He bomped the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp
May 2021
There comes a time, we’re told, as you’re coasting through your “golden years” that you should pause, take stock and start toting things up.
You should make the apologies you owe; you should offer the thanks that are due.
And you should do it sooner rather than later. Do it now, before the opportunity slips away. You never know.
So I’ll begin, starting with the thanks. The list won’t be as long, maybe, as the roll of apologies I ought to make. But the thank-yous will be more fun.
I’m not going to do the Academy Awards thing, though, the rundown of all the folks responsible for shoving me along to the pinnacle of success. Thank you, Bill, thank you Bart, and all that. I’m going to start by thanking somebody I don’t even know, somebody who doesn’t know me.
What he did for me, in fact, he did in the process of thanking someone he himself didn’t know.
Let me explain.
He’s Barry Mann -- the man who wanted to thank the guy who put the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp and the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.
“Who was that man?” Mann sang back in 1961. “I’d like to shake his hand. He made my baby fall in love with me. Yeah!”
Mann, who’s alive and hopefully well at 82 today, teamed up with Gerry Goffin to write and sing one of the catchiest pop novelty songs ever recorded. Some people said it was a put-down spoof of the era’s doo-wop lyrics, but I think of it as a celebration of all the goofy, non-sensical lyrics we can all remember and belt out ourselves.
Today pundits would say Mann and Goffin and others like them made the music “accessible”. I’d say they made it so we could sing along. Sha-na-na, sha-na-na. Wa-wa-wa, wa-wa-wa.
“Who Put the Bomp?”, as the song was called, succeeded in preserving forever and ever phrases like “bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop” and “dip-da-dip-da-dip”. It made “boogity-boogity-shoo” a permanent part of the English language.
You won’t find these exuberant words chiseled into a stone monument or engraved on an archway across a grand boulevard. You’ll not read “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Ya-ya-ya, Yaaaaaaaaaaa” in any dictionary or thesaurus. But they’re phrases written in our “Book of Love” for all eternity.
You’ll find them etched not only in old folks’ memories, but now in the younger generation’s, too, because they’ve given us grandpas and grandmas a fun, tangible part of our growing-up to pass on to our grandkids. We can say to them, “Come Go with Me” to another time, to our time, a happy time, years and years ago.
That’s the thing about music – high-brow, low-brow, pa-pa-hoo-mow-mow-brow. It’s so ethereal but so enduring, too. Even if we never see it written note by note, word by word on paper, it’s always floating around in our heads. It's always there when we need it. Happy or sad, sweet or belligerent, moody or triumphant, strings and strands of melody are always standing by to help move us along.
It’s a truism that we link the memories of important events in our lives with memories of certain songs or melodies. We remember “unimportant” but meaningful things, too, when we’re prompted by a cascade of notes tumbling out from the recesses of our minds. The “Hallelujah Chorus” recalls an Easter morning in church; “Louie Louie” rekindles the thrill of an awkward early foray into romance at a darkened gymnasium dance.
The hundreds of songs we know not only serve as file folders for keeping and sorting memories, but they give us ways to express, manage and massage our own feelings when we need to. “Song Sung Blue” by Neil Diamond puts it this way:
Funny thing, but you can sing it with a cry in your voice
And before you know, it started feeling good
You simply got no choice.
So thanks to you, Barry Mann. You got me started on this, and I think I’m going to continue it. But there are lots of you folks out there, you people who enriched my life with music… Ray Charles and Joe Cocker; Roger McGuinn and Bob Dylan; Bette Midler and Janis Joplin; Phil and Don, the Everly Brothers.
The list is long, and this may take a while. But I’m in no hurry, either.