Wedding season has begun. First out of the gate this year was my young first cousin once removed, who entered marital bliss in a lovely Catholic ceremony in the small western New York city of Lockport, hometown of the logorrheic novelist Joyce Carol Oates and the supermodel cum hemorrhoid-cream spokeswoman Kim Alexis.
As I sat nursing a non-alcoholic beer (I should’ve stuck with water) at the reception I awaited the father-daughter dance, and not only for its poignancy. I have paid attention to these ever since reading a newspaper article several years back that said Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” was then the second-most-popular song for this wedding-reception custom. Hmm. Unless my powers of literary exegesis have declined, that hit was about a languid, druggy rock star who gets shitfaced at a party and has to be driven home and tucked into bed by his supermodel girlfriend. (Not Alexis, I assume.) It’s about as apt for the occasion as “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight” would be at a funeral. (My cousin’s bride and her dad cut a respectful rug to a fitting Tim McGraw song.)
Pity the poor misunderstood lyricist, whether Clapton or others. Bruce Springsteen protested when Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign blared his aimless Vietnam vet song “Born in the USA” at its happy-face “Morning in America” rallies, and the Guess Who’s chugging anthem of Canadian resentment toward the colossus to the south, “American Woman,” is the ubiquitous accompaniment to Fourth of July fireworks. Look, I don’t need our war machines or ghetto scenes either, but can we give it a one-day break on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence?
Finding a song that hits the right note for a father-daughter dance is rather like combing through the greeting-card selection at your local supermarket. All you want is something that says “Happy Birthday!” but your choices are treacle or purple prose, cretinous pop-culture memes or expressions so stilted they make Hallmark’s all-star versifier Helen Steiner Rice’s decorous doggerel seem Whitmanesque. You’re better off just making your own damn card.
Alas, most of us can’t make our own damn song, so we must make do with the lyrical stylings of others, as if Nashville pap or studio rap can articulate authentic emotions.
But sometimes it all works out. When our daughter was married a year and a half ago, she surprised me by proposing as our father-daughter dance song “Come Saturday Morning,” the hauntingly strange pop tune written by the intriguingly odd Dory Previn, and first performed by the one-hit-wonder the Sandpipers. Good choice, daughter!
“Come Saturday Morning” was the theme to The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), which featured one of the only Liza Minnelli performances that was neither annoying nor cloying, as Judy Garland’s poor little rich girl daughter played a kooky girl – helpfully named “Pookie” – in a character study drawn from the John Nichols novel and set in and filmed at Hamilton College in central New York.
At the wedding reception we danced to a “Come Saturday Morning” cover by Mark Lindsay, lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders, the band behind the proto-punk bangers “Kicks” and “Hungry” as well as one of the better earnest-white-man-weeping-for-the-red-man numbers, “Indian Reservation.” Surely Paul Revere and the Raiders belong on the Mount Rushmore of Idaho bands. Heck, those corny tricornered hats and Revolutionary War vestments might (very briefly) be in again for the 250th anniversary celebrations this summer. Anyone up for a Raiders revival?
Lindsay’s version of “Come Saturday Morning” effectively substitutes sincerity for kookiness and lacks the off-kilter quality of the original, but it has a strong sentimental hold chez Kauffman. For years I would play it every Saturday morning as my wife and daughter entered the kitchen to the unwelcome sizzle of the pancakes I’d whipped up. I am an impatient stove jockey with an unfortunate habit of leaving tiny and inedible clumps of flour in the batter. My flapjacks are, I admit, an acquired taste that precious few ever acquire. But wife and daughter would dutifully choke down a bite or two – “drowned in syrup,” as Scout says in To Kill a Mockingbird – and I would take that as license to whip up another ghastly confection the following week.
Although I’m no longer a regular pancake-flipper and I have a new song with which I torment my wife when she comes down to breakfast – “Linda, Put the Coffee On” by the Canadian balladeer Ray Materick – I still play that father-daughter dance song almost every weekend. “But we will remember/ Long after Saturday’s gone…” You got that right, Dory.
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