I was writing when “Last Kiss” came up on YouTube Music. I hadn’t heard it in many years. I stopped and listened. For about a decade, one kind of rock-and-roll hit followed a simple formula. Boy meets girl. Somebody dies. When “Last Kiss” ended, I played it again and thought, what if?
The DJs had names for those songs—death discs, splatter platters. Today they’re filed as teenage tragedy songs.
The Cheers got there early, in 1955, with “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots,” a No. 6 hit about a biker who doesn’t come home.
After that, the body count climbed.
A girl runs back to a stalled car on railroad tracks for the ring her boyfriend gave her. A boy enters a stock-car race to win money for a wedding ring. A plane carrying a soldier’s sweetheart goes down. A girl’s parents forbid her to see her boyfriend, and she watches him ride away on his motorcycle before a fatal crash.
And the records sold. Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel” went to No. 1 in February 1960. Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her” made No. 7 that summer, the Everly Brothers took “Ebony Eyes” to No. 8 in 1961, and the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” topped the chart in 1964.
By 1965, the British Invasion helped bury them.
One of the last big hits was “Last Kiss.” Wayne Cochran wrote it and recorded it in 1961, and it went nowhere. In 1964, J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, a band out of San Angelo, Texas, cut it again (boy, girl, someone dies) and took it to No. 2. I didn’t hear it until years later, and I couldn’t tell you where.
Around 1998, Eddie Vedder found a copy of that 45 rpm record in a Seattle antique shop. Pearl Jam recorded it and released it as a Christmas single for their fan club. That was supposed to be the end of it.
But copies reached radio stations, airplay spread, and in 1999 the band released it commercially to raise money for refugees from the war in Kosovo. It climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest any Pearl Jam single has charted.
Same song. Same spot on the chart. Thirty-five years apart.
That what-if became LAST KISS, one of my new Halloween stories for my Substack readers.
And these are the two cover concepts.
