Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music [Paperback]

Karen Schoemer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2007

February 1964: The Beatles step onto the tarmac at JFK International Airport and turn the country on its head. It's the advent of rock and roll's uninterrupted reign, youthful rebellion, and overt teenage sex. It's also the deathblow for the pop music of another generation -- the songs of Pat Boone and Georgia Gibbs -- and all its perky, white-bread conformity.

Not two years later, Karen Schoemer is born, and comes of age with rock and roll. While her parents might enjoy the new music, the cultural upheaval passes them by, and they cling to the promises made by the music they loved as teenagers, the sweet, innocent 1950s pop of Patti Page, Frankie Laine, and the like. But having courted and wed against a backdrop of ideals peddled by this music -- finding true love, living happily ever after -- Schoemer's parents, like so many people, are crushed by disappointment when love doesn't deliver what the songs promised. Fifties pop falls quickly off the charts; their marriage eventually falls apart. In Great Pretenders, a lively, provocative blend of memoir and music criticism, former Newsweek pop music critic Karen Schoemer tries to figure out what went so wrong, way back in the hazy past, for her parents' marriage and for the music of their youth. To find the answers, she embarks on a strange, lonely journey in search of some of the brightest stars of the 1950s.

Schoemer's search started when, twenty years after her parents' divorce, the new Connie Francis box set appeared on her desk at Newsweek. Now a successful rock critic dispensing post-punk opinions to the hipoisie, she was about to toss aside this relic when she was struck by the cover image of Francis, which bore an uncanny resemblance to her own mother; on a whim, she played one of the CDs. For all their cloying, simplistic sentimentality, songs like "Where the Boys Are" had an undeniable power -- "the sound of every teenage girl in every bedroom on every lonely Saturday going back a thousand years." It was the music of her parents' long-lost adolescence, and much to her surprise, it moved her.

Thus Schoemer, arbiter of Gen X cool, found herself falling into the saccharine thrall of 1950s pop music, that pariah of the rock establishment. Even as her colleagues tried to steer her away from the terminally uncool genre, she tracked down seven former pop idols of the late 1950s and early 1960s: Connie Francis, Fabian, Pat Boone, Patti Page, Tommy Sands, Georgia Gibbs, and Frankie Laine. As she became privy to their inner lives and immersed herself in their music, Schoemer revised her own notions about the fifties at the same time that she explored her family's vexed dynamic. The result is a wonderful romp through an unappreciated chapter in music history and, more important, through her own past.

Full of humor, insight, and unflinching honesty, Great Pretenders bucks the received wisdom, explores the intersections of our private lives and pop culture, and broadens our understanding of a crucial moment in our history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In an ambitious first book, former Newsweek rock critic Schoemer offers a skittish fusion of memoir and revisionist music history exploring how pop music shapes our values. In 1996, after listening to a retrospective of songs by '50s teen idol Connie Francis, Schoemer set out to understand the music that originally matched her bitterly divorced parents, in order to understand "[w]hat expectation of their youth could have been so great that its disappointment left them so angry." Thus begins an odyssey that takes readers to a musical landscape on the cusp of rebel rockers, sexual revolution and the civil rights movement. Schoemer talks with Pat Boone, Fabian, Georgia Gibbs, Frankie Laine, Patti Page, Tommy Sands—and her holy grail, Connie Francis. Meanwhile, she constantly reassesses her critical (and often cynical) sensibility against the undeniable emotional connections evoked by pop songs she'd long dismissed as kitsch. Schoemer is a plucky narrator; she has written an enjoyable text that alternates between beguiling interview set pieces imbued with the author's lucid sociomusical analyses of such curious hits as "Mule Train" and musings on her middle-class, suburban Connecticut upbringing in the 1970s and '80s, and development from rock critic to Rolling Stone scribe, wife and mother.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* This is no conventional music history. Although Schoemer, Newsweek's former chief pop-music critic, spends considerable time recounting the lives and careers of seven often overlooked and, in her opinion, underappreciated fifties pop icons--Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Georgia Gibbs, Tommy Sands, Fabian, Pat Boone, and Connie Francis--she spends much more examining her fascination with these performers, whose careers were already in eclipse when the Beatles led the British pop-music invasion. Schoemer admits that when she began research for the book, she shared the conventional belief that these singers were square, uptight, utterly conventional representatives of the conformist era in which they flourished. Worse, their careers seemed to have been based entirely on selling shallow, silly, emotionally dishonest new songs and homogenized covers of the rougher, more authentic work of such black performers as Little Richard, Etta James, and Big Mama Thornton. Over the course of the book, Schoemer depicts a journey to deeper understanding of the era, the music, and herself. What makes her intellectual trip especially exciting is her willingness throughout the book to explore issues both personal and professional that most critics are terrified to confront, most notable among them the thin line that divides interest from obsession and the observation that all music criticism, indeed all criticism, is subjective and autobiographical. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (October 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416584536
• ISBN-13: 978-1416584537
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,432,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A mean-spirited disappointment, March 13, 2006

By 

DSA "DSA" (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music (Hardcover)

Strangely mean spirited, "Great Pretenders" most likely will disappoint fans of the seven performers profiled in the book.

This could have been such a compelling book, as it looks at the lives of a group of performers often overlooked by music historians. But it's a little hard to buy Karen Schoemer's opinions, or even believe everything she writes. She was a music critic for "Newsweek," yet she claims that she never heard the Barbra Streisand recording of "People?" Even harder to believe: She asks Frankie Laine about his 1957 album entitled "Rockin'," but says she never bothered to look at what songs are on the album. This woman is a professional music critic - why would you bring up an album if you had no clue what material it contained? Then she slams "Rockin'" because it contains re-recordings of his earlier hits, not mentioning that was a common practice that everyone from Sinatra to Dinah Shore did at the time. I agree with a previous reviewer who said she was particularly harsh on Mr. Laine. Schoemer seems to have no idea of what he meant to audiences of the time. "The absence of sexiness in his voice, the bland bonhomie" she writes, then later saying he was "more chaste, less threatening" than early Sinatra. What she doesn't seem to know is that Laine's sexy performing style and R&B-flavored crooning earned him the nickname Mr. Rhythm early in his career, and his rougher edges were seen as a bit unsettling compared to Sinatra's more traditional crooning. Also, and this is just a personal opinion: The man is about turn 93 - Has he done anything to merit such a bitter portrayal at this stage of his life?

Even factually, some of the book seems off kilter. She says the Bear Family Connie Francis box sets sell for close to $300. Check amazon - the list price is under $130 for both English-language sets. I've had both since they were released; the prices haven't changed in that time. Schoemer says "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte" starred Joan Crawford, who is nowhere to be found in that film (it stars Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland) -- didn't this book go through fact-checking?

Schoemer intersperses vignettes of her own life between the profiles, but it's all a bit clumsy. And while one not need be a fan to write about music, you should at least be able to appreciate it. Schoemer approaches the music with a snarky, campy, condescending eye, rather than hearing what made it so compelling to audiences in its original day. The music is still compelling -- if you're willing to listen with an open mind.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less a "Love Affair" than an awkward date, March 30, 2006

By 

Michael Pendragon "Michael Pendragon" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music (Hardcover)

(Make that ** 1/2 stars)

Make no mistake: Karen Schoemer's book is first and foremost about Karen Schoemer (including unwelcome details about her sex life). Her opinions on the artists she interviews are of little worth, seeing how the fullest extent of her "research" (she actually admits this!) was often to pop a "greatest hits" cassette into her car radio on the drive each "interview." (She doesn't exactly print interviews with them -- snippets of interviews would be more accurate.)

Schoemer "gets" the music of some of the artists, and totally misses that of others. She is utterly clueless when it comes to pre-rock and roll era stars like Patti Page, Georgia Gibbs and especially Frankie Laine. She's basically a rock critic attempting to "understand" her mother's attraction to pop rock (post-Page, Gibbs and Laine) music, so why these three artists were included is anybody's guess.

My own guess is that their names are what is going to sell her book (anyway, that was my reason for buying it).

Still, as frustrating as the book is when dealing with classic pop, the author manages to bring up two good points: 1) that rock and roll owes a large debt to the pop music that preceeded it; and 2) that loving an artist or a song is akin to a love affair. Okay, neither sentiment is particularly original or profound, but in the profusion of rock-oriented music "histories," the first point needs to be stressed as often and in as many venues as possible.

Schoemer fares best when interviewing former teen idols (male var.) from the early rock era (Fabian and Pat Boone), both of whom she developes large crushes on; supporting and illustrating the second of her second-hand points. When Schoemer is turned on by a star, she's more likely to get turned on by their music -- so her chapters on them (or, rather, on her reactions to them) are far more positive.

It's unfortunate that the book wasn't written by someone who actually understands and enjoys the music of the great singers who are being "profiled." Since the majority of readers purchasing the book are going to be fans of artists rather than the author, the coupling of Schoemer's narcissistic confessional style with her general ignorance of 50s pop, become nearly insurmountable flaws.

The book also lacks pictures of the stars Schoemer "interviews." I suppose this was done to keep down production costs; but since the author doesn't mention bringing a camera with her, the idea of showing fans how their favorite singers look probably never entered her head. (There is, however, a vanity shot of Schoemer on the inside of the dust cover.)

What ultimately saves the book, however, is the author's interview with Georgia Gibbs. No, she doesn't get Gibbs' music -- she fails to appreciate Gibbs' beautiful voice and doesn't like her haunting ballads and torch songs. Still she gives us something that is priceless in its rarity -- an interview with Georgia Gibbs herself! That alone was worth the price of the book for me.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An idea with lots of potential comes up short, July 5, 2006

By 

Paul Tognetti "The real world is so much more... (Cranston, RI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music (Hardcover)

Normally I am caught up in books discussing much more serious subjects. It was time for a break. So when a friend told me he had just finished up Karen Schoemer's "Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair With 50's Pop Music" and offered me his copy I simply could not resist. In fact, I had almost purchased the book myself a couple of months ago. It was a book I had high hopes for and I wound up reading it in a single day. As one who has been collecting popular music for more than 40 years I hoped to gain some additional insight into the music of the early 1950's. Very little has been written about this period and much of what you do find is extremely negative. Most of the so called "enlightened" rock critics immediately dismiss the music of such artists as Pat Boone, Connie Francis and Patti Page as trite and superficial. Yet this music certainly struck a chord with millions of Americans in the early fifties. Karen Schoemer wanted to find out why and she certainly seemed to have the credentials. She wanted to know why her parents, her mom in particular, loved this stuff. So she decided to write a book about this era. She began this project back in 1999 and admittedly struggled with the concept over the next several years. In the end she wound up interviewing seven of the era's biggest stars. She chatted with Patti Page and Frankie Laine, Georgia Gibbs, Fabian, Tommy Sands and two of the biggest stars of early 50's pop Connie Francis and Pat Boone. Much to her surprise she discovered that most of these folks were anything but the stuffy, uptight people she expected to find. As of matter of fact she really did like most of them. And as her work on the book proceeded she found herself enjoying this music even more. She suddenly decided it was OK to enjoy this stuff despite what the so-called critics thought of it. Not everything she listened to had to be hip or loud or socially relevant. Karen Schoemer had discovered what made this music so attractive to her parents generation.

"Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with 50's Pop Music" is in fact a mighty strange book. I craved to learn more about the songs and about the artists Karen had a chance to speak with. Instead I came away frustrated that I did not find out as much about these people and their careers as I had expected. In general, I found "Great Pretenders" to be pretty unfocused at times and I certainly could have done without the frequent references to the authors personal life. For a project in the works for 7 years I would have to classify it as somewhat of a disappointment. In spite of all of its shortcomings I still managed to finish "Great Pretenders". I just happened to be in the mood for some lighter reading and it fit the bill perfectly. Though it was not a total waste of my time in the final analysis this is a book that clearly misses the mark. As such it is not a book that I can wholeheartedly recommend.