The Dreamlovers, "You Gave Me Somebody to Love"

The esteemed music critic Robert Christgau suffers neither fools nor copy editors gladly. So I didn't get to know him as well as I might have liked during the brief period we both worked for the Village Voice. But he did at least one nice thing for me: knowing my love of '60s pop, he gave me a just-received CD titled Phil's Spectre II: Another Wall of Soundalikes. As the title suggests, the songs were all produced in the densely orchestrated style of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound (the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" being the iconic example, for those unfamiliar). A few of them even warrant such bombastic treatment.

And so we have "You Gave Me Somebody to Love," a 1966 non-hit by a Philly vocal outfit, the Dreamlovers, who'd scored a couple of hits a few years prior. The writers are Peter Andreoli, Vincent Poncia, and Jerry Ross - Poncia, I know from other writing credits; the other two, unfamiliar to me. They've given this your basic Righteous backdrop, but it's the message that matters here, not the music. (The depth of the message is probably why the song failed to chart.) Guy's losing his girl - but instead of being angry with her or begging her to change her plans, he lets her go, sad to lose her but fulfilled with the knowledge that he knows how to love. That he has known love. It's the most mature response to not being able to be with the one you love.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn / Is to love and be loved in return," went the old chestnut "Nature Boy." I'd argue the truth is slightly to the left: the greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and never wonder whether you're loved in return.