On One Hit Wonders

You know who they are...

When I was a young man in Baltimore in the early 60's my band (The Peanut Vendors) and I achieved classic 'One Hit Wonder' status. In July of 1964 our song 'I Wanna Mow Your Lawn' hit #38 on the Billboard top 100, and we were never heard from again.

It was a catchy little number and when our song came out it was quite popular locally and managed to catch on nationally as well thanks to a local DJ. Things got very exciting very fast and our teenage heads were filled with dreams of fame and fortune. Unfortunately those dreams came crashing to the ground later that year when the popular press began to speculate that the song was really just a simple minded double entendre for something far more nefarious.

Truth be told it really was just an innocent song that I happened to write a few years before when I was in high school. I was attempting to earn extra money by mowing lawns, and it was an ode to the cutest girl in town, Sarah Jane Zbikowski. I desperately DID want to mow her (or rather her father's) lawn. See, I was totally in love with this precious creature, and I felt that if I could just get a chance to mow her (front) lawn, she would see me out there, and the sight of my buff teenage abs glistening with sweat in the hot summer sun* would prove to be too much for her and she would come swooning out through front door of her cute little ranch style home and cover me with kisses.

Sad to say, not only were we villified as perverts by the national press, but my undying love for Sarah was also proscribed into the unrequited cull pile of love. She never even got a glance of my hot bod because her father never allowed me to mow their lawn, even for free. I heard later that whenever their adorable cat pets went into heat he would put out poison for all of the male feral cats in the neighborhood that would inevitably gather on their stoop. So obviously the dude was hip to the hormonal male trip and perhaps there was something pathological at work there as well.

Also, I never had the courage to actually speak to her.

To this day I am disappointed at our treatment and lack of success due to this misunderstanding. I mean seriously how could a song like 'Puff the Magic Dragon' live on in famy (or infamy depending on your perspective) while 'I Wanna Mow Your Lawn' is consigned to the dustbin of overt entendral history. Sad, really...

*ok, perhaps such purple prose, which the song was full of, *did* promote the entendre theory