Throughout the Sixties, I was growing up in Garden Springs, a suburb of west Lexington, Kentucky – in a church-music-only home.
During those years, there was a Beatles cartoon on Saturday mornings for a while – a show where caricatures of the Fab Four, voiced by actors, had silly adventures that culminated in a Beatles song. There were 33 episodes produced over several years. I wasn’t permitted to watch them; the Beatles were frowned upon in our church.
I was destined to discover pop/rock music several years later, as a fifth grader in north-central Indiana (in the shadow of WLS Chicago, the greatest rock station in the history of the Midwest), but in the meantime – there was only cereal.
Cereal, as in Post cereal, as in Alpha Bits, Honey Comb and Frosted Rice Krinkles. In 1970, Post began stamping cheapie 45 records into the backs of the cardboard boxes of their cereal boxes – and a generation of Boomer kids enthusiastically cut them out and played them, like any other 45 singles, on our little mono record players.
I was no exception. There, at the tender age of nine, I have records!!! It was a luxury beyond anything I’d ever hoped for. My parents took no notice, and were probably amused.
That’s fine, they can be amused; if my kids knew about this, I can promise you they would howl. But there was some damn fine music on those cereal boxes!
We got an astonishing variety of songs, divvied up among four bands/artists: the Monkees, who had just completed a successful TV run and a string of hit singles and albums; the Archies, who were even more make-believe than the Monkees, but who themselves had made it to the top of the charts in both the US and UK; Bobby Sherman, who had a string of pop hits at the time and who had just been starring on the TV show “Here Come the Brides”; and the Jackson 5, for whom no explanation at all is necessary.
This, friends, was a treasure chest – a hit parade beyond a kid’s wildest dreams! From the Monkees, we got (among others) “I’m a Believer”... “Last Train to Clarksville”... “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”. The Archies offered up the obvious “Sugar, Sugar”... “Love Light”... “Jingle Jangle”. Dreamy Bobby crooned “Easy Come, Easy Go”, “La, La, La”, and the theme from his TV show, “Seattle”.
And the J5? They were, of course, the most legitimate of the lot, and handed over gems: “A-B-C", “I Want You Back”, and the near-magical “I’ll Be There” - and lots more.
This is just a cross-section of the music Post published for the Saturday morning slurpy milk set way back then – but it was a canon like no other. I eagerly selected cereal for the family when I went shopping with my mom, carefully avoiding duplication. I badgered her into letting me cut out the record before the cereal had all been eaten. And I’m amazed, in hindsight, that I’m not diabetic...
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