For some reason—most likely the much-reported news of his participation in the new Queens of the Stone Age album—I’ve lately found myself in a Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player state of mind. It turns out that E.J.’s sixth LP holds up well 40 years after release, suggesting that its original 1973 grade in the Village Voice Consumer Guide (C+) may have been unduly harsh.

But I think I know why the Guide guy disliked it so much, which is generally why I like it so much. Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player represents a major closet-jump for Elton: his first public embrace of pure pop, an affection that would blossom fully on his next set, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, issued later the same year. Though original, the music on his previous albums placed him comfortably within the two dominant musician trends of the early Seventies (both now revered traditions): the inward-bound singer-songwriter and the make-mine-rustic Band acolyte. 

Granted, a newfound fascination with killer hooks and catchy, early-Sixties turnarounds was in the air in 1973.That year of American Graffiti was also the year of Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Make’r,” Ringo’s “You’re Sixteen,”  the Carpenters’ Now & Then covers LP, Roy Wood’s faux-retro UK hits, and the debut of the New York Dolls. It was also the year of Dark Side of the Moon, Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play and Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VII. But there Elton chose not to go.

Don’t Shoot Me keeps a toe or two in the earlier styles.  “Have Mercy on the Criminal” and “High Flying Bird” retain a Band tint, and “Daniel,” its impact now blunted by decades of airplay, is above-average singer-writer elegiac.  Elsewhere, “Elderberry Wine” presages the toughness that would later power “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” and “Midnight Creeper” essays undistinguished funk while pushing Bernie Taupin’s often toss-off lyrics into the red on the cringe-meter (“Walk a mile in my tennis shoes…”). “Blues for Baby,” despite the riff-lift from Love’s “Alone Again Or,” is surely one of Elton’s most sublime compositions.

But it’s the exuberance of three densely packed, over-the-top pop cuts that ignites the album. “Teacher I Need You” kicks off with a brief piano roll, then segues into a shuffle that never lets up—except to admit new melodic blasts (the bridge, the whoa-oh-whoa-oh-oh’s that cap the choruses), each one further charging the track’s momentum. Elton’s vocal sells the hell out of the song, almost enough to make one forget that its theme makes it a key link between the Fifties standard “Teach Me Tonight” and the hot-for-teacher tropes of a half dozen hair-metal videos.

The stylized vocal and the piano on the verses of “Teenage Idol” recall another of the era’s superstars – Leon Russell—but they work, principally as excuses for Elton to get to the infectious chorus. And the chorus is the star of the show, with bandmates Nigel Olsen, Dee Murray and Davey Johnstone perfectly nailing the quavering-vocal backups that helped make a teenage idol of the song’s subject, T. Rex.

Elton’s first U.S. chart-topper, “Crocodile Rock” was his most unapologetic retro move to date, a record whose insistent melody (partly swiped from Pat Boone’s 1962 hit “Speedy Gonzales”) annoyed many. Was this the same guy who, barely two albums earlier, swooned over creaking porches and the horse-drawn life in “Country Comfort”? It was indeed, and his sweet tooth for hard-grabbing hooks and unshakeable bridges, first indulged publicly on this trio of tunes, would never fully abate. Next up was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, awash in riffs and harmony, and such tasty disposables as “Step Into Christmas,” “Island Girl” and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” And where’s the guilt in such obvious pleasures?

The incongruity of Waters and the Hoochie Coochie Boy in that film is rather the opposite of what we get in Born in Chicago, a new documentary now making the rounds of the festival circuit. Here, the Sixties generation of young white hipsters—Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Barry Goldberg, Charlie Musselwhite, Harvey Mandel, Nick Gravenites, Corky Siegel—come off respectful and still awed after 50 years that they were even invited onto Muddy’s and Howlin’ Wolf’s stages. There’s a lot of love on display, and the film makes clear that it flowed in both directions, from acolytes and mentors alike. As for the latter, who wouldn’t be flattered to have an eager cohort of young followers seek them out for advice and instruction?

A fact often ignored about the early Sixties is that it wasn’t just white audiences to whom the blues had to be reintroduced; young blacks had long since forsaken the genre as their parents’ music and were onto uptown style counselors like James Brown and the soon-to-emerge soul men of Stax. Apart from European blues societies and belated recognition by the Newport Folk Festival, Waters, Wolf, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson weren’t getting a lot of door knocks back then.

Born in Chicago is a valentine to a lost scene, its archival and contemporary performances and eloquent talking-heads reminding us of what could once be dreamed and achieved. Writer-singer Gravenites and organist-songwriter Goldberg probably offer the best analysis and observation, and harpist-singer Charlie Musselwhite the best anecdotes, but everyone contributes: Dylan, Buddy Guy, Eric Burdon, Butterfield alumni Sam Lay and Elvin Bishop. Narrator Marshall Chess is adequate as a narrator, even if he now resembles the lovechild of Ray Davies and Vincent Price.

But the film is also a reminder of how important this generational baton-pass was, and how, well, near heroic these hipster kids and Mick and Keith, the early Animals, Pretty Things, Yardbirds, etc. were. Without them acting on the inspiration of late-night R&B radio and obscure import singles, how might the history of popular music have gone? One sometimes shudders to think.

Item: Last month marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Donald Fagen’s first solo album, The Nightfly, whose songs its creator has said, house similar artifacts: “the fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a Northeastern city during the late Fifties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build.”

Fagen has just issued his fourth solo set. It remains to be seen whether Sunken Condos will replicate the success of The Nightfly, which rose to No. 26 on Billboard’s LP chart, where it hung around half a year, spawned the hit single “I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World),” and eventually went platinum.

Just why did The Nightfly strike such a nerve with audiences three decades ago? A Village Voice review of the time may have put it best: “Apparently, what Walter Becker brought to Steely Dan was an obscurantism that lost its relevance after the post-hippie era. On The Nightfly, words always mean everything they want to say.” Not only did Fagen’s aural autobio bristle with the literal. Its sober-eyed, sardonically Dan-ish takes on its material offered the first fresh rear-view look at the Fifties, which by 1982 had spent more than a decade imprisoned in the deep amber of ‘Grease’-coated poodle skirts and car backseats. The Nightfly admitted a more extensive notion of nostalgia. Listening to it now reveals just how rich, and honest, an album it is.

Like everyone else, Fagen was so much older then: a Fifties almost-teenager supremely confident in his worldviews, whether pessimistic or optimistic. In the hilarious, come-on-a-my-fallout shelter come-on “New Frontier,” he informs his distaff target that if the Reds push the button, “the key word is survival.” But he’s just as sure, in the rose-tinted “I.G.Y.,” that once the work of the future-focused scientists is done, “We’ll be eternally free, yes, and young.”

Young Donald’s vision of hope-and-change colors “Green Flower Street” (despite intra-tribe suspicion, “joy is complete” for white guy and Asian gal) and even the Four Freshmen-ish “Maxine.” Here, two young bohemian lovers visualize their escape from suburbia, planning to “move to Manhattan and fill the place with friends,” and, just like Kerouac and Dean Moriarty, “drive to the coast and drive right back again.”

The Nightfly swings too, deliciously, on the bop shuffle “Walk Between Raindrops” (Fagen’s organ playing echoing Jimmy Smith, John Patton and all those Prestige grinders of the early Sixties) and the cover of “Ruby Baby”—itself no mean feat. So does the more subdued, comically sinister “Goodbye Look,” in which a clueless Americano (envoy, spy or Batista-connected businessman) figures out—too late—what’s really on the bill at the “small reception” they’ve arranged “just for me behind the big casino by the sea.”

This is The Nightfly’s principal charm: that Fagen’s affection for the period is sincere without being uncritical or sentimental, and actually a lot of fun if you’ve been there or ever wanted to be. The album cover (which ties into the title track), tells us much about who the aspiring young Fagen was. He wears his heart on his rolled-up white shirtsleeve, role-playing the hipster DJ from whom he heard the word, whose records still move and inspire our man far into adulthood.

It’s a SpongeBob Christmas!, from the Nickelodeon animated series (available as a download at all the usual places), is admittedly a simpler pleasure, but it now joins the rest in the “Like a lot” column. Its hooks are solid, harmonies joyous, lyrics silly, provenance unimpeachable. Most of the tunes were written by Tom Kenny (the voice of SpongeBob Squarepants) with Andy Paley, who also produced. Paley has composed with Brian Wilson (“Meet Me in My Dreams Tonight” and “Rio Grande,” “Soul Searchin,’” etc.) and himself been produced by Spector (the Paley Brothers’ version of “Baby Let’s Stick Together,” which the maestro also cut with Dion). And the wreathing crew includes James Burton, Nino Tempo, Jonathan Richman and ex-NRBQ-er “Big” Al Anderson (both on guitars), Tommy Morgan (Pet Sounds’ harmonica man), roots cats Robert “Big Sandy” Williams, Russell Scott and Dave Stuckey, plus Paley.

The album’s top cuts are the single “Don’t Be a Jerk (It’s Christmas)” and “Santa Won’t Let You Down,” uptempo sound-walls that sport good vibes and sentiments. The former makes its message abundantly clear: “When others are talking never interrupt/ Don’t put people down or leave the toilet seat up.” The latter, buoyant on a bed of girl-group changes, is unapologetic Super Pop, with Kenny’s pinched-nasal vocal suggesting Mike Love on helium. The rest of the set goes generic—which is to say, it leans on tried and true song forms. But the craftsmanship is so concise and affectionately applied that the resulting tracks wind up as more than mere genre exercises.

“Snowflakes” is the requisite ballad, but it doesn’t serve as just a pace-brake. It’s structured to generate a dramatic tension that, abetted by the repeating chorus and Morgan’s now-it’s-there-now-it-isn’t bass harmonica, pulls the whole track to a nice melodic payoff. A cool dilemma: It may be delivered by an adenoidal cartoon character, but beauty is present. “Wet Wet Christmas” is the doowop move. A loose, handclapping cross between the Devotions’ “Rip Van Winkle” and the Alleycats’ “Puddin N’ Tain,” it’s jubilant, the kind of addictive candy that, once tasted, many of us kids can’t stay away from. Inspirational Verse: “Bring your fa-la-la and your ho-ho-ho/ To our party in the H2O.” Garage gets its due in “Pretty Ribbons and Bows.” Here, series regular Patrick, a clueless pink starfish, overdoses on Xmas bling as Jonathan Richman churns out a descending, Raiders-worthy riff and unleashes a gnarly solo.

“Ho Ho Hoedown” is the country number (western-swinging steel guitar, shout-outs to Waylon and Willie, Sir Douglas, Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez), and “Christmas Eve Jitters” is nervous rockabilly, with Spongebob channeling “Viva Las Vegas”-era Elvis and referencing Buddy with the hiccupped line “I’m shakin’ like a leaf on a great big wreath of ha-ha-Holly.”And that’s the source of the album’s charm: at once knowing and innocent, it’s purely pop for people now.

And in this corner: a band that wasn’t really a band but a front for two precocious songwriters whose cumulative credits included backing Jay & the Americans and placing one song (“I Mean to Shine”) on a Barbra Streisand album. The pair had named themselves after a sex toy featured in William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch, and had no intention of touring to promote their record, whose tawdry/trendy design they subsequently scored as “the most hideous album cover of the Seventies.”

And yet, ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill’ established Steely Dan as one of rock’s most daringly original acts, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen as two of its most imaginative composers, and Fagen as an affecting if idiosyncratic vocal stylist. It not only introduced the team’s tantalizingly obtuse vision of the world—one that sustained itself through a decade of platinum albums and a dozen hit singles—but it still sounds fresh at 40. Its title cribbed from a line in Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill’ is Steely Dan’s pop-iest-sounding set, rich with much of the melody, harmony and hook-y solos that were subsequently jettisoned in the duo’s march to modernism.

One reviewer tagged Fagen and Becker “snotty post-grads” – not that there’s anything wrong with that. The album’s second hit, the driving shuffle “Reelin’ in the Years,” references “the weekend at the college,” and the pointed set-to with the dreamy utopian of “Only a Fool Would Say That” resembles the transcript of a late-night dorm-room sit-down. But nothing’s as simple as that; if junior-year social intrigue was the songs’ source material, here the experience is modified and re-imagined (like Wordsworth’s defining poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”) and spun out as something else much more intriguing.

Steely Dan’s universe begins here, its inhabitants the progenitors of all who’ll populate ‘Countdown to Ecstasy’, ‘Katy Lied’, ‘Royal Scam’, ‘Gaucho’ and ‘Aja’. The weary, confused subject of the LP’s other hit, the ominous cha-cha “Do It Again”—who vehemently swears he’s “not a gambling man” but soon finds himself “back in Vegas with a handle in your hand”—is not only a cousin of the desperate anti-hero of ‘CBAT’s “Fire in the Hole” and the shamed enabler of “Dirty Work.” He’s also a distant relative of such later figures as the ‘Royal Scam’s furtive “Kid Charlemagne” and ‘Pretzel Logic’s OD “Charlie Freak.” If Seinfeld broke ground by getting viewers to enjoy characters whose personalities we’d run from in real life, Dan-world got us involved with a parade of folks defined by their exit-less loserdom and badly dealt hands (cards pop up here throughout “Do It Again,” “Change of the Guard” and “Brooklyn Owes the Charmer in Me”).

As a reluctant front-man, Fagen outsources several of the vocals on ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill’: to Jim Hodder (“Midnight Cruiser”) and David Palmer, who co-sings with Fagen on “Only a Fool Would Say That” and goes it alone on “Dirty Work,” “Brooklyn” and “Change of the Guard” (where he manages a near-perfect Fagen impersonation).

And the music? Flawless, and both expansive and compact in a way that reflects and refutes its era. The album abounds with solos (Denny Diaz’s electric-sitar on “Do It Again,” Skunk Baxter’s untouchable guitar on “Reelin’” and pedal-steel on “Brooklyn,” Elliot Randall’s guitar on “Kings,” Fagen’s snake-hipped “plastic organ solo” on “Do It Again”), but they’re never ecstatic, feels-so-good-I-can’t-stop stuff that, like “Layla,” defined early-’70s playing. Instead, they’re there to serve the songs, which is what you’d expect from the record’s principal architects, who’d formerly pounded Brill Building pavement but shook no action.

We should be grateful that Fagen-Becker didn’t become Goffin-King (not that there’s anything wrong with that). We all got so much more from their failure to do so, starting with ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill. ‘

No superheroes for me either, thanks. My beat is an exotic species of publication that enjoyed the briefest of shelf lives (1958-1958). I collect imitations of Mad, also-ran satire magazines with titles like Loco, Frantic! , Shook Up, Frenzy and Thimk, most of which published out of small Manhattan design shops. Though clearly inferior to Mad, they wowed me as a kid and still do. Their anarchic covers, splash panels and crazy-font headlines (“I Was a Teenage Slob from Outer Space!,” “Pagan Place: An Expose of the Sex Life of the New Englandian Savages”) signified both a craven desire to cash in and an urgent need to catalog the uncountable cultural lightning bolts raining down on Americans in those wild midcentury years—Sputnik and rock & roll, fixed quiz shows, Castro and Bardot, drive-in banks and boat-size sedans.

More than that, the knock-off magazines’ blatant mimicry—how different from Pope’s Imitations of Horace or Glass House aping Big Brother aping MTV’s Real World?—seemed somehow born of love. It struck me that in brazenly nicking the styles of Mad’s artists and writers, even its masthead, indicia and mascot, the folks at Nuts and Panic were as jazzed as I was by the original and were thus crafting objects of intense affection. Doesn’t the wannabe’s ardor run deepest?

Music, though, is where the siren of the second-rate called loudest. In the mid-Sixties, when he was almost weekly recharging pop, I, like lots of guys my age, would have given anything to be Bob Dylan. So it was easy to recognize aspirational comrades in P.F. Sloan (he wrote “Eve of Destruction”), the Changin’ Times, David Blue, Simon & Garfunkel (“A Simple Desultory Philippic”) and a dozen others, their records overrun by ghosts of electricity and errant syllable-stuffing. They weren’t him, babe, but so longed to be. It was heaven when, in the Seventies, I found the best faux Dylan of them all: Dick Campbell, whose 1966 LP Dick Campbell Sings Where It’s At jangled with gems like “The People Planners” and “Approximately Four Minutes of Feeling Sorry for D.C,” the latter featuring appearances by Judas, the Pied Piper and assorted blind men and farmers’ daughters.

The Seventies is also when the guy initially derided as the most blatant Dylan pretender showed up, born to run down his predecessors in a fuel-injected, hemi-powered whatever. Springsteen inspired a parade of romantic street-sweepers, hearts stitched tautly to sleeves; each brandishing mannerist takes on his grandiose folk-rock. I had all their albums: Willie Nile’s, Arlyn Gale’s Back to the Midwest Night, Billy Falcon’s Burning Rose, Desmond Child’s Runners in the Night, D.B. Cooper’s Buy American. Somewhat later came the debut of another original: Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, trailing a long court of agitated popsters—Joe Jackson, Graham Parker, D.L. Byron, the Jags (“Back of My Hand”), Any Trouble, and Scott Wilk + the Walls (their 1980 album resembles a slate of Armed Forces outtakes). And don’t get me started on the Madonna-be’s: Regina, Martika, Stacey Q, Debbie Gibson, E.G. Daily and the rest. Love ’em.

My passion for knockoffs has yet to flag (I’ve already registered for Comic-Com 2013 and updated my want list). The process and its practitioners still beguile me. Does this mean I think the imitator is greater than the original? Sometimes. After an apprenticeship spent strapping his style across someone else’s engines, John Cougar Mellencamp on tracks like “Jack & Diane” and “Hurt So Good” easily bested his mentor, who seemed to have long since come up short at the melody pump. And there are surely other examples. But more to the point, what’s ultimately appealing—and even touching— about the silly, now flaking pages of a Cracked parody or the quarter-century-old coyness of Regina’s “Baby Love” is what they unintentionally reveal: the innately human impulse of, having seen what can be done, wanting to get up and do it ourselves. It’s how we learn, pass along skills, make art, connect. It’s really as simple, and as vital, as that.

A shock of course, but one gradually absorbed as the freeway pavement flew by and I resumed my intrepid monitoring of the radio. Since we’d left California I’d been desperately hoping to catch a reprise of a new record the San Francisco stations had just started playing. I didn’t know its title, or the group that recorded it, but one exposure to its soul and tough momentum instantly hooked me—and who knew, if it didn’t draw sufficient audience response, I might never hear it again or even know what it was. It opened with something you hadn’t heard since the doowop Fifties, a spoken intro: “You broke my heart ’cause I couldn’t dance…”

The Contours’ “Do You Love Me” was but one of many audio delights grabbing air in 1962. It comprised, along with Marvin Gaye’s no less propulsive “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” and Mary Wells’ three Smokey Robinson-penned Top-10 sides, Motown’s first full round of hits.

The year also marked the start of several careers and partnerships that would define popular music for decades: the debut of America’s two longest running pop institutions in the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari” and the 4 Seasons’ “Sherry,” and the collaboration between Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Dionne Warwick that tore up convention in the apocalyptic “Don’t Make Me Over.”

The dance floor shook too. Not since the Twenties heyday of the Charleston, Black Bottom and Varsity Drag had so many dance crazes crowded the charts: Little Eva’s “Loco-motion,” Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time,” the Orlons’ “Wah-Watusi,” Joey Dee’s “Peppermint Twist” and Chubby Checker’s terpsichorean trifecta (“Slow Twistin,’” “Limbo Rock,” “Popeye the Hitchhiker”). While girl-group sounds had broken through the previous year, and wouldn’t dominate till two years later, 1962 is when the genre’s genius, Phil Spector, first asserts himself, with spellbinding results in “Uptown” and “He’s a Rebel” by the Crystals and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” by Darlene Love.

There were even a couple of curious imports that year. Frank Ifield’s yodel-delic “I Remember You” played as we rolled into Seattle in the rain that summer, and the year would close out with the Tornadoes’ whirring, Joe-Meek-produced “Telstar.” Both of these records came from the U.K., maybe the last place on earth America’s teenage audience considered a fertile pop field; the last accredited bundles from Britain were Chris Barber’s fruity “Petite Fleur” (1959), Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and Laurie London’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (both 1956). But that notion would soon be upended.

They broke late in the States (January ’64), but the Beatles really arrived in 1963, clicking in their homeland first with “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” and following up with two No. 1’s: “From Me to You” and “She Loves You.” And when they did storm America—with a rush of singles issued on six different labels that still couldn’t satisfy consumer demand—they displayed a profound respect for the pop that preceded them, a great deal of it from 1962.

We most often recall the Beatles as the first self-contained rock ’n’ roll band to write and play its own material (technically wrong; Brian Wilson’s and Buddy Holly’s respective crews had done it). What’s easily overlooked is the Beatles’ pre-fame dues-paying as a working bar band, one that had to hammer out the hits of the day if it wanted to work. Also to be considered: the pressure upon them, once they hit, to quickly supply a super-sizable quantity of product—which they did by raiding their stage repertoire; and the peculiar tastes of hipster Liverpool (both its bands and their audiences), which placed a high premium on B-sides and rarities.

Among the Beatles’ covers of songs from ’62, Dickie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy” and the Donays’ “Devil in Her Heart” likely spring from the latter source; R&B songwriter and producer Barrett (Frankie Lymon, the Chantels, the Valentines) was also the artist behind another set-stalwart of other Mersey-bands, “Tricky Dicky.” Other components of the Fabs’ shows were contemporaneous hits: the Cookies’ “Chains,” the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You,” Little Eva’s “Keep Your Hands Off My Bay” (the sequel to “Loco-Motion”), “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” the Crickets’ “Don’t Ever Change,” and “Anna” and “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues” from soul pop-legend Arthur Alexander (the Stones cut his “You Better Move On”). And the widely dismissed “Mr. Moonlight” and “A Taste of Honey”? The former’s the flipside of another ’62 Scouse fave, Dr. Feelgood and the Interns’ “Doctor Feel-Good.” The latter, the title theme of a Fifties/early-Sixties play popular in the U.S. and U.K., was penned by Bobby Scott, who later wrote the Hollies hit “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”

Uncovered but not unnoticed: “Hey! Baby,” the ingratiating chart-topper from Texas’ Bruce Channel. The record’s signature harmonica playing was done by future blue-eyed-soulster Delbert McClinton, who gets credit for later having taught John Lennon how to play the modest little instrument.

And the Contours’ once-elusive 1962 single? I heard “Do You Love Me” just last week, in my local supermarket.

Unsmiling faces, framed by lowered brows and downturned, don’t-mess-with-me mouths, have long been a dominant design element of pop album covers, whether the music within is made by scrappy indie outfits, howling grind corpsmen or easily aggravated hip-hoppers. Why so glum, chums? Sure, sleeves also feature objects, landscapes or illustrations, but when it comes to photographic captures, artists are often depicted as no-nonsense brooders whose gaze suggests they’re conducting cold assessments of you the viewer.

Think about it, and please credit Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Before his boys’ debut LP, 1964’s England’s Newest Hitmakers, whose caught-in-the-cops’-spotlight cover shot seems to issue an ‘Are you lookin’ at me?” challenge a decade before DeNiro’s mirror turn in Taxi Driver, artists were portrayed as pleasers. Not just the cheery Fabs of the Please Please Me sleeve (though With the Beatles/Meet the Beatles opts for somberness, the effect is neutral, not hostile), but everyone in showbiz, from Sinatra (a wink and a finger-snap beckon you to Come Fly with Me) and Presley (a sexy grin for Elvis Golden Records) to the Beach Boys, Seasons, Supremes and the rest, aimed for an agreeable hook-up. The artists’ eagerness to Mach shau! for potential consumers was never in doubt.

One could say that the Stones were selling disdain, and that we’ve loved them for it. They were. And we do. But there’s more to that look and its enduring appeal. Historically, the reproachful posture was a defense—against the naysayers who scorned pop—and it’s a statement that all of us, fans and critics alike, spent considerable effort making back then: This is serious stuff, not dismissible like the fluff that came before. Show some respect.

Forty years on, the defensiveness is hardly called for; we won, everything that preceded rock has
been dethroned, all previous reigning cultural standards tossed. But the conceit that science is being dropped, that Something Big Is Being Said Here, still hangs heavy on covers, a sort of aesthetic ghost limb that obliges most of them to be strict no-smile zones.

Through the years, this approach has spawned numerous sub-schools. From today’s perspective, perhaps the silliest was the late 60s/early 70s phenomenon that Howard Kaylan of the Turtles once described as “the Knowing Acid Look”: all those medallioned, kaftan-ed junior yogis staring out from LP sleeves with a near- contemptuous regard for the poor shmuck considering his purchase. He should be grateful to pony up five bucks for all this long-play wisdom!

Next came the singer-songwriters, whose earnest faces suggested their shoulders were buckling under intense cogitation on politics, the environment, drug policies and that long-haired girl who messed up their minds.

The shadows deepened further still with heavy-metallers, who are usually depicted as simply more disgruntled versions of the Glimmer Twins. But that riff is now beyond redundant. It may explain why a preponderance of metal covers opt for gory illustrations over band photos. (At least it’s a fertile field: a recent L.A. Weekly article on the genre listed 25 sub-styles, among them Skater Thrash, Tech-Death and Pornogrind.)

Ironically, while their music was refreshingly dumb and funny and the farthest from “heavy,” visual representations of the Ramones—and of most punks who followed—hewed to the sullen template forged by the Stones. The message is clear: Anything labeled “rock and roll” had better look like this. Gloomy portraiture likewise thrived when metal met punk in Seattle grunge. Though the band itself never appeared on the front of Nirvana’s three albums, Cobain and company were typically caught in downcast poses. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, consistently solemn in the Nineties, now works out on ukulele, perhaps the only instrument that one cannot play without smiling.

It’s with the rappers, though, that grimness reaches its apogee. Not just in the old-school glares of N.W.A or Ice Cube’s isometric brow flexes, but with successive waves of glowering solipsists, bare-chested or in bespoke suits. Even now, as the charts swell with the forced glee of One Direction and the drowning irony of Katy Perry, hip-hoppers keep it real by keeping it serious. On the cover of his international No. 1 album Take Care, Drake stares inconsolably into the table, as drained as the empty goblet he halfheartedly clutches. Can nothing relieve his anguish?

It’s a mean old world, this pop universe. But can’t we all just lighten up?

It’s an issue those of us in this game probably don’t think about that often. But every once in a while something pops up that makes you wonder about the purpose of this whole enterprise of rock criticism, now celebrating its 46th birthday (Crawdaddy magazine debuted in 1966, Rolling Stone a year later).

What just popped up is a New York Times feature that broaches the vexing question “Just how fast is Justin Bieber allowed to grow up?” The piece spends 1600 words examining a crisis that’s kept the windpipes of the world on lockdown far too long. Described as a pitiable “R&B aspirant trapped in a pop universe” who “has few options,” Bieber is diagnosed with a malady that demands the hard focus of the major reviewer at a daily paper (circulation 1.6 million). Why is that?

I guess what got me was the photo, the one on the article’s jump page: Bieber adorable and pompadoured, on one knee, gazing out from that teddy-bear/tiger space between innocence and manhood. The pose made it a kissing cousin to a glossy poster of Fabian that came with a 1960 greatest-hits LP. Across the poster, in the Fabe’s own hand, was the inscription “Fabulously grateful.”

In my day—at least in its earliest hours, now hurriedly receding from view—the notion of devoting any public space to the music of a pop star (I said “music,” not sociological impact, which probably qualifies as news fit to print), would have been considered ludicrous. Until Tom Wolfe ID’ed Phil Spector to the masses (1965), the larger world barely knew or cared about pop’s machinations. Sure, alerts like “Jack Nitzsche Will Helm Sonny & Cher LP” or “Mickey Most’s Playboys to Open for Gene Vincent in So. Africa” would have appeared in Billboard or NME. As for Sontag-ian exegeses on the texts of the Turtles or Showaddywaddy, forget it.

The advent of rock journalism was the first tub-thump on the tribal drum, relaying to ‘our’ community of interest news and information that barely rated a blip on mainstream radar. It necessarily legitimized music that had taken its knocks as unserious and insubstantial. But it’s fair to ask, I think: Has something gone astray in the four decades since everyone (rightly) acknowledged Dylan and (insert your own pop worthy here)? Now, precious print and virtual real estate is routinely given up not just to recounting the naughty exploits of stars (that’s been grandfathered into celebrity coverage since the Twenties) but to performing deep-tissue analysis on the music of every last act who charts.

My hunch is that it went wrong in the Sixties, around the time the first high-school teacher decided he had to hip up and, you know, “reach the kids.” So he brought in Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme for a little parsing and round-the-horn debate (“Diane, what is it you think they’re trying to convey in ‘The Dangling Conversation’?”). So now we have history-of-rock classes in high schools (not a bad thing, I guess), interdisciplinary majors in the study of pop-culture in college (well, OK) and prolonged chin-stroking and public cogitation on Justin Bieber’s artistic dilemma.

I’ll bet it won’t surprise you to learn, as the Times has, that his new track “Boyfriend” is “spooky and minimal” and fittingly serves as “Mr. Bieber’s formal coming-out party as an adult.” Can a co-production with the top dozen rap stars and remixers, not to mention an epithet-strewn, video-captured set-to outside a trendy boite, be far behind? Next: an album of brutally frank, borderline-explicit songs addressing the set-to and excoriating those who hate on him for telling all, and Mr. Bieber’s music will have fully matured.

Not to diss Bieber, but, beyond his many fans, who really cares if he “grows up” in his music? It may well matter mightily to them, but does such a concern fall under the need-to know interests of the general newspaper readership?

It’s a problem Fabian never faced. No wonder he was so grateful.