Those who know me in a passing way, or only in a particular context, tend to have certain preconceptions about me. If you play rugby (or hockey, or football, or touch rugby, or bl*ody Monopoly, or just about anything competitive) with me, you may nominate me "person most likely to get a four week ban". If you work with me, you may remember the odd, erm, heated exchange. I can't pretend to be wholly ashamed of this behaviour, either. Who wants to be tame?
Anyway, those who know me better are painfully aware of a deeper, far more unpleasant trait. I am a sucker for emotional manipulation. I love romcoms, be they 1940's The Shop Around the Corner, or 2005's Hitch. I cannot go and see films with sad endings, which I can, fortunately, detect a mile off (no Crouching Tiger for me, thanks). They affect me for hours, or even days. My favourite songs are very, very often poignant either in form (Hoobastank - The Reason, Massive Attack - Teardrop) or in association (The Cocteau Twins - Blue Bell Knoll).
There is a point to this narcissistic self-indulgence. It leads me to name - to assert - the greatest pop song of all time. I know what you're thinking: something safe by the mid 60's Beatles, perhaps? Dylan? Or maybe a deliberately provocative choice: the Death in Vegas/Iggy Pop collaboration Aisha or the Cure with A Forest? Maybe The Undertones, or the Clash, or Nirvana will get a nomination for a bit of alternative credibility? Or someone unheard of, just to assert my musical alpha status? Team Sleep's Ataraxia would do there. Or even just a ridiculous piece of fanboism from my own tastes like the Smiths' How Soon is Now? or Faith No More and the Boo Yah Tribe's Another Body Murdered. Ho ho ho.
But no. I think the finest pop single ever released is Don Henley's The Boys of Summer. It's not my genre, nor my era, nor is it specifically associated with any great event in my life. It's not the sort of music I usually like, and it has been murdered in a variety of unfortunate ways by later, lesser artists. But in structure, melody and lyrical content it is simply the perfect pop record, and the real, underlying meaning of the song is universal.
The 16-bar, minor key intro is distinctive and built around a beautifully simple, syncopated figure in threes, but is later subsumed into the song proper, being restated fairly intact between each chorus and verse (played twice between second chorus and third verse) with a hint of adornment in the later playings - a gesture towards a guitar solo. The chorus itself shifts into a major key, giving a sense of release each time and serving to lighten an essentially down song. You wouldn't know from a quick listening, but this is one of the saddest pop songs outside the godlike Rolf Harris and his track Two Little Boys*.
The sadness is hidden in a simple yet subtle lyric. An initial listen might leave you thinking that the song is about the end of summer. That is certainly the theme of the first verse:
Nobody on the road
Nobody on the beach
A feeling in the air
That summer's out of reach
But at the end of that verse is a link to the theme of the next: "I'm driving by your house, though I know you're not home". The second verse does, indeed, seem to be singing about the girl he loved - and who he clearly still loves - but who he has lost somehow. A pop song about losing a girl? Not great in the novelty stakes. But again, the hint to the larger theme is there near the segue into the second chorus. What sounds like a relapse into normal, tedious pop cliche ("...but I don't understand what happened to our love...") is, in fact, key to understanding not just the third verse in turn, but in fact the whole song.
Despite being standard, 4/4, 16-bar pop, nonetheless it is the case that - outside of the choruses - most of the song is dominated by a three-against-four rhythm. The threefold figure is repeated in the verse structure. And the theme of the song is decidely triune in nature. This use of threes in music has a long heritage: just look at the sonata form: exposition, development and capitulation. You can even shoe-horn this song into a sort of sonata structure, with the exposition comprising a first and second group (although the transposition is not between the normal tonic and dominant). The codetta is missing here (but appears near the end of the song), but it is not a universal element in any case. The development and recapitulation are repeated here, of course, but that was traditional before 1780 or so, and if it's ok for Beethoven (in the Appassionata Sonata) then it's ok for Henley. Pushing the parallel further, there is even a slow introduction (actually the tempo is maintained throughout, but the guitar line is distinctly slower in pace than the rest of the intro) and a lengthy coda which restates the main theme while emphasising the sub-dominant
I knew those years of musical study under Alex Keith weren't entirely wasted. Whether he was ever so sure is another matter.
Returning to the lyrical theme, the first words of the third verse are the pay-off:
Out on the road today
I saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac
A little voice inside my head said
"Don't look back you can never look back"
This verse is about the loss of the late 60s and 70s world that Don Henley identified with. Again, as with the second verse, there is no need to be specific in the identification here, since the song works just as well with the Ataris' lyric of seeing a Black Flag sticker (although a BMW would, if it scanned or rhymed, be more approriate to that age group than a Caddy [edit: Ack.. I totally forgot when writing that that *I* drive a BMW. Noooo....]). The values of rebellion, of the rejection of mainstream norms and the assertion of a new and different, better way all pass with time, in the face of material wealth and mundane security.
The chorus ties this together, with the first couple of stanzas each time concerned with a simple act of imagining of the girl, while the second half of the chorus is concerned with asserting that the singer's love is beyond the passing nature of what he describes elsewhere: summer ends, the girl goes, the world itself passes, but his love for each remains unaltered, despite the fact that he knows "those days are gone forever, I should just let them go"
This unifies the song as a whole. I don't think Henley was particularly writing a song about summer ending, girls leaving or the seventies passing. I think he was simply writing about loss, and the difficulty of accepting that loss despite its inevitability. As put by another songwriter with a gift for evoking this sense of inevitable loss:
As all things must surely have to end
And great loves will one day have to part**
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* Colin Harvais, who I went to school with, would physically shed tears on hearing Rolf's magnum opus. Seriously.
** Billy Corgan, The Smashing Pumpkins, Muzzle. In many ways, I prefer Corgan's defiant version of loss - "my life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won", but the song as a whole, while I love and identify with every line, is not as tautly written nor as universal as Henley's. It is a little sixth-form-self-indulgent at times. But Corgan is undoubtedly a master of the crafted one-liner: "Wrap me up in always, and drag me in with maybes"
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P.S. This reminded me of a song I know I liked but cannot really remember. Does anyone remember a song from about 1999-2000, possibly black and white (certainly false-coloured somehow) with the band in a car in the sea, heads just above water-level? The sea may be sped up while the band might move real-time. I'm not terribly sure about this, am I? Kinda rock-ish, though not metal as such. Occasional MTV2 play. And it's not the Stereophonics, nor is it the Cure.