St. Joan of the Jukebox

There she sits, desperate, unhappy, twelve years old. She is cursed with the catastrophe of parents, and her boy friends complete her misery by being too young to drive. She sulks behind a screen of bob by pins, slapping at her baby fat, mourning the birth of her acne. She is a worried sixth-grader, an aging child, a frightened girl--and the queen of the $100 million-a-year popular record industry.

The record companies make market surveys, and as a result, they have through the years cast their heroine younger and younger, stretching her life cycle back toward the cradle. In the days when teenage girls were called bobby-soxers, a full-blooming record fan was 16 or so. and only by great leaps of the imagination could she convince herself that Frankie was really singing about her. Now she is ten, or even eight, and by twelve she has become an ardent collector of the dollar each. 45-r.p.m. records through which she suffers the painful joy of hearing a dirge for her already disappearing adolescence. Many of the singers and songwriters who churn out 5,000 records a year for her are scarcely older than she is. and they sing right at her. treating her as if she were a jaded old teenager. Every song echoes their search for something almost as grotesque as it sounds, something the industry calls "the teen feel."

All Heart. Elusive and frail as a sparrow in the hands of any but the most mystically attuned writers and performers, the teen feel has inherited much of its style and sound from rhythm and blues, and much of its spirit from country music. But its creators consider it sharply distinct just the same. Country music, they say, comes from a hard, God-loving life in the sticks. Rhythm and blues comes from the soul. What remains in popular music is mainly the teen feel which, of course, is all heart.

The perfect teen-feel song has a melody simple enough for a devotee to learn in one hearing and, hopefully, it is also reminiscent of some other song that was a hit a year or so ago. It has all the intellectual content of a scream, and its lyrics are direct and ungrammatical:

I've waited so long for school to be through Paula, I can't wait no more for you.

Its rhymes are irresistibly convenient--"heart" and "apart," ''take my hand" and "understand." ''cruel" and "school." The song can be about emotional cripples:

No one needs me, no one cares

No one wants me to be theirs.

Or economic cripples:

He doesn't hang diamonds 'round my neck

An' all he's got's an unemployment check. But it better be about cripples of some kind. Its themes run the full gamut of human feeling--from misery to self-pity to despair. When these subtleties have been achieved, the song ought to be recorded by someone who sings no better than any other kid on the block, lest the record lose the "dumb sound" the industry values as a cinch to win rapport with the girls.

Double Suicide. Occasionally, a happy song acquires a little reverse teen feel:

My name is Oliver Cool

I'm the most swingingest boy in school, but the most trustworthy bets are exploration of the lower reaches of emotions.

Last year, a 17-year-old singer named Kenny Karen made his grandly promoted debut with a song called Susie, Forgive Me, in which the hero robs a candy store after paralyzing Susie by smashing his car into a tree:

Johnny woke up and felt O.K.

But Sue couldn't move her legs that day.

Next came Patches, which sounded like a promotion piece for double teen-age suicide; it was among the year's biggest hits. This year's first hit was Go Away, Little Girl, in which the message sounds suspiciously like a souvenir from Lolita. It is sung by Steve Lawrence, who, perhaps significantly, has reached the Humbert Humbertish age of 27.

Affirmative Corn. The fastest rising phenomenon in the business is a Tin Pan Alley octopus called Aldon Music Inc., which has 35 boys and girls busy night and day composing songs. Last year Aldon turned out 300 numbers that were eventually immortalized on records, most of them strongly teen feel. "After four years," says Vice President Emil La Viola, "we've achieved an Aldon feel, a groove that's fresh and easy, a personal feel. The songs are simple, and mostly they have a negative message." Writers who have the Aldon feel down pat can make $50,000 a year, tossing off 60 or so songs and counting on three or four hits among them. Gerry Coffin, the co-author of such works as The Loco-Motion and Go Away, Little Girl, is 23 and a master of teen feel. "Lyrics will hurt a song," he says, "if they're too adult, too artistic, too correct. You should shy away from anything deep or too happy. When I was a teenager, I noticed that whenever I felt an affirmative attitude toward life and told the other kids, it would be corn to them. So now I avoid it."

Howard Greenfield, another Aldon writer, has had 14 hits since he abandoned his job as a messenger boy four years ago and arrived as a composer with Stupid Cupid. "What we do is take an adult idea and bring it on down to the kids' level," he says. "I figure we have 2 1/2 minutes to grab interest, change pace and paint pictures. A pop song is like a movie--it's a little escape."

Faintly Comic. But it isn't. Rather than offering escape, teen-feel songs invariably wallow in melancholy, trying to touch nerve ends with anything from the merely silly to the downright psychotic. The teen-age girl, as described by her taste in music, is above all a martyr--to broken dates, homework, high school--a St. Joan of the Jukebox yearning for weak heroes with weaker ideas. Dion, a pathetically undernourished singer with a pleading little voice, is among her favorites now. and his songs have titles like The Loneliest Man in the World and Unloved, Unwanted Me. Joan Baez (TIME cover, Nov. 23) is a hit with teen-agers at least partly because of the gloomy songs she sings. And, if there is something faintly comic in the sight of a 14-year-old girl singing along with Joan "All my trials. Lord, soon be over," it is something that escapes the singer.

"You can't be content with getting the girls to just buy the records," says Bob Morgan, an Epic Records producer. "You've got to really move in there with the weepers so that she'll have to possess the record. She's got to need it to explain herself."

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