Since I Lost My Baby

The teenage coffin songs — narrative ballads performed in a pseudo-operatic style of crooning — have customarily been portrayed as representing the Dark Age of Popular Music. Influential New York rock critic Richard Goldstein, for one, frequently characterizes the emergence of the Liverpool four as saving the world from “death songs, pretty boys, and payola.” Richard Meltzer takes a similar tack, in part, arguing that the rock and roll of the early 1960s was an attempt to return to the golden roots of rock observable in fhe 1950s. He writes: ^

To rock ’n’ roll, renaissance is merely necrophilia, and this notion has frequently burst forth into the very content of rock song. Mark Dinning’s ‘Teen Angel’ is such a song, as is nearly everything recorded by Dicky [sic] Lee.