B005S8O7YE EBOK by Carole King

units sold as the writers of the A side.
    I recorded four songs for ABC-Paramount with Don Costa producing and arranging. I played the piano and sang while other musicians played drums, bass, guitar, and saxophone. Don hired background vocalists for some of the records. The first single was “Baby Sittin’,” backed with “Under the Stars.” I wrote the music and lyrics for both. I shudder to recall.
Baby, baby, baby baby sittin’, I’m-a
    Baby, baby, baby baby sittin’, I’m-a
    Baby, baby, baby baby sittin’
    You know the baby I mean—he’s seventeen
    And the B side was almost as repetitive:
Under the stars, we kissed good night
    Under the stars, you held me tight
    Under the stars and the moon above
    Under the stars, we fell in love
    The second single was “Goin’ Wild,” backed with “The Right Girl” —or maybe it was the other way around.
My lovin’ baby’s got a special rock & rollin’ style
    Every time we dance he really drives me wild
    I’m goin’ wild, I’m goin’ wild
    Goin’ crazy goin’ batty ’bout my rock & rollin’ daddy
    Goin’ wild
    If that doesn’t convince you that I needed help with lyrics, consider these opening lines from “The Right Girl”:
I know I-I am the right girl
    The right girl for you-uh-oo-oo
    And you-oo-oo are the right boy for me too-oo-oo
    Uh-oo-oo…
    Though I wasn’t good at writing lyrics myself, I knew how important they could be in a pop song. Lyrics gave a singer the ability to express an emotional dimension beyond “La la la la”—not that there’s anything wrong with “La la la la,” or, for that matter, “Bum doo-bee doo-wop.” Lyrics aimed at my generation didn’t need to be good, but they needed to be relevant to the burning issues of a teenager’s life. As far as I knew, the biggest concern of teenage girls in the fifties was, “Does he like me?”
    Years later I would learn that the biggest concern for manyteenage girls in the fifties was the sexual and physical abuse they endured on a regular basis, often from someone in their family. Unaware of such abuse personally, I never even knew it existed because victims were too ashamed to speak of it. I was also unaware that some teenagers had feelings for others of the same gender. Even if I had been aware of such things, I wouldn’t have known how to put them in a song. Instead I wrote about what I knew—the naïve yearning of a girl in puberty for love and devotion from a boy.
    Because girls didn’t ask boys out in those days, I was spared the risk of rejection. Since I couldn’t ask a boy out directly, I had to be creative. Sometimes I used the “asking a question about homework” ploy to initiate a conversation that I hoped would end with the boy asking me out. Unfortunately I never got the invitation, only the answer.
    I didn’t know that boys, too, worried about rejection. If a guy wasn’t on the football team, if he was short, overweight, wore glasses, had pimples, was brainy, or, God forbid, didn’t smoke, he was definitely not cool. With every molecule of testosterone raging through his out-of-control body, a male teenager who didn’t have the right look despaired of getting a girl to say yes to a date, let alone the ultimate yes. The right look was exemplified by pop idols such as Frankie Avalon and Fabian, who were wholesome, and movie actors James Dean and Marlon Brando, whose darkness of mood and image made them
beyond
cool. Under their influence boys wore cigarette packs in the rolled-up sleeves of their T-shirts, hooked their thumbs in their Garrison belts, and tried to look misunderstood.
    If boys aspired to be as cool as James Dean, Natalie Wood embodied everything girls wanted to be. She played young, beautiful teenagers with bad-girl overtones. Her characters were sexy, romantic, and often tragic. Though I had explored forbiddenthings such as smoking cigarettes and sneaking off to Greenwich Village, no one considered me cool or a bad girl. I was so far from