Rant #2,337: I'm Gonna Blow You a Kiss In the Wind

Well, yesterday's employment-seeking experiment was an abject failure, as absolutely nothing came of it.

I still think it was a good idea, but I guess thinking outside of the box does not apply to looking for work.

Onward and upward!

Let's talk about some people who had good jobs, had many fingers in many pots, and well, I am pretty sure they never had to do what I did yesterday.

Let's first talk about Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who you might remember were the prolific songwriters who composed many tunes, including a bushelful for the Monkees.

That being said, their everlasting contribution to pop culture might just be that they were the songwriters for the theme to the "Days of Our Lives" TV soap opera, but whatever the case, these guys were a hot commodity in the mid to late 1960s, whether as songwriters, producers, or performers in their own right.

They were ubiquitous, they were everywhere, and even if you turned on your favorite TV show, you might just see them.

They were on episodes of "The Flying Nun," "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Bewitched," as well as performing as a duo on every TV variety show you could name, including, of course, "American Bandstand."

There was a very good reason that they were all over TV, and that was because they were actually being groomed for their own sitcom from Screen Gems Television.

The duo broke up, so that never came to pass, although the concept of the show was used later on in the very short-lived situation comedy "Gettin' Together" starring Wes Stern and somebody by the name of Bobby Sherman.

But let me digress ...

In the season six episode of "Bewitched," Samantha's evil sister, Serena, wants Boyce and Hart to perform at the Cosmos Cotillion, but the duo is booked until 1976, so she can't get them the right way.

So Serena does what Serena does ... she puts a spell on them so they become highly unpopular, which forces them to play the Cotillion, because nobody else will have them.

Once Samantha catches wind of this scheme, she insists that Serena remove the spell, but, of course, Serena has other thoughts.

The song that the duo performs, and which is heard throughout the show is "I'm Gonna Blow You a Kiss In the Wind," and it rings the show to the point that it becomes a real earworm by the end of the half hour episode.

This procedure worked to get the Monkees' tunes into our consciousness, and I assume that those behind this episode thought that the constant repetition of the tune would make this song as big a hit as Boyce and Hart's "Last Train to Clarksville" was for the Monkees.

Well, that plan didn't work at all, the song never even charted on Billboard's Hot 100, and the whole project exists all these years later as one of the more amusing episodes from the popular series, and nothing more.

The only reason that I even bring this subject up is that I finally found the single, with the picture sleeve that you see here, and I added it to my collection.

Boyce and Hart had an interesting career both in front of the camera and behind it, and while they may only exist as footnotes all these years later when talking about popular culture in the 1960s, their work really is something to behold, because they seemed to squeeze so much input and output into such a small window of time--even though these guys had been around honing their craft since the late 1950s.

Hart is still around, Boyce died in 1994, and while they will forever be remembered for their work with the Monkees and for their one lone giant hit on their own, "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight," they were really so much more than just those things.

When their episodes come up on the shows I listed above, give them a try; they are all good for a few laughs and they all have some pretty good music in them to tap your toes to.

Have a good weekend. Speak to you again on Monday.