Things I Will Keep #21: THE MURMAIDS, “Popsicles and Icicles”

The Murmaids
“Popsicles and Icicles” b/w “Huntington Flats”
1963, Chattahoochee Records

Everyone talks shit about vanilla, but it’s my favorite flavor.

The word itself is often used as a synonym for boring or bland. You can lead a vanilla lifestyle with vanilla interests and have vanilla sex–and no one who describes it that way means it as a compliment.

Vanilla is also typically white, like a politician’s shirt or the plain walls of an unfurnished living room or Pat Sajak–and that’s supposed to be bad, too, I guess.

You hear these slanders about vanilla all of the time, but you won’t hear ’em from me because I LOVE IT. I’m crazy about it. Vanilla is refreshing and cozy. I’m even nuts about the scent of it. Furthermore, vanilla, like me, may look very white, but it has Mexican roots (all real vanilla is derived from an edible orchid plant indigenous to Mexico; the Aztecs of old were way into it).

In that sense, I am vanilla. I identify.

It explains everything. THAT’S why I love a nice, thick vanilla milkshake. I’m not a ridiculous sugar addict, no; I’m simply in touch with my heritage.

Yeah, that’s it.

Also, a scoop of simple vanilla ice cream makes me sing and dance down the street. Give me a vanilla cupcake and you may as well be giving me a winning lottery ticket. I don’t drink soda anymore, but when I did, Vanilla Coke was my poison. I even love classic cheap old Nilla Wafer cookies all by themselves, no banana pudding necessary. Rip open the box, pour ’em right down my throat.

Now, I like chocolate, too. I like strawberry. I’m also into coconut, banana and pistachio. I enjoy buttery things and minty things. Cinnamon. Caramel. I appreciate diversity. I’m a man of the world.

But there’s something about vanilla that just sits right in my soul.

And this 1963 single from short-lived girl group The Murmaids has some of that same something. 

It’s the music equivalent to glorious vanilla and it’s one of my favorite records.

I’ve played “Popsicles and Icicles” for people before and their response is typically along the lines of “Yeah, that was okay… So, you got any chips?”. They don’t care and I think I know why.

They’re stupid.

I’m kidding.

No, they heard it the wrong way. They heard it because a shrimpy nerd named Jason pushed it on them.

By contrast, your obedient servant first heard “Popsicles and Icicles” the right way. On the radio.

It was the summer of 1991, right before I started high school, and when I wasn’t touching myself, I was finding myself and one of the places where I looked was the oldies radio station, KLUV 98.7 in Dallas, Texas. This was back when oldies radio was wall-to-wall 1950s and 60s. Buddy Holly. The Drifters. The Skyliners. Smokey Robinson. Jefferson Airplane. It was all malt shops, sock hops and hippies. It was the only music that I listened to at the time. (I know that oldies radio has since updated. Is KLUV playing Nirvana, yet? Don’t tell me.)

There was no internet back then and I didn’t have friends, so what I had instead was my nightly ritual.

Every night, starting at around 8 or 9, I sat in my room, turned on KLUV and read that day’s newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, from front to back under the light of a cheap desk lamp. All of the news, all of the obituaries, all of the columns, every comic strip, all of the reviews of the latest local museum exhibits and movies and books (okay, I skipped the sports and financial sections). When I was finished around midnight-ish, I usually turned on the TV and watched whatever old movies were showing. I saw the The Killer Shrews and Cattle Queen of Montana that summer, I remember. Or I’d read comic books or magazines and let the radio play on.

I had a head full of Chuck Berry, rubber suit monsters, cowboys and the City Council. Good times.

Somewhere in this odd journey, the combined forces of God and Fate and KLUV decided to slide me the world’s sweetest slice of angel food cake. It came in over the the airwaves at a late hour–and I remember that it was late because that’s when KLUV sneaked out the odd deep cut for the eight people who were listening at 2 AM.

And you know how some songs grab you right away?

The sugary Hawaiian lilt of “Popsicles and Icicles” did that. It instantly flicked on a light bulb inside of me. It was pure sweetness and right away I was fascinated. When the vocals kicked in a few seconds later, I was powerless. Laid out. The honeyed harmonies, sung by the most whitebread and ghostly girl group I’d ever heard at the time, sent me straight into a dream. Meanwhile, the words are about the simple pleasures. Popsicles, icicles, bright stars, guitars and drive-ins on Friday night (“If you put them all together/ Much to your surprise/ You’ll find a bit of heaven/ Right before your eyes”). Sounds good to me, too. The Murmaids deliver every detail with a sigh.

It’s such a simple little record. It’s not Mozart. It has more in common with, well, a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I react to it in the same way. It trips the same alarms.

The most rational explanation that I have for my attachment is that it’s an earnestly innocent song–and I was about to begin a new life stage. This squeaky clean take on teenagerhood from thirty years ago may have helped ease whatever jitters I had.

It stood out in the blizzard of media that I traversed on that summer vacation from school. Back then, I slept all day and stayed up all night and learned the ways of the introvert, mostly solitary, but never “lonely”. I was simultaneously detached from the world and furiously (obsessively) plugged into it through newspapers and airwaves.

I thought a lot about the transmission of things. By that I mean the media that we receive and how we receive it and then what we do with it afterward. Back then, I didn’t have the words for it and only a clumsy concept of it in my undercooked teenage brain, but it was when I first got a hint of a whisper of an inkling that media is not a passive experience (or it wasn’t for me, at least). It’s not a thing that just happens to you. It’s not just “escape” and it’s not just entertainment. No, it’s one half of a conversation and you supply the other half.

That’s what this whole website is about.

“Popsicles and Icicles” talked to me and then I talked back. Looks like I’m still talking back.

Two other ideas that I got into that summer and to which I still subscribe:

1) Old things aren’t dead things.

2) Sometimes the things that mean the most to you can be very modest and be found in the most modest places. So, if you enjoy digging, keep doing it because kicks are everywhere.

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In addition to being a cool song, “Popsicles and Icicles” was also a mystery to me for some years because I didn’t know who did it. If the DJ ever said the group’s name, I missed it and the song was not in heavy rotation on KLUV. Pre-internet problems, kids.

I always kept a blank tape in my little portable radio/cassette recorder and I managed to capture about 4/5s of the song that first time I heard it (I think that I hit record in the middle of the first chorus), but that fragment was all that I had.

For all I knew, the song was beamed down from aliens and not of this world.

However, it was of this world.

It had a writer and his name was David Gates. He would go on to write songs for Elvis Presley and The Monkees (“Saturday’s Child”, one of their early best), but would achieve his biggest fame as one of the lead singers and main creative forces of the 70s soft-rock group Bread, where he would continue to make hearts flutter with songs such as “Everything I Own” and “Make It With You”. How many 1970s children were conceived with a David Gates song oozing out of a silver stereo with glowing tuner lights?

It also had a producer and his name was Kim Fowley, one of the most colorful cult figures in American pop music from the early 60s and through the punk and new wave eras and beyond. He scored a few hits, but mostly operated on the fringes. Fowley was like a lizard crawling in the crevices of the Los Angeles rock scene. He Godfather’d one of this site’s favorite groups, The Quick, along with The Runaways and many more. There are plenty of seedy stories about him from way back. Fowley was a weird combination of huckster and artist, but when you see his name in the credits on a record in a used vinyl bin, you buy it. It’s probably good. His solo albums are also nicely fucked.

As for The Murmaids themselves, they pretty much got screwed. Their names were Carol and Terry Fischer (sisters) and Sally Gordon and they were all teenagers. The Fischer sisters had parents with deep roots in the music industry. Their father, Carl Fischer, was a songwriter who came up with a few hits for Frankie Laine. Their mother was an old-school big band singer. None of that pedigree though prepared them for a business that saw them as merely pretty voices to use up and then discard. “Popsicles and Icicles” was a hit, but they barely got paid.

They didn’t even get a bone thrown to them on the B-side. On my 45, the flipside is an instrumental called “Huntington Flats”, an organ heavy piece of 60s game show music credited to Kim Fowley as the writer and “The Murmaids Band” as the performer.