The Comedy of Errors: The Wedding Present - Pleasant Valley Sunday (1 May 1992)

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Although I’ve been a bit hit-and-miss when it’s come to The Wedding Present’s A-sides during their 12 month assault on the Top 40 single charts, their B-sides have fared better with me due to them exhibiting such good taste.  Pleasant Valley Sunday, which backed their May 1992 single Come Play With Me, brings back memories of the mid-80s and watching The Monkees TV show on each weekday morning of the summer holidays.  In a packed field, Pleasant Valley Sunday has claims to be the best Monkees single, and The Wedding Present’s version reflects the sonic Jackson Pollock approach that producer, Chip Douglas brought to the original - and it should be acknowledged that in keeping with The Monkees image at the time, the emphasis was on producing tracks that reflected the  nature of their TV show: fast paced, engaging, eccentric, enjoyably anarchic but with a suggestion of weirdness that meant that their 1968 film, Head, was less of a departure and more of an inevitable end-point for a pre-packaged group that embraced the spirit of the age as much as any pop group did in the late 1960s.
Unfortunately, David Gedge’s Kermit the Frog croak can’t quite do the same justice to the countercultural lyrics that Micky Dolenz could, which is a shame, because while Gerry Goffin’s lyrics may seem to have been heard in a thousand different iterations over the last 50 years, it also seems a perfect touchstone lyric for garage/punk/grunge bands ever since.  Any song you’ve heard that bitches about the identikit nature of suburbia or a longing to escape a world of identical houses, garages and car ports can trace itself back to Pleasant Valley Sunday.  Nowadays, writers and musicians could get criticised for following a cliche but at the time Goffin wrote the lyrics to Pleasant Valley Sunday, he was starting to turn on, tune in and drop out.  LSD and the hippy lifestyle was starting to exert its pull on the co-writer of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. In effect, Goffin (still only 27 years old by 1966, despite having been a writer since the late-50s) was picking his side in the battle for the soul of America that defined so much of its self-relationship between 1965-72.  Nowhere was this more eloquently defined than by Ian MacDonald when writing about the rise of LSD use and the theory of cultural and human relationships espoused by people like Timothy Leary.

“The enemy was The System: the materialistic machine which processed crew-cutted American youths through high school into faceless corporations or the army - an ‘uptight’ society of ‘straights’ so estranged from their bodies and feelings that sex had become a source of guilt to them assuageable only by setting fire to the living flesh of Vietnamese peasants.” (Ian MacDonald, p.149 Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, 4th Estate, 1994).

Pleasant Valley Sunday reflects a whole petri-dish containing both straights (the squire mowing the lawn, Mrs Gray and her roses, Mr. Green and his multiple televisions) and the growing army of freaks such as the narrator or the local rock group who would reject “creature comfort goals” in favour of “a change of scenery”.  However the line about mothers complaining about how hard life is
 to general indifference implies that Goffin had been hammering Mother’s Little Helper by The Rolling Stones around the time he sat down to write the song.

There is a case to be made against Pleasant Valley Sunday for sneering at middle-class values and local community spirit.  John Peel’s favourite song of the 60s, The Misunderstood’s mighty I Can Take You to the Sun can be seen in parts as a generous olive branch to those who were happy to stay behind their picket fence and tend to the garden amid the implied social storm which was kicking up in America at the time.  However, to really get the nuance of this most sweetly delivered middle finger to the US Bourgeoisie, I always end up going back to Mrs. Goffin’s original demo.  You can’t fail with Pleasant Valley Sunday and no one ever really has, though whether The Monkees would have gone near it had it been written in 1968 and included a demand to burn Pleasant Valley to the ground is debateable.



Videos courtesy of jim bob (Wedding Present) and Luciano Bugna (King).