ABSTRACT
In preparing for this, I did what I usually do when I’m presented with a subject. I went to my records and looked for every single song I could find that had either crowd in the title or crowd in the lyric. And eventually, I hit pay dirt. I went through a bunch of sixties soul-stompers, like Betty Everett’s “Getting Mighty Crowded,” Dobie Grey’s “The InCrowd,” some mod songs, like the Who’s very, very sweet “The Kids Are Alright,” where the whole point of the song is that he trusts the crowd so much that he can leave his girlfriend with them and doesn’t mind whether she goes off with one of the crowd. On the other hand, there’s a punk song like “Shot by Both Sides” by Magazine, where Howard DeVoto says, “I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd, I was shocked by what was allowed.”
