Various Artists
The first time I stole a record it was because I wanted to be in a girl group. It was easy. I went to the library, picked up a copy of 25 Years of Motown, cut out the magnetic alarm strip with a razor, slipped the five-album set into my large schoolbag with the spray-painted peace sign on it, and headed home to listen to “Reflections” by the Supremes a few dozen times in a row. I was obsessed with Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard and desperately wanted to be them all. That wasn’t the norm amongst 11-year-old Minnesota girls in 1988, but my fandom was immutable. Much as their harmonies killed me, what I really loved was their aesthetic: Mary had the better voice and bouffier hair, but Diana was my favorite because she always seemed to be wearing twice as much eyeliner. They were the most majestic representation of young womanhood I knew, so princesslike, and I bought into the dream of it completely.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The four-disc genre retrospective One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found (Rhino) is a monument to that dream: the romantic fever dream of teenage-girl narratives written by adult songwriters. In the pre-Beatles days of the early 1960s girl groups came to dominate the charts, supposedly due to the vacuum left by the overseas deployment of Elvis and the deaths of Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly. Trios and quartets of high school- and college-age women, many of them black, supplanted slick-haired boys on the radio and got a chance to tell their side of the story–sort of. Crooning and cooing about the triumphs and travails of young love (and little else), wagging gloved fingers in time to their honey-sweet three-part no no nos, the girl groups proffered the inverse of the thrusty rebellion and innuendo that had been codified by men: the ultrachaste longings of a bunch of purported virgins in satiny evening gowns.
Much as the sound of pop may have changed, the subject matter–love and how to suffer it–is still intrinsic to the soul-baring teen balladry on the radio today, and performers still rarely write their own material. But as the liner notes to One Kiss are careful to point out, some of these girls were more than singers, and the girl-group boom enabled them to establish careers as songwriters: among them were Stevie Wonder collaborator Syreeta Wright, a 17-year-old Mary Wells, and Dusty Springfield’s biggest influence, Evie Sands, who has two early singles included in the set.
