Give pop music fans a song they can wigwag, boom or clomp to (e.g., Down by the Old Mill Stream, Deep in the Heart of Texas'), and a national contagion is started. Last week RCA Victor had a husky little new number in the boom division called The Thing. It had sold 400,000 copies in ten days, an alltime Victor high, and was spreading like German measles.
The Thing had an inexorable calliope-style tune, utterly undistinguished and not even new. Charles Grean of RCA Victor's own popular records staff had merely borrowed the tune of a Rabelaisian old ditty called The Tailor's...
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