Why Were There No Polyesters?

Stranger than fiction! You’re the team of Billy Jackson and Jimmy Wisner, and it’s 1964, and the Orlons have recorded your song “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” as the B-side of, well, “Bon-Doo-Wah”. “Bon-Doo-Wah” isn’t a hit. And then, a year and change later, someone calls from England to tell you that “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” is No. 1 in the charts.

Sixty-one years after the fact, I have taken an intense dislike to their song, unheard by me until 2024. The Searchers, who labored in the same fields as the Beatles, who, with the even obscurer-than-the-Orlons Donays’ non-hit “Devil In Her Heart” had shown that there was gold in them thar hills of black American artists’ esoterica. The Moody Blues would soon break through on the strength of their cover of Bessie Banks’ “Go Now” and Manfred Mann with their cover of the Exciters’ “Doo-Wah-Diddy”.

When writing about Elvis’s emergence, one typically decries the insipidness of the pop music that ruled the airwaves in the first half of the ‘50s. Well, I deny anyone to find the Searchers’ “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” significantly less insipid than Parry Como at his most relaxed.

And the lyrics!

Before we get to which, we must agree that, in almost every case, lyrics are the least important feature of a pop record, the most important being the groove — the aural atmosphere, if you will — and the melody. In my life, I have adored Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki”, sung in Japanese, of which I speak not a syllable, and many tracks by the sublime Cocteau Twins, whose Elizabeth Fraser sang nonsensical random words that made John Lennon Lewis-Carroll-tribute-band items like “Come Together” sound as though from My Fair Lady.

In 1963, some genius at Capitol Records, which a few months later declined to even bother releasing the Beatles’ records in America, had decided that Kyu Sakamoto’s song should be renamed after a Japanese hot-pot dish familiar to those few thousand Americans with adventurous palates. Newsweek quite wonderfully speculated that it was as though "Moon River" had been renamed “Beef Stew” for release in Japan.

But we can avoid discussion of the lyrics of “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” no longer!

Don’t throw your love away.
No no no no.
Don’t throw your love away.
‘Cause you may need it some day.

That fairly leap out of the radio, demanding, “Have you ever heard anything so lame?”

Well, yes, you have, in America’s breakthrough hit “A Horse With No Name”.

In the desert you can remember your name
‘cause there’s no one there for to give you no pain.

How many English-speaking grammarians were driven to suicide by that?

Compared to which, “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” is Carly Simon’s magnificently heartbreaking “The Way I Always Heard It Should Be” or Joan Baez’s heartbreaking (and scathing) “Diamonds and Rust” or Mr. Cohen’s heartbreakin “Bird on the Wire”.

You might infer, quite correctly, that I like songs about heartbreak. And here, for comparisons’ sake, is one of my own, “When You Lost Me (For Nancy)”.

For all those years you broke my falls.
I raged at God. You endured it all.
But you’re exhausted now. I can’t help but see
I lost my way when you lost me.

Confess my crimes? All right, I shall
I put you through seven kinds of hell
Nobody could condemn your impulse to flee
I lost the earth when you lost me

Of this effect I am the cause,
I gasp for breath. I grasp at straws
But what court could condone this inequity?
I lost the moon when you lost me

As I burn up, your passions cool
I have no axe to grind, nor another tool
I can’t defend myself. I won’t cop a plea
I lost the sky when you lost me

I’ve hurt before, but not like this
Behold my view of the abyss
The road’s impassable, covered with debris
I lost my will to live when you lost me