Resuming this series that I’ve long neglected here: In 1966, The Association — a popular musical group of the day — released “Cherish” and had themselves a number one hit and a record that would be played at an awful lot of wedding ceremonies ever after. I’m not sure why I had this on my mixtape except that I guess I heard it a lot at the time and it became very familiar.
I’m also not entirely certain just what the song is saying. It’s kind of like “I want you, I may even love you but I’m aware that a thousand other guys feel the same way.” If I ever get married, they won’t be playing this at any wedding of mine.
If I could find a copy of “Relish,” we might have someone perform that. That was a parody I wrote that was performed (not by me) in a talent show back at University High School. I no longer have a copy of the lyrics I wrote but I recall that the singer really, really loved relish on his hot dogs and that he loved that more than the singer of “Cherish” loved the lady he cherished. I also recall two lines that went…
I don’t know how many times your choices left me flustered
I don’t know how many times you drowned your lunch in mustard
The rest of my version is lost but judging from that couplet, it probably wasn’t a great loss. But hey, here’s something interesting about the single version of “Cherish” released by The Association and I just learned this on Wikipedia. The single ran 3:13 but they lied on the label…
For the single release, the song was sped up and one of the two “And I do cherish you” lines near the end was removed. This was done to hold the track to the three-minute mark, as AM radio programmers frowned on songs that went longer than that. However, even with the edit, the song still ran over. Instead of editing further, producer Curt Boettcher intentionally listed “3:00” on the label as the song’s running time.
And it was a hit anyway, which says something about disc jockeys or AM radio programmers of the day or someone. Anyway, here’s The Association performing their hit on some TV show somewhere…
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