Peggy Sue Got Analyzed

Freshman comp paper -- first graded assignment of the semester, actually, and I love it.

“Please don’t tell, no-no-no…” Repression and self-doubt are expressed by a struggling Holly in his original nervous ditty, “Peggy Sue.” This apprehension turns into indifference with a hint of anger in the second, more rockin’ version.

Holly, like most males, is struggling with an Oedipus complex- essentially wanting to love his mother and get rid of his father. With this comes a castration complex; he is afraid that his manhood could be taken away from him, thus making him fail at loving Peggy properly. Even though Holly’s mother is the ultimate goal, Holly invests his emotions in Peggy instead; loving her is okay but loving his mother is not. The relationship between Peggy Sue and Holly’s mother is evident with lines like, “She’s the one, I’ve been told/ Now she wears a band of gold.” This “band of gold” must represent something for Holly. It must have had some sort of effect on his life prior to Peggy Sue- it seems as if it had caused him some sort of pain. Holly saw his mother’s band of gold as the reason he couldn’t be with her- a constant reminder that his father had what he needed.

Peggy Sue, being a woman, naturally wants to be taken care of by a man. She is inclined to submit to the societal norm of marriage when she realizes her natural female Penile envy. Since she couldn’t be satisfied by Holly, she had to find someone else to fulfill her needs. This meant that she had to leave Holly and now he’s alone and emotionally confused . This only furthered his Oedipus complex and now he is dealing with feeling even more inferior. First he was rejected by his mother and now Peggy Sue.

The unconscious is the main site of creativity and obviously thoughts of Peggy Sue have been deep-seeded into Holly’s unconscious, “You recall the girl that’s been in nearly every song.” Being sensitive about this subject, and being bombarded by the anger he feels toward Peggy Sue’s new husband and his own father, he quickly gets uncomfortable and focuses again on his confusion, “This is what I heard, of course the story could be wrong.” He is comfortable describing his confusion because that’s one feeling that is socially okay to have.

In the second, more upbeat version of Peggy Sue, Holly’s self-doubt develops into indifference and apathy toward the situation. He has realized why Peggy Sue left him and he has come to the conclusion that he lacks the ability to please the women he loves and is too embarrassed to admit to it. Now he has been so emotionally beaten down by that fact that he is pretending to not really care. He has somewhat gotten over it, or is atleast trying to ignore his feelings so he can move on. He feels as if he has wasted too much time on this girl and has recognized that every relationship he has wanted in his life (his mother, Peggy Sue) has been ruined by a wedding ring and he is trying to recover and move on with his life.

Peggy Sue was just a medium through which Holly acted out his feelings toward his mother. The let down of this relationship was devastating to Holly and left him emotionally drained and embarrassed to admit his true feelings. In the second version, Holly’s situation is turned into a renunciation of these same girls and is portrayed as sick of being left behind and is ready to forget the pain both women have caused him.

That Was Now

After a certain age you get to be afraid of your own taste. It's not that you can't bring yourself to turn on the radio, or download from iTunes, or check out today's music channels on XM or Sirius, it's more that you're afraid you'll get it wrong.

I suddenly realized that I was a victim of this fear. I had started an email family game: Battle of the Decades. It worked like this: I would go to XM Online, and copy and paste the "Now Playing" list for the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Whatever happened to be playing at that moment. Then we each had to vote row which decade had the best song of the moment.

A good game, a good email connector for a far-flung, music-loving family. But, my 27-year-old niece asked, what about the 90s?

The 90s? Did anyone care about the music that came out of the 90s? Well, Alex seemed to. Hard to imagine...she was a Richards, wasn't she? But I added the 90s, and sure enough, the songs began garnering votes, and not only from Alex (The Notorious B.I.G. over Chuck Berry?) but sometimes from her sister and even her cousins--my own daughters--all older than she.

And from me? As Commissioner of Battle of the Decades, I figured it was my duty to listen to at least samples of the songs I didn't know. And sometimes--like if the 50s Channel was playing Connie Francis and the 60s had Brian Hyland and the 70s had The Carpenters--the 90s Channel might turn out to be my choice too.

That was when the fear set in. Suppose I really liked someone on the 90s, and I voted for it, and it turned out to be the 90s version of Brian Hyland?

I'm serious. How could I be sure I could distinguish, in 1997 or 2007, between the hip and the unhip?

I who once was the arbiter of hip. I, who knew that Big Joe Turner was the real thing and Paul Anka wasn't, that Miles was hip and the Dukes of Dixieland were frat-boy pap. Well, that one would have been too easy. I, who knew just how far you could go in digging Cannonball Adderley and still be on the cutting edge of hip. I, who knew why "We don't want to think we're Listening to Lacy -- it's gotta be Bird, Pres, Shearing or Count Basie." And knew why Shearing had made the list, and why he no longer belonged there.

Worse, maybe I did know what was cool and I didn't care. That started to happen around the mid-80s, after The Clash and Springsteen. After that...I knew who Metallica and Van Halen were, but they didn't sound hip to me -- they sounded like kid stuff. Paul Anka with more noise. I watched Ozzy Osbourne on TV, dripping eye makeup, singng that he was going to take me to hell, and I knew that his chances of offering a credible guided tour of that zone were on a par with those of any State Farm agent.

And then, of course, the great generation-divider, as sure as rock and roll in my youth -- hip-hop.

So I accepted who I was. As Jesse Winchester once wrote,

Someday I'll be an old gray grandpa,
All the pretty girls'll call me sir
Now they're asking me how things are
Then they'll ask me how things were

And sure enough, the pretty girls in my English class were writing in their evaluation, "He's like the grandfather I never had."

That was now; this is then.


And that was fine. I knew what it meant to see the Alan Freed holiday show at the Times Square Paramount, with Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Moonglows, and Buddy Holly and the Crickets, or the Coasters and Frankie Lymon at the Apollo, or Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry at the Five Spot. And I'm fine with being the human archive who can tell about what it was all like.



But...to turn on XM, find something I like, only to discover that she or he is the 21st Century equivalent of Air Supply...? I'm not sure I want to take the risk.

Anyone want to listen to some Big Al Sears?