Get Yourself A College Girl (Original Soundtrack)

Oh, boy. I may have some explaining to do. I swear I bought this for the kitsch factor, for how stupid and outdated the title seemed. I think I bought this in the fall of 1980, a 20-year-old college junior living for peak irony. Our walls in the place we called “The Embassy” because it housed mostly foreign students were decorated with truly loved albums, like “Songs, Pictures and Stories of The Fabulous Beatles,” and ironically loved albums like “Teen Challengers” (oh, we’ll get there). There were posters — the great psychedelic poster of “Wild in the Streets” on one wall, and for reasons I would never be able to explain, a life-size Idi Amin in our bathroom. Part of what we loved about ‘60s music was its rejection of what had come before, of the square society, of things like this: a movie starring a former Miss America, Mary Ann Mobley, opposite Chad Everett in a bit of fluff entertainment with the title of “Get Yourself A College Girl.” That just 16 years before, this was even possible, seemed to us to be the height of ridiculousness. That they tried to adorn this nonsense (which we had never seen, mind you) with music from bands like The Animals, the Dave Clark Five, and the Standells — all then musical heroes to us — but also with The Jimmy Smith Trio, Freddie Bell and Roberta Linn, and the ubiquitous “The Girl from Ipanema” — well, that was just too much. IMDB.com, which we didn’t have way back when (we’d have had to have consulted Halliwell’s Film Guide) describes the film as: “A college co-ed tries to balance her time writing songs and dealing with her publisher who tries to pursue her.” Unusually, all of the bands on the soundtrack (which to my knowledge were all on the MGM label at the time, and the movie was also an MGM product, so there ya go) actually appear in the movie.

I bought this for the kitsch factor, and I’ve kept it all these years just for that. But I don’t play it, and even for this project, I’m just not going to. Because I included it on one of my earliest classic cassettes, the title track is permanently emblazoned on my brain: “Psychoanalytically / She’s not too complex / She knows all from A to Z / Regarding S-E-X / And S-E-X spells sex.” My god.