As we were coming home from work the other day, the 70s pop song “I’d Really Like to See You Tonight” by England Dan & John Ford Coley started to play on the radio. We were already talking back to the radio, so I took a shot at this song, saying something like, “What ever happened to these one-hit wonders?”
“Oh, they must have had more than one hit song,” My Darling B answered.
Arching my eyebrows at her, I leveled the challenge, “You really think so? Name one.”
When she couldn’t, she asked The Google, which actually came up with three more songs we both recognized by the titles alone: The first was “Nights Are Forever Without You” and the second was “We’ll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again.” We thought that was all we would recognize, because none of the other titles sounded familiar, and when B played them on her phone we both shook our heads and she went on to the next one.
Then she played the third song we both knew. I don’t remember B reading the title of it before she played it, but as soon as I heard the piano playing the opening I recognized “Gone Too Far,” and as soon as they started to sing I even recalled most of the words. I remember liking this song quite a lot when I was a kid. Still like it now, as it turns out, but I hadn’t heard it since probably the 1970s. I don’t think it got a lot of play back then; it was one of those songs that would get me to pounce on the volume to turn it up.
So I was unnecessarily harsh on England Dan and John Ford Coley: They weren’t one-hit wonders at all. They wrote at least four songs that both B and I remembered and, according to the Wikipedia article I called up while I was writing up this drivel, they released 11 albums in ten years, hardly the work of slackers. That’ll teach me to watch my mouth in the future.
This Is Drivel 