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Jan and Dean have endured, at least until next week, which is unique in a market where one-hit-and-forever-miss performances are the rule rather than the exception. Eva Boyd is typical. A few years ago, Eva was a 17-year-old maid working for a husband-and-wife songwriting team. On a dare, she recorded one of their songs, The Loco-Motion. It sold more than 1,000,000 copies, and Little Eva, as she was billed, picked up $30,000 and has not been heard from since.
Also Dropouts. Last week the man of the moment was Herman, 16, of Herman's Hermits. An engaging high school dropout who looks like a toy sheep dog, Herman (real name: Peter Noone) smiles a lot, claps his hands over his head, and sticks his finger in his mouth when he sings. His Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, rendered in a heavy English Midlands accent, was the No. 1 bestseller last week. Right behind it was Count Me In by Gary Lewis and the Playboys. Gary is Comedian Jerry Lewis' son. Unfortunately, he favors an overdose of echo-chamber effect, which makes him sound as if he had his head inside a fishbowl.
Rock 'n' roll lyrics have lately taken on urban socioeconomic themes. In the Crystals' Uptown, downtown is a place where a man "don't get no breaks" and "everyone's his boss, and he's lost in an angry land." But to hear Petula Clark on the subject, Downtown is an island of promise:
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city . . .
How can you lose? The lights are much brighter there.
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.
So go Downtown.
For his part, Chuck Berry is going neither uptown nor downtown, just slightly commercial, and doing well at it. One of the great lowdown blues singers, Berry, 38, now is talking "teen feel," as in his No Particular Place to Go:
The night was young and the moon gold. . .
Can you imagine the way I felt?
I couldn't unfasten her safety belt.
After serving time for armed robbery and escorting a 14-year-old Apache girl across a state line for "immoral purposes," Berry was recently granted a reprieve by his parole board in St. Louis and is now one of the most popular singers on the rock 'n' roll circuit. Chubby Checker is back pushing a new dance called the Freddie, a kind of side-straddle-hop routine.
Glazed Reverie. The Freddie is the latest of scores of new dances that have spun off the twist. The pelvis is crucial. If it swings from side to side, that's the twist, and the twist is now as dead as the big apple. If it bumps and wiggles, that's the frug (pronounced froog). The rest are all charades. The dog, for example, is a slow-motion jerk (known in less erudite circles as the bump and grind), which is a slow-motion frug. Add a backstroke arm motion to the frug and you have the swim; add a tree-climbing motion and you have the monkey. Stick your thumbs in your ears and it's the mouse or the mule; up in the air, and it's the hitchhiker—and so on for the woodpecker, Cleopatra, Popeye, Harry James, Frankenstein, etc.