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| Bobby's Angel |
All right. Time to sing along with the catchy theme song from Bobby's Angel!
I've been poking at ideas for a novel called Meet The Frantiks! I've posted early drafts of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, setting up the general storyline of a widow in her sixties remembering the Frantiks, a made-for-TV rock 'n' roll group she saw on two episodes of an obscure TV sitcom back in 1965. The overall story is yet to be written, but it's an idea I've had for a very long time. With my first book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones published this past May and my second book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) still looking for a path to print but completely written, it seems like I need to think about my next book. Maybe that book will be fiction. And maybe it will be Meet The Frantiks!
Meanwhile, the novel's imaginary sitcom needed a title. This make-believe show is about a teenager named Bobby, head-over-heels in love with his neighbor Angel. Angel herself is literally an angel from Heaven, sent to our world to use her celestial powers to help us cute li'l mortals find our way. Bobby's the only one who knows Angel's secret. Like Chapter 1 says: It was 1965. Anything could happen in 1965.
Presuming Bobby's Angel would have debuted as a short-lived mid-season replacement series in January of 1965, that would place its premiere a year and four months after the first episode of My Favorite Martian (September 1963), the series considered the first of the 1960s fantasy sitcoms. And Bobby's Angel would take flight a few months after the September '64 introduction of Bewitched, the real-world sitcom about pretty witch Samantha Stevens trying to hide her magic powers and live a normal life as a suburban housewife. Bewitched began around the same time as other weird-meets-normal family sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family. Bobby's Angel's single short, imaginary season would have come and gone prior to the September '65 debuts of I Dream Of Jeannie and The Smothers Brothers Show, the latter also centering on the comic escapades of an angel trying to pass as homo odinarius. I watched all of these shows when I was a kid--I may have been the only one watching The Smothers Brothers Show--and they all influenced my concoction of Bobby's Angel.
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| Unretouched Angel image from my 1980s sketchbook |
Unlike those shows, Bobby's Angel is teen-oriented, a supernatural counterpart of The Patty Duke Show and The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis. I guess Sabrina The Teenage Witch is the closest actual parallel, but Bobby's Angel is specifically imagined as a sitcom that could only have happened in the early/mid 1960s. Hence the appearance of those four moptopped youngsters from England who call themselves the Frantiks.
A few years back, when I took my decades-old rough concept of Meet The Frantiks! and started to redirect it from the biography of a fictional '60s rock group toward whatever it's now on its way to being, I decided a make-believe 1965 sitcom about a literal teen angel would be an essential part of its tale. I was originally going to call the show Angel Next Door (or The Angel Next Door), but rejected it in favor of something else. Didn't know what yet, but, y'know, something else.
Then I was chatting with singer-songwriter Gary Frenay, bassist for Syracuse's own power pop powerhouse the Flashcubes. This would have been in 2021, I think. Gary said he'd been asked to write a song for a short film called Show And Tell, which needed a reasonable facsimile of an early '60s girl-group ditty of teen yearning. Gary answered that challenge with his original song "Perfect Girl," which Gary recorded as a single (credited to Maura and the Bright Lights) with Pete Kennedy, Tommy Allen, and Mike Kallett, all backing Maura Kennedy on lead vocals. The track also appeared on the 2022 compilation album This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 5, because my radio co-host Dana Bonn and I know a good song when we appropriate it.
Describing "Perfect Girl" to me, Gary said it was supposed to be a cross between Marcie Blaine's "Bobby's Girl" and Shelly Fabares' "Johnny Angel," both from 1962. My dim widdle lightbulb sparked immediately. Bobby's...Angel! My Frantiks story's 1965 sitcom had its title. Thanks, Gary! Hell, Fabares was herself a '60s sitcom star for her role on The Donna Reed Show. Serendipity! Or was it...Angel's magic?
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| Oh, ya wanna see some MAGIC, do ya...? |
And, of course, an imaginary 1965 sitcom needs an imaginary TV theme song to go with it. I'm neither a musician nor a songwriter, but I tried to conjure something in my head, something that could sorta pass for a theme song from that era. Biggest single influence was the theme from The Patty Duke Show--But they're cousins, identical cousins!--a pleasant 'n' bouncy earworm that summarized the show's setup. I don't have a melody, and I likely won't need one for my prose purposes here. But I do have the lyrics to this bubbly theme song from Bobby's Angel:
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Carl's new book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is now available, courtesy of the good folks at Rare Bird Books. Gabba Gabba YAY!! https://rarebirdlit.com/gabba-gabba-hey-a-conversation-with-the-ramones-by-carl-cafarelli/
If it's true that one book leads to another, my next book will be The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). Stay tuned. Your turn is coming.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream, archived at Westcott Radio. You can read about our history here.
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