Doug Blough

Faithful readers of my sporadic columns have surely gathered I’m in love with old song lyrics and use them excessively in proving my infallible opinions. Often they’re strategically-inserted en route to reaching grander conclusions, but sometimes old song lyrics deserve to stand on their own with no grand master plan. Today is one of those days. These Buds are for you, music lyrics from the golden past.

*Would it kill our fine FM stations to play Milli Vanilli once in a while? Who cares if Pilatus and Morvan never actually sang a note; they were fine-looking young men and WERE Milli Vanilli, period. Who cares who they were lip-syncing? For that they get banned from airtime forever?

Hey, if everyone involved in the scam were willing participants: no crime, no foul. Might I remind everyone of the Archies? Bang-Shang-a-Lang? Google it, listen carefully and tell me cartoon characters like Jughead and Veronica sang that love ditty. Certainly they did not, but the Archies weren’t banned from anything, so why, I ask you, should the incomparably-funky Milli Vanilli be cruelly ostracized?

I loved and sadly sang along to “Girl, I’m Gonna Miss You” during a particularly painful breakup in the late 80’s. And I did “Blame it on the Rain” for some time — enough so that my nephews Jay and Rusty named it my unofficial heartbreak theme song. Finally I had to admit it wasn’t the rain, but the fact I wouldn’t set a wedding date and stupidly suggested maybe she date around a bit before we tied the knot. It wasn’t even a rainy day.

*Those girl groups of those decades, for lack of a tidier term, turned me on. When the Bangles led by dynamite-in-a-small-package, Susanna Hoffs with those huge, hauntingly-expressive eyes sang, “Manic Monday” or “Walk like an Egyptian,” I was doing as told. The Spice Girls, Bananarama, The GoGo’s; you name it. They heated me up.

*When I first migrated to Cody from Pennsylvania to play Legion baseball at 16, I oft-entertained my new friends/teammates by singing car/tragedy songs. Among their most-requested was “Teen Angel,” “Last Kiss,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” and as Bobby Moore is my witness, a perfect rendition of “Little GTO,” more or less my signature song. With my rat-tail comb as a makeshift mic, I wailed out, “Little GTO, you’re really looking fine; 3 dueces and a 4-speed and a 389. Listen to her tacking out now; listen to her whine, yi yi … wind it up, tach it out, blow it up, GTO”

When I hit the chorus, “Yi yi, yi yi yi yi yi ...YI-yi, yi yi …. in a high-pitch voice that had dogs barking outside our team bus, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I put my heart and soul into serenading Bobby, Ronnie Crosby, Doug Price and Bruce Lyman — the senior studs to my freshman doofus.

*Then back to Pa in the winter for the school year, where it was Jerry Lee Lewis my voice captured with that invisible mic, particularly loving, “Hello baby, yeah, this is the Big Bopper speakin’. Ah-ah-ah-ah. Oh you sweet thing; do I like what; will I what? Oh baby, you know what I like … Chantilly Lace and a pretty face, and ponytails a hangin’ down; a wiggle in the walk, a giggle in the talk; it makes the world go round; ain’t nothing in the world like a big-eyed girl, to make me act so funny, spend my doggone money; feel real loose like a long-necked goose; like a … Oh baby that’s a what I like.”So much truth in those few words.

I absolutely loved that crazy Jerry Lee. Sure he married his underage cousin, but again, who am I to judge? I once kissed my sister through a screen door and I haven’t been banned from the Blough family reunions. I am still kind of gawked at though.