Seekers Syndrome

When I was a kid I had the 'Georgy Girl' album by the Seekers and loved it. I recently rediscovered it on iTunes and found that I still love it. The title song is undeniably a little piece of pop froth, albeit a tasty one--a guilty pleasure and nothing more. But the rest of the songs are something else entirely. I had forgotten that the Seekers were actually a band. They had a singer (Judith Durham) with a big ringing voice, robust (if not always letter-perfect) vocal harmony, and a secret weapon in 12-string virtuoso Keith Potger, one of the best guitarists you've never heard of. They lived somewhere in the stylistic and commercial middle ground between Peter Paul & Mary and the Mamas & the Papas, but had a robust Aussie duende that PP&M couldn't touch and a rootsy simplicity that the M's & P's could only dream of.

As I listened I realized that the Seekers are the quintessential example of a particular syndrome in pop music--a band that kills itself with a hit. If "Georgy Girl" had never happened, they would have been remembered best for stuff like "A World of Our Own" and "I'll Never Find Another You"--songs that were commercial only in the sense that they were too tuneful and accessible not to find an audience. But that ghastly whistling hook was enough to cast them forever in the mawkish mold of the Association, the Christy Minstrels, and the Sandpipers.

It's a shame, because the world should know some of this stuff better. It's pop-folk in the "Mighty Wind" tradition, for certain, but with a bracing, unselfconscious energy and not a trace of that self-congratulatory piety that gave folk music a bad name. "Come the Day," with its titanic guitar strums, full-throated harmonies, and unabashedly idealistic lyrics; "All Over the World," a nakedly emotional but never melodramatic torch song featuring a gorgeous vocal from Durham; a full-steam-ahead version of "Red Rubber Ball" (with Potger at his muscular, precise best) that's so much better than the Cyrkle's tepid, pimply hit that it sounds like a different song; superb covers of folk chestnuts like "The Last Thing On My Mind" and "Well, Well, Well"--these recordings deserve a better fate than to languish in the iTunes servers as forgotten extra tracks by "the Georgy Girl group."

Who else has been a victim of Seekers Syndrome, I wonder?