2025, Kids, Music, State Fair

Happy Together

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While I love the State Fair, I’m not all that big on the grandstand shows.  Not sure why – just not my thing.  Every now and then I go to a show – last one before this year was Garrison Keillor, back in 2017.  

Back in the spring, the Happy Together tour was announced in an email from the State Fair folks.  Later that same day, my friend Lori, who loves the fair as much as I do, emailed me with the dates she and her husband were going to be on the fairgrounds (she lives in Chicago now).  For some reason, the grandstand show and Lori being in town seemed like a sign.  We texted back and forth a bit about going together and then I bought the tickets.

When I was leaving for the fairgrounds on Monday night, YA said “will you know any of the songs?”  Her opinion of my musical knowledge is that I don’t know anything written in the last thirty years.  She might be correct, but I assured her that the 60s and 70s are another thing entirely.

Here was the line-up:  the Cowsills, the Vogues, Gary Puckett, Little Anthony, Jay & the Americans and the Turtles.  Each group got four songs – they all did their most popular and on the fourth song, videos of each group back in the day was aired on the big screens. 

It was a fun show and I DID know all the words to all the songs – and sang them unashamedly (along with everyone else in the grandstand).  It was a little bittersweet though as the 60s is now too long ago for these performers to still be stumping around.  None of the bands had all their original members; only the Cowsills were all Cowsills, just fewer of them.  The Turtles were actually represented by Ron Dante, who was a member of the Archies, but was never a Turtle.  (This turned out to be fun because there was an extra song for that set – Sugar, Sugar, which is one of my favorites.)  And the single performers (Gary P, Little Anthony) were struggling.   And while I know all the words to the Gary Puckett songs (Young Girl, Woman, This Girl is a Woman Now and Lady Willpower), listening to the lyrics in 2025 is a bit…. squirmy. 

If another Happy Together tour comes around and it again features the 60s, I think I’ll take a pass.  Unless it’s for the 70s – then I might give that a go!

Any favorite tune from the 60s?

55 thoughts on “Happy Together”

    1. Oh, this brings back memories. My father never told me I couldn’t listen to something or read anything that I wanted, but it was clear that my 60s and 70s taste in music didn’t align with his. He did not like the song Bridge Over Troubled Waters because it had the word “whore” in it. “The whores on Seventh Avenue”. Again he never forbade me from listening to it, but if I didn’t want to have a long discussion with him about it, I never played it when he was home.

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        1. Aah yes, you’re both correct. My dad also didn’t like Cecilia or Baby Driver… I seem to have conflated this to the entire album! Cecilia – he didn’t like the line about getting up to wash his face and coming back to bed. He never could articulate exactly why he didn’t like Baby Driver. Maybe he had just decided he didn’t like Simon & Garfunkle?

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      4. There’s no one home, we’re all alone
        Oh, come to my room and play, yes, we can play
        I’m not talking about your pigtails
        I’m talking ’bout your sex appeal

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  4. Some Everly Brothers
    Yes S & G
    Some Kingston Trio
    Lots of folk singers whose names have slipped my 80-year-old mind but whose CDs I do own. Not at home to look. Not quite sure who was in the 60s in that genre. Was Take 5 released then? When was Herb Alpert?

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  7. I have been anonymized. I posted a song by Dylan and it disappeared into WP nether worlds. Maybe it will magically appear again. Krista

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  9. Roy Orbison
    Some Johnny Cash
    I think of the 60s as being bad rock and roll from 60-63 from my high school years. I know not all will agree with that opinion. Surprised by how much has come to mind. My daughter cringes at some of my music of that era, often because how off key it is to her and how weak the harmony. But the Everly Brothers she likes. My son of wide eclectic music tastes likes all of it.

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  11. One of the first projects I picked up when I went freelance 30 years ago was to write copy for a series of K-Tel commercials offering music compilations. One of the compilations was “Biggest hits of the ‘60s” and the music in that assortment was exactly in keeping with the “Happy Together” show. They were the biggest hits only if you pretended the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkle, Dylan, and the Beach Boys had never existed.

    I also wrote scripts for a country western and a R&B compilation. I wish I still had copies of those scripts, just for reminiscense.

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      1. I remember one of the lines from the Country Western compilation:
        “Songs about being on the road and wishing you were home, and songs about being home and wishing you were on the road…”

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  17. I saw a ‘Happy Together’ Tour back in the mid 1980’s. The Turtles, The Grassroots, The Buckinghams, and Gary Lewis and the Playboys. I remember buying 10 tickets front row center, and inviting theater people to come to the show. I didn’t know many of the songs. The 60’s stuff is a little bit too early for me, unless we get to late 1960’s. Through about 1976, those are my peak music years.

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    1. My sister gave me that record album when I was a teenager. It didn’t all register, nor did I make the connection of that album and ‘The Who’ for a long time.

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  21. I can’t list any one favorite song from the 60s, although “Happy Together” was always one of my favorites. The music of the sixties was the soundtrack of my junior and senior high school years (graduated 1970 – the year the Beatles broke up). Even of I can’t remember the exact titles or even the groups that performed them, I can still sing along with a majority of them.

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  22. Too many favorite songs to list. I was in my preteens in the 60s and teens in the 70s, so my tastes span two great decades. Favorite 60s bands: The Beatles, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, The Guess Who, S & G. I didn’t hear much pop/rock music when we lived on the Iron Range, but remember watching The Beatles in 1964 on Ed Sullivan and being blown away. Once we moved to the cities in the late 60s, I started hearing more popular music.

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  24. As several baboons have suggested, our age, and where we lived impacted what music we were exposed to. My mother being Irish, a culture with deep musical roots, was always singing, and insisted on my sister and I taking dance lessons every winter from the age of four or five. Also, very few people that I knew growing up had a television set. My family had a radio and a record player, and that was the extent of our music listening capabilities until 1961, unless we made it ourselves.

    I see the 1960s as a time of enormous social changes that rippled all over the world. Much of the music that I still love came from that era and reflected those changes.

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    1. I was a bit young to remember a lot of the 60’s, but about the time I got a transistor radio – for Christmas when I was nine – a whole world opened up to me. It was December 1967.

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    1. I don’t think I had ever seen this particular video before tonight, but I think I’ll watch it every morning from now on….those dancers really make you want to get up and move.

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