I suspect these guys are so much more important than any serious critic would be willing to allow? Well, lots of reasons but starting with this line from their Wikipedia write up:

Between 1967 and 1972, The Grass Roots set a record for being on the Billboard charts for 307 straight weeks. They have sold over twenty million records worldwide.

The thing you need to know here is that Billboard charts are based on radio airplay not record sales. And that is important because most girls didn't buy records they liked between 1960 and 1980, they just listened to the radio.  And that was all you needed to do in the 1960s and 1970s because the really popular songs got played often enough that you didn't need to own them.

Where all this is going is that The Grassroots were one of those groups that girls liked and girls are the ones who drive popular music. Both girls and the music they like get short shrift from the mostly men who write about pop music in a serious fashion. But, consider this: 1967 to 1972 was the period when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were producing the music that gets written about but the group that set the Billboard record for being on the chart for 307 straight weeks was The Grassroots. 307 weeks is almost six years, that's to say they were on the charts constantly from 1967 to 1972. If you want to know what young girls of the time were really influenced by—who had the most profound cultural impact on the young adults of the 1980s that these girls grew up to be—you'd study The Grassroots a lot more and the Beatles and Rolling Stones a lot less.

Again, note the contrast between Jimmy Durante and lead singer Rob Grill above. You can see a real shift in ideals of masculinity. Jimmy Durante didn't tweeze and he drank whiskey.

Rob Grill on the other hand could be Rob Girll. His voice is sweet and supple. Even with sideburns he looks feminine.

He didn't write this song but catch this lyric:

Baby, I need to feel you inside of me
I got to feel you deep inside of me
Baby please come close to me
I got to have you now, please, please, please

That is not a man talking. It might be a man imagining what he wants to hear a woman say to him and that is probably how it started out in the lyricist's mind but as a pop song listened to by millions of virgin girls it became something else.

These were the flower children. They were too young to be part of the 1960s and 1970s. They heard pop music on the radio and imagined what they would become. They heard lyrics they only dimly understood and they'd project all sorts of fantasies onto them. The fantasies were dark and mysterious but they fit into ordinary lives, like most fantasies do

Oh yeah, before letting this go, Rob Grill with the sweet supple voice spent most of his life in pain because of a degenerative bone disease.