Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Cardigans

You may be forgiven for believing that The Cardigans are a Swedish group whose most recent release is Super Extra Gravity from 2005. Yeah well, that’s what they’d have us believe.

I’m here to tell you about the other Cardigans. Unfortunately, that’s difficult, because I don’t know much about them. I know this: 1. They recorded for Mercury in the 50s; 2. they were white (I can’t prove this, but they sure sound white, and they shared a label with The Diamonds and The Crew Cuts, 2 more white vocal quartets); 3. They had no hits on Billboard, I don’t know if they had hits on Cashbox; 4. They do not have an entry on Wikipedia, nor on Allmusic.com.

Sorry. I picked up what appears to have been their one and only single completely by chance, totally random. It looked authentic, and when I got it home, it sounded authentic. Apparently, it is authentic. The rest is a mystery.




The Cardigans:



Your Graduation Means Goodbye – Not to be confused with Graduation Day by The Four Freshmen, nor with What Good Is Graduation by The Graduates, this is the perfect high school prom record. It has everything: the high school specific heartbreak lyrics, the lilting melody, the harmonies in the background, the slow dance tempo. All I’m wondering about is this: why is *he* singing about *her* grad? Is he younger? Did he graduate and stay in town? It was out in the spring of 1958, just in time for graduation, but for reasons that elude me, it did not make the Billboard chart at all. It did, however, reach number 19 on Toronto’s CHUM charts, demonstrating, as if it proof were necessary, that Canadians are way cooler than Americans. And I mean that in the nicest possible way…

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