'60S GOING ON '90S

By RICHARD CORLISS

They linger in the middle-age memory like invisible friends from childhood--a wisp of melody, an easy rhythm, a naive lyric that sounded like poetry then and rings with poignance today. You hear the old pop songs, and suddenly it's 1960; you are yanked back to the spot where they first assaulted you in all their potent mystery. "When I first heard Ray Charles' Hit the Road, Jack," says Tom Hanks, who was five in the summer of '61, "I literally thought it was about some guy hitting the road with his fist. I remember sitting out in front of my house, singing the song and slamming my fist on the pavement."

The pop songs of the '60s, before music became all art and attitude, have never disappeared; these ghosts do their haunting on oldies stations and TV commercials, in elevators and showers. A 4-CD set of Burt Bacharach's sophisticated pop ballads has been issued in Britain. The decade's prime confectors are appealingly, exhaustively available on the 10-hr. video version of The Beatles Anthology--more than twice the length of last year's TV special, with many more archival performances of the Fab Four's hits--as an appetizer for the final Anthology CD set, due in late October.

And if the original old gold isn't good enough, now there's a heap of pretty paste imitations. Allison Anders' Grace of My Heart, a fictionalized biopic of songwriter Carole King, has '60s-type tunes for girl groups and beach boys. Hanks' new film That Thing You Do!, about the Wonders, an imaginary pop group from Erie, Pennsylvania, features songs in the style of the Beatles, the Ronettes, the Ventures, Jan and Dean, even a little bogus Bacharach. And the ultimate British rip-off group, the Rutles, are cashing in on the Anthology with their own Archaeology CD--satire you can hum along with.

The '64 Beatles, cuddly and chart busting, are the inspiration for Hanks' Wonders. The later Beatles, of Sgt. Pepper and The White Album, are fodder for Rutle in chief Neil Innes, who for Archaeology composed such cheery pastiches as "You got lonely-phobia / And I only hope ya / Get better." Innes says George Harrison gave his blessing to the project. "He said, 'Why not? It's all part of the soup.'" Why not indeed? Rutles footage appears on the Anthology video.

The Rutles album has an advantage over the CDs from Grace of My Heart and That Thing You Do!: it doesn't have to support a movie narrative. The Hanks and Anders films have big problems as nostalgic history and satisfying dramas. But the music is first-class evocation. The essential artifact for both works is not the movie but the album. Coincidentally, each film's sound track was developed the same way: a dozen or so pop composers--some veterans of the '60s like Bacharach, Lesley Gore (It's My Party) and King's ex-husband Gerry Goffin, others so young they weren't alive when the Brill Building was the Pentagon of pop--wrote tunes with the bounce and pang of the old stuff. As Gore, who helped write one number in Grace of My Heart, says of the old songs, "They were simple and direct. They got to the heart of the matter."

The songs on That Thing You Do! are faithful parodies: tight, with short verses and catchy tunes. Listen to Hanks describe the That Thing You Do! title tune, written by 28-year-old Adam Schlesinger: "There's a driving rhythm, and as it goes into the second chorus the entire crowd picks up on the beat. The singer steps back from the mike, the guitarist goes into a stumbling yet evocative solo, then it ends with a soul-satisfying bomp-bomp-bomp Waaaaangtwiddlelip!" The CD also has a song called I Need You (That Thing You Do), similar to the first tune but even more engaging. If released as a follow-up, it could have made the band two-hit Wonders. (Wait a minute--we're waxing nostalgic about a band that never existed.)

Except for a Dixie Cup-esque cut (I Do), the Grace of My Heart songs aren't primarily parodies; they're just good music. The pearl is God Give Me Strength, by Bacharach and Elvis Costello. Broody and complex, it suggests a tune Bacharach might have given Dionne Warwick to sing in an uptown nightclub at 3 a.m. "Burt consciously breaks rules with bar lines," says Costello. "He's breaking the meter, but it still feels natural. And he expresses feeling so much better than the trumped-up romantic ballads of today, where the emotions seem to have come off a shopping cart at Woolworth's."

Instead of sitting in the Brill Building, the writers worked via fax and voice mail. Yet, Bacharach says, the aim is the same: "Despite the machinery, the finesse of modern record making, underneath it all, there has to be a yearning for a melody. You still need something to whistle."

For emotional impact, the "new '60s" songs can't be compared with the originals; for that you'd have to be 15 again, your ear soldered to an AM radio in the urgent expectation that the next 3-min. jingle would explain and rectify your life. But the movies' songs--with their close-rockin' guitars, shivering tambourines and wall-of-sound studio skills--have a musical validity. Thirty years from now, they could be a new generation's invisible friends.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles