Scenes From An Ordinary 1950s Life- Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow- Billie’s, Billie The Pope Of “The Projects” Night, View

 

A YouTube film clip of The Shirelles performing the classic Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?.

 

By Bart Webber:

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Lyrics

Carole King

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

 

Tonight you're mine completely,

You give your love so sweetly,

Tonight the light of love is in your eyes,

But will you love me tomorrow?

 

Is this a lasting treasure,

Or just a moment's pleasure,

Can I believe the magic of your sighs,

Will you still love me tomorrow?

 

Tonight with words unspoken,

You said that I'm the only one,

But will my heart be broken,

When the night (When the night)

Meets the morning sun.

 

I'd like to know that your love,

Is love I can be sure of,

So tell me now and I won't ask again,

Will you still love me tomorrow?

Will you still love me tomorrow?

 

 

Hey all, this is Bart Webber from the old neighborhood, the old cranberry bogs neighborhood of Carver down in Southeastern, Massachusetts, the world capital of that berry in the old days , the Acre neighborhood to be exact when all the “boggers” lived from time immemorial as they say. This is another one of those tongue-in-cheek commentaries that I have been running around thinking about lately as retirement looms directly ahead, retirement from the printing business that I started back in the 1960s and which I am now getting ready to turn over to my youngest son (the other two older boys are both computer whizzes and could give a tinker’s damn about the soon to be dinosaur extinct old-time Guttenberg press print according to them), the back story if you like, in the occasional sketches I have been producing of late going back to the primordial youth time of the mid to late 1950s with its bags full of classic, now classic then just rock and roll, rock songs for the ages.

 

Of course, any such efforts on my part to see how the cultural jail-break took root  down in the Acre have to include the views of one Billie Bradley, William James Bradley, the schoolboy mad-hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in our “the projects” Acre neighborhood. Yah, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days when after searing failures to be the next best thing after Elvis (really after Bo Diddley but in hard white enclave and consciously Northern-style racist bog country that would turn out to be a non-starter, no, would turn out to be hazardous to one’s health never mind one’s future) and the next dance-master general of the new rock dispensation he turned to the life of petty and subsequently hard crime, every kid, including his best friend, a guy named Peter Paul Markin, whom we all called just Markin back then but who would later be called the “Scribe” for obvious reasons, to hear what he had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that we would recognize as our own. Yeah those were the days when like a poet I read once in high school, and English or is it British poet, said to be “young was very heaven.” (He, oh yeah, now I remember, Wordsworth, the Lakes poet, who was referring to his view of the French Revolution in the days before it got serious and blood was being let on all sides)     

 

Billie and Markin (an on occasion me when they were having a dispute like whether Elvis’ sneer was fake, stuff like that) personally spent many, many hours mainly up in his tiny bedroom, his rock heaven bedroom, walls plastered with posters of Elvis, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and of every new teen heartthrob singer, heartthrob to the girls that is, around, every new record Billie could get his hands on, by hook or by crook ( a euphemism for the five finger discount, you know the “clip” that every guy, and some saucy girls, took at the rite of passage in the Acre when they had their “wanting habits” on and no dough to pay for the stuff), and neatly folded piles of clothing, also gathered by that same hook or by crook (“clipping” clothes a whole separate art form in itself and rated higher than merely grabbing some foolish cheapjack overpriced anyway rings to give away to some girl who could have given a fuck about some such trinket), appropriate to the king hell king of the schoolboy rock scene, the elementary school rock scene between about 1956 to 1960. Much of that time was spent discussing the “meaning” of various songs, especially their sexual implications, ah, their mystery of girls-finding-out-about worthiness. (What we didn’t know, even Billie, about the whole sex thing could fill volumes but we like our older brothers, and sisters too, learned what little we did know, and a lot of that was wrong we learned on the streets like everybody else. It certainly wasn’t from prudish parents or heaven forbid the priests at Sacred Heart, the main church servicing the Acre.)   

 

Although in early 1959 Markin’s family was beginning to start the process of moving out of the projects to a run-down shack of a house in Muddy Bottom even lower on the neighborhood scale that the Acre if you could believe that the only virtue, a small one being that they would “own,” along with the bank, their own house. More importantly, Markin had begun to move away from Billie’s orbit, his new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe, after figuring out that the life of petty crime was much harder to deal with that reading books to find out two million facts which he had settled into one summer after a few run-ins with the law over a couple of “clips,” he would still wander back to the old neighborhood until mid-1960 just to hear Billie’s take on whatever music was interesting him at the time.

 

These commentaries, these Billie commentaries, are Markin’s recollections of his and Billie’s conversations on the song lyrics in this series. But Markin was not relying on memory alone. During this period he would use his father’s tape recorder, by today’s standard his big old reel to reel monstrosity of a tape recorder, to record Billie’s covers of the then current hit songs (for those who have not read previously of Billie’s “heroics” he was a pretty good budding rock singer at the time) and their conversations of those song meanings that we fretted about for hours.

 

About twenty years ago long after Markin had gone face down in his own hail of bullets down in Mexico after a dope deal he was either trying to broker with some mal hombres from some budding cartel or, more likely, giving the residual “wanting habits” that haunted us all for many years whether we liked books or not stealing the “product” I was helping his late mother clear out the attic of that shack of a house over on Muddy Bottom in order to sell it  after Mr. Markin had passed away I found those tapes among the possessions Markin had left behind. Mrs. Markin having no earthly use for them passed them on to me as tanks for my help in cleaning the place up. I, painstakingly, have had those reels transcribed so that many of these commentaries will be the actual words (somewhat edited, of course) that appear in these sketches. That said, Billie, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make us laugh to boot. Wherever you are Billie, in jail or in jail-break I’m still pulling for you. Got it.

 

Here’s what Billie had to say about the lyrics to the classic girl sex dilemma song Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow that we all went wild over but which baffled a bunch of twelve and thirteen year old boys who were trying to figure out what that girl was worried about. Yeah, that’s the way it was:

 

Billie back again, William James Bradley, if you didn’t know. Markin’s pal, Peter Paul Markin’s pal, from over the Myles Standish Elementary School and the pope of rock lyrics down here in “the projects, ” the Acre projects where I was born, my father was born and my grandfather came to when he was a young man. The Carver projects, the place where all the boggers live, the people who keep cranberries on the Thanksgiving plates every year if you don’t know. Markin, who I hadn’t seen for a while since he moved “uptown” to the Muddy Bottom a place even lower on the human living scene that the Acre according to my parents, came by the other day. Even we guys from the Acre wouldn’t be caught dead in Muddy Bottom, wouldn’t let a guy from there into our circle at school, well, except Markin because he had to go there or live on the streets, something he was willing to do for a while rather moving from the Acre. So he came by the other day to breathe in the fresh air of the old neighborhood and we got to talking about this latest record, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? by the Shirelles. They are hot.

Fair’s fair right, so I’ll give you Markin’s, Peter Paul’s, take on the lyrics, so I can come crashing down on his silly pipe dream ideas. By the way if you don’t know, and he will tell you this himself if he is honest, he was behind, way behind, in figuring out girls, and their girlish charms. I had to practically tell him everything he knows.

 

I’ll let you know how I found out, found out true later. Where did I learn it? Hell like everybody else from the older kids, the older guys, and my older sisters too if you can believe that. So I know a lot, or at least enough to keep old Peter Paul from being a total goofball. Still, see, he thinks the main thing is that the girl in the song here is worried about her reputation because she has just given in, in a moment of passion, to her boyfriend, it’s way too late to turn back and yet she is having second thoughts, second thought regrets, about it, and about what he will think of her and whether it will get around that she “does it.”

 

Yah, she “does it,” I will give Markin that much, now officially certified a woman, or at least acting like a woman can act, that is what my sister Donna says, and from the feel of the song, probably in some back seat of some “boss” convertible, a Chevy I hope. Her guy, some under-the-hood day and night guy making that baby, his real baby, hum against the in-stock store-bought standards of his father’s car, his old fogy father’s car. She was breathless weeks ago when her Chevy guy came up gunning that beast behind her walking home from school and said “Hop in.” And she did without a minute’s hesitation, had been saying rosaries and novenas that Mister Chevy would stop her in her tracks before she went over to his place and made a fool of herself, now she's the queen bee of the high school Adventure Car-Hop night. Sitting in that front seat just the right distance away to show everybody, every walking girl in town what she had, and how easy it was that she had it. All the other girls, friend or foe, frantic at her fortune and ready to leap, girls’ “lav” leap, all over her come Monday morning finely-tuned grapevine gossip time. So the “tonight” of the song was paying back time, car- hop queen bee paying back time, time to make Mr. Chevy glad he stopped behind her that day a week before. No turning back.

 

I hope, I really hope, they “did the deed” down by the seashore, over by whatever local version of secluded “no married adults need enter” Plymouth Cove, big old moon out, big old laughing moon, waves splashing against the rocks and against the sounds of the night, the sounds of the be-bop moaning and groaning night. Call me a romantic but at least I hope that is where she gave “it” up. Or, maybe, away from coastal shoreline possibilities if you lived with Dorothy in Kansas it was at some secluded lovers’ lane mountain top, tree-lined, dirt road, away from the city noise, some be-bop music playing on the car radio, just to keep those mountain fears away, motor humming against the autumn chill and the creaking sun ready to devour that last mountain top and face the day, and to face the music.

 

But see that’s where Markin has got it all wrong, all wrong on two counts, because even if Chevy guy’s two-timing her, or spreading the “news” about his conquest, or even that hellish girls’ lav whirlwind inferno is not really what’s bothering her. Markin has got this starry-eyed thing, and I think it is from hanging around, or being around, all those straight lace no-go Catholic girls we go to school and church with, who do actually worry about their reputations, at least for public consumption. That is why high Catholic that I am, just like old Markin, I don’t go within twenty yards of those, well, teasers. Yah, teasers but that’s a story for another time, because right now we have only time for women, or girls who act like women.

 

What’s bothering moonstruck song girl, number one, is that she likes it, she liked doing it with the Chevy guy, and is worried that she’ll go crazy every time a boy gets within an arm’s length of her. She “heard” that once a girl starts “doing it” they can’t help themselves and are marks, easy marks, for every guy who gives them the eye. Jesus, where did she ever get that idea. Must have been out in the streets, although I personally never heard such an idea when I was asking around. This is what I heard, well, not from the street but from my sister Donna, she said it was okay, natural even, for girls to like sex. If the moment was right, and maybe the guy too. It wasn’t some Propagation of the Faith, do-your-sex-duty to multiply thing we heard in church. Hell, Donna said she liked it too, and believe me, old Donna doesn’t like much if you listen to her long enough. So moonstruck girl don’t worry.

 

But number two you do have to worry about, although I don’t know what you can do about it now. I never did ask Donna about that part. About getting pregnant. Yah, the dreaded word for girls and guys alike when you were just trying to have a little fun, just liking it. Now everything your mother told you about “bad” girls, about leaving school, about shot-gun weddings, or about having to go to “Aunt Bessie’s” for a few months, flood her memories and as the sun comes up there is momentary panic. Like I say I don’t know what you can do. I don’t know the medical part of the thing. But Peter Paul, leave it to Peter Paul, who knows diddley about sex (except what I tell him) says do you know about “rubbers.” And he got all in a lather telling me that there is some new pill coming out, and coming out soon, so you don’t have to worry. [The blessed Pill, hail science-Bart.]  This “rubbers” stuff from a guy was practically missed the first time he kissed a girl. That take a pill and everything is alright is just because the goof reads Newsweek and Time and not because he actually knows what makes a girl tick and why. But if he is right, and I ain’t saying he is, then check it out and then you can still like “doing it.” And not worry.