Love Is Blue

Did you ever dream of being a famous country music artist, or a rock star? I think most people have at least day-dreamed about it at one time or another.
As a young adolescent I remember some of my sisters getting all mushy over singers, sometimes singing in family groups, like Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson, Kieth Partridge, and Greg Brady. 
I think about men (boys) who started their music careers very young. Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson began their careers singing with siblings. These families were real, but not all teenage heartthrobs came from real families.
The girls went crazy over David Cassidy, whose solo career wasn’t nearly as popular as his character Kieth Partridge, from the Partridge family. Do you remember when the Brady Bunch formed The Brady 6, and tried their hand at singing as a family? How would one go about tapping in on this success of the singing families? 
Joe and Katherine Jackson had ten children, George and Olive Osmond had nine; both were real families with successful bands of five members. Certainly, a band could be formed from my family of sixteen siblings. At least my sister Gail thought so.
In the early 70s Gail held auditions. Everyone who tried out made the band: three boys and three girls. Gail, our leader, was the oldest at about thirteen, my sisters Theresa and Judy, were probably seven and eight. Gerard would have been around eleven, I was ten, and Jimmy would have been six at best. I don’t even remember the name of the band, but maybe that would come later.
Gail hand wrote a copy of the lyrics for each of us to Love Is Blue; an instrumental song made popular by Paul Muriat. I always thought Gail created the lyrics herself. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the songs actually had words. However, ours had some line about ‘Pink, pink, his name was Link…’ Gail must have written that as I’ve never found that in the lyrics. 
Gail lined us up in the living room and we sang and danced as instructed. When we weren’t getting it right, Gail would leave the line and march over to the hi-fi stereo console. She’d lift the tonearm off the record, show us the dance moves again, and then restart the record. Eventually we all learned Love Is Blue, but you can’t do a show with just one song.
The second song in our repertoire was Dizzy, by Tommy Roe. Gail was our choreographer. This number had us rolling our hands, pointing fingers in the air, and spinning on our feet – a lot. We practiced until we literally became dizzy and started falling down. ‘Maybe if we had less spins,’ we pleaded. “Just take five and we’ll do it again,” Gail said. She was a firm leader of the group. 
I always felt sorry for    Jimmy, the youngest member of our band. At five years old he couldn’t read yet, so he just mumbled along with the words. He pointed his fingers at the wrong time, and he usually spun the wrong direction – but he sure tried, he was just too young. However, he was good at falling when another sibling fell first.
The lyrics were another problem. One day Gail took the words from us; I couldn’t remember the lyrics, and being dizzy didn’t help. “You’ve got to learn the words by heart,” she’d tell us. “If we get on American Bandstand, we can’t carry papers with us.” American Bandstand?
It was a tall order, but what great accomplishment was ever achieved without beginning as a dream – a big dream. This was a short-lived dream. Gail was frustrated, the members were tired, and we wanted to go play outside. The band broke up, however, not everyone gave up on the idea of being famous. 
Gerard and I thought we might start our own duo, like The Righteous Brother’s. Our first hit would be Rock and Roll Heaven. We borrowed our older sister Patti’s 45 rpm record and took it to the hi-fi. We would play a bit of the song and write down the words. Then we would lift the needle and move it back to catch the next line. Doing this over and over is how we learned the lyrics. Gerard handled the tone arm, and I wrote. “If you believe in forever, then luck is just a one-night stand.” 
“Love,” Gerard corrected me, “He’s saying love is just a one-night stand.”
“Luck,”
“Love,” Gerard insisted. Years later, I learned the word in question was Life. We were both wrong, but it didn’t matter. We couldn’t even get the first line written down before our newly formed duet parted ways. But not all of us gave up our dreams of becoming famous. Maybe I could be a solo act, or I could be the next famous DJ. Dick Clark can’t live forever, ya know! I was wrong about that, too.
‘Tis true, no one lives forever, but by the time Dick Clark retired, I was already showing some early signs of a receding hair line. Besides, Wolfman Jack, and Casey Kasem were already very strong in the world of disc jockeys. The music industry is a hard business.
I was recently thinking about our Palen Family band from the seventies. The Partridge Family and Brady’s were fictitious and had six members each. We were real, with six members. The Osmond’s and Jackson’s were real siblings, with only five members each. Maybe six members was too many. We should have kicked Jimmy out. The music industry is a hard business.