Older men, young girls: a common theme of 70s pop – but still wrong

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Created on Sunday, 07 October 2012 00:00

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Older men, young girls: a common theme of 70s pop – but still wrong

Teenage love was at rock'n'roll's core. The stars were often not much older than female fans, and industry middlemen also tried to interpose themselves into the sexual mix

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Charles Shaar Murray

Back in 1968, Mick Jagger sang, "I don't care that you're 15 years old, I don't want to see no ID," on the Rolling Stones' Stray Cat Blues, "It ain't no hangin' matter, ain't no capital crime..."

Needless to say, the Stones don't perform this song in concert any more, and the last time they did, the lyric was subtly amended to "16". Who knew at the time that it would be the band's bassist Bill Wyman, rather than Jagger, who would later play out the song out in real life, eventually marrying Mandy Smith (when she was 19 and he was 53), or that their post-divorce punchline would be the wedding of Wyman's son to Smith's mother?

Another song you don't hear much nowadays is a once-popular blues standard that was first recorded in 1937 by the first of the two harmonica-playing Mississippi bluesmen to use the name Sonny Boy Williamson. Its opening lines were "Good morning little schoolgirl, can I come home with you? Tell your mama and your papa I'm a little schoolboy too." In 1964, a version of that song was Rod Stewart's first solo single and it has also been recorded by Chuck Berry (no surprise there, really), Van Morrison, Huey Lewis, Paul Rodgers and numerous blues greats including Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. But not lately.

Yet, even leaving aside the rough-and-ready worlds of the blues and post-blues hard rock, it's not hard to understand why the early days of pop and rock'n'roll included so many songs about teenage girls.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when the music was a relatively new phenomenon, its audience consisted primarily of teenagers and those in their early 20s; teen romance was its principal lyrical topic and songs about teenage girls sold well both to teenage girls themselves and to their boyfriends. Teen angels were rockin' at the high-school hop: either to songs borrowed from rhythm and blues and written and performed by and for black adults or to songs specifically aimed at teens seeking passage into adulthood.

Chuck Berry's Almost Grown began, "Well, I'm doin' all right in school" and its punchline, "Don't bother us, leave us alone, anyway we almost grown", was perfect for teenagers in 1959.

Berry himself – who later served two years in prison for transporting a 14-year-old girl across a state line – was 33 at the time. Yet many of those who wrote and performed the songs were not that much older than their subjects. The first line of the first song on the first Beatles album may have been, "She was just 17, you know what I mean", but when it was recorded and released, the youngest Beatle, George Harrison, was only 20 and Paul McCartney, who wrote it, had barely turned 21. Nevertheless, it is sobering to note, when viewing the Beatles' 1964 movie A Hard Day's Night today, that Pattie Boyd, whom Harrison met on set and later married, appears in the role of a schoolgirl, costumed in classic 1960s school uniform.

After all, from time immemorial, a large part of the pop industry has been devoted to selling pretty young men to younger girls. From Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, Elvis Presley in the 1950s, the Beatles and the Stones in the 1960s, David Cassidy and the Osmonds (or, for the smarter kids, David Bowie and Marc Bolan) in the 1970s through to Take That in the 1990s and Justin Bieber or the latest X-Factor cutie-pie today, the transaction seemed fairly straightforward … on paper, at least.

The music industry got a hefty slice of pocket money (or parents' disposable income); in exchange, the audience got artefacts such as records, posters and concert tickets and an opportunity to explore burgeoning sexuality via a fantasy of remote, safe-distance virtual boyfriends.

Things got complicated when the safe distance disappeared, the love-object was no longer remote, the attraction was reciprocated and industry intermediaries (most of whom were neither as young nor as pretty as the stars) used the reflected glory of the pop and rock idols to interpose themselves into the mix.

They could use the promise of access to the Loved Ones – not to mention drugs, alcohol or outright threats – as leverage to indulge fantasies of their own in ways that could, and often did, turn incredibly ugly. As ugly, in fact, as many of the main culprits, few of whom could have gotten within spitting distance of their prey were they forced to depend solely on their own talents, charm or appearance as means of attraction.

Jimmy Savile OBE was a very different proposition from Jimmy Page OBE who, in the Hollywood Babylon of the early 1970s, had girls less than half his age fist-fighting for his favours. Nevertheless, even though there was no coercion involved, the question of whether or not the Led Zeppelin guitarist should have accepted their devoted attentions, however freely offered, was one that pop had already been addressing for a decade.

In Younger Girl, the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian had mused, "And should I hang around acting like a brother? In a few more years they'll say we're right for each other." And in the breastbeating 1968 chart-topper Young Girl, Union Gap's Gary Puckett discovered, just in time, that his sweetie was the wrong side of the age line and sobbingly sent her back to mother.

For those coming of age in the Deep South of the 1950s, both custom and law were breathtakingly different. Elvis Presley, serving overseas in the US army, began romancing his commanding officer's daughter, nine years his junior, when she was a mere 14, though the relationship went unconsummated until their marriage six years later. Jerry Lee Lewis, famously, not only married his second cousin when she was 14, but did so before his divorce from his previous wife was finalised. He paid for this transgression not in court or jail, but with a decade in the career wilderness.

Some things were just plain unacceptable even when buttoned-up 1950s prudery was beginning its retreat.

So: are we projecting modern attitudes back into a very different time? Yes, we are. Are we right to do so? Yes, we are. Many things once considered "normal" – ranging from institutional racism and legal suppression of homosexuality to drinking and driving or smoking in public places – are now proscribed, and we are, both as a culture and as individuals, better for it.

Quite simply, we know better now, and these days most grownups, thankfully, act on that knowledge. In the supremely unlikely event that your correspondent were to be hit on by a naked 14-year-old, I'd make like Gary Puckett, throw a coat over her and send her in a cab back to her mother.

And this would hold true even if we were in Spain, where the legal age of consent is 13. Or anywhere else on the planet where both law and custom differ radically from ours.

Source: The Guardian UK