Let’s Hear It for Elevator Music

It can be difficult to write about stuff from the distant past on the intertunnel. Interweb commentary will brook only two settings: I love it, or I hate it, and I hate you for liking it.

This can make it dicey to simply acknowledge stuff, and sometimes mention that it was popular for reasons that escape the observer. For instance, I wrote yesterday about 70s songwriters, and pointed out several influential examples. Almost without exception, I’d have turned the radio to another station if anything they wrote came blattering out of the speaker, Montego Bay notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate admire grudgingly acknowledge their popularity. And this is coming from a guy that has made money playing I’m a Believer in public.

So, don’t lose your shit when I start talking about elevator music. MOR, as in Middle of the Road. Easy Listening. It was pretty big back in the late sixties/early seventies. Mom used to listen to it while she vacuumed, for example. To this day, I can’t hear the Sandpipers without wondering where the Hoover backing track went.

Then again, I never hear the Sandpipers. That song was a hit on the regular charts. No, really. That version of that song. It was in the soundtrack of the movie The Sterile Cuckoo, which was more or less a hit, too, in that it made money. This was back when Liza Minnelli was the go-to choice for portraying painfully quirky, somewhat homely manic pixie dream girls. This is a power move when you’re born with deep sea fish eyes, but still have to work. And thanks, Mom and Dad!

I’m singling out the Sandpipers for calumny or kudos, depending on your lack of taste. But there were a lot of bands groups bunches of people doing the same sort of de-boned music for weak teeth at about the same time that rock music was becoming really loud and obnoxious and ubiquitous. Off the top of my head, there was The Association, and the slightly more pop-music 5th Dimension. Or (ugh) The Lettermen:

Precious and few are the times I could stand to hear that one. Man, those lyrics:

You don’t know how many times I wished that I could mold you into someone that would cherish me as much as I cherish you

That sounds like a guy that has shallow graves in his garden. Or maybe it’s just me.

It wasn’t all singing. There were tons of instrumental music records out at the same time. Jackie Gleason made a fortune on what he called aural wallpaper. Mantovani, Percy Faith, David Rose, Henry Mancini, and if you were in the mood for something wilder, Esquivel!

Closely related close harmony singing was everywhere for a while, too, until it disappeared just as quickly. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head was a very popular soft rock hit, but it’s the long sequences in the movie with nothing but vocal harmonies that fit in with, and somewhat energized the genre, even though many found them incongruous with the subject matter:

Mood music like the Sandpipers was easy to dislike, especially in retrospect, and became a punchline later in the seventies. Remember the Blues Brothers solemnly riding the elevator in the old Federal Building in Chicago with Muzak playing while the police and National Guard rally outside?

The easy listening crowd didn’t do themselves any favors by choosing very unwisely among the available pop songs to remake in their signature tapioca style. To wit:

Well, if it wasn’t for the Sandpipers, I never would have enjoyed the adolescent bliss of the mondegreen “One Ton of Mayo.” That’s not a lot to hang your hat on, but then again, it’s not nothing.