Shortly after 11am on 11th November 1961, I arrived into the world. I hadn’t done much for the Minute’s Silence and I haven’t done much for peace and quiet since.
The week that I was born saw the Marvelettes “Please Mr Postman” narrowly pip Ray Charles‘ “Hit the Road Jack” to number one. Dion’s “Runaround Sue” and Jimmy Dean‘s “Big Bad John” were in the top five which was completed by “This Time” by Troy Shondell. I reckon most forty and fifty somethings know the aforementioned but Troy Shondell?
Here’s “This Time” in all it’s glory . Troy Shondell, or Gary Shelton to his Mum and Dad, rode the charts for four months in 1961 and though he never seems to have repeated the dose , the song was bought 3 million times. They didn’t have You Tube then.
Try naming ten acts over the past fifty years that shaped your musical consciousness. Here are mine;- Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, Bowie, the Clash , the Pistols , Joy Division, the Smiths , Primal Scream ,Springsteen and Lou Reed.
That wasn’t the result of deep thought – merely the first ten names to came to mind on a drizzly Sunday morning.
For someone, Troy Shondell is on that list – for whatever random reason.
If we leave a legacy these days, it is digital. My google footprint now stretches across many pages and no doubt Google Images will, should this blog be read sufficient times, include Troy Shondell’s youthful face among Henry Tapper’s gallery.
It is hardly the stuff of Shakespeare’s sonnets where the poet dreamed of immortality through the beauty of his lines. Today, we seek to clamber from obscurity in different ways, aspiring to a “twitter mention” that might last longer than the time that mention stays upon the viewable page.
Thus passes the glory of this world. Being fifty is no big shakes and if I happen to read this little masterpiece in thirty years time, I will, as you are probably doing, smile with embarrassment at the thought that anyone could really feel they were important enough to be remembered.
Well at least Troy was!
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