The record in context

Every so often pop music eats its own advertising. The melody of “Music to Watch Girls By” was composed by Sid Ramin as a jingle for a Diet Pepsi commercial in the mid-1960s — sixty seconds of brass-and-bounce designed to sell soda. Producer Bob Crewe heard the jingle demo, recognized a hit hiding inside the sales pitch, and recorded it as an instrumental with his studio group, the Bob Crewe Generation. Released in December 1966, it reached number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1967: a commercial had become a record.

Then the record became a song. Lyricist Tony Velona wrote words for Ramin’s tune — a playful, slightly mischievous lyric about the mutual sport of people-watching on a city street — and Andy Williams recorded the vocal version for his 1967 album Born Free. Released as a single in March 1967, it reached number 34 on the Hot 100. Think about the journey: a jingle became an instrumental hit became a vocal single by the smoothest crooner in America, each step moving further from the soda bottle and closer to the songbook. Nobody planned it. Pop music just kept finding new uses for a great tune.

The story has a coda that completes the circle. In 1999 — more than thirty years after the original — Williams’s version was used in a British television commercial, and the re-released single climbed into the UK Top 10, becoming one of his biggest British hits ever. A jingle became a song became a jingle again, and the song won every round. There is something almost poetic about it: the tune kept returning to advertising because advertising was where it had always belonged, and it kept escaping into the charts because it was simply too good to stay there.

Listen closely

Start with the groove, because this is the funkiest record Andy Williams ever made. The arrangement bounces on a bossa-nova-meets-lounge rhythm, all bright brass and finger-snapping swing, and Williams — the king of the sustained ballad — sounds like he is having the time of his life keeping up with it. Listen for how he leans into the beat rather than floating above it. The famous crooner restraint is still there, but it is wearing a grin. When he sings the title line, there is a wink in the delivery that you rarely heard in the “Moon River” years: this is Andy Williams flirting, and he is very good at it.

Then listen for the lyric, which walks a delicate line with remarkable charm. “The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys” — it is a song about looking, about the harmless theater of attraction on a summer street, and Velona’s words keep it light without making it lewd. Williams’s genius here is tonal: he sings it with the delighted innocence of a man who genuinely loves watching the world go by, and the backing vocals and brass punctuations turn the whole thing into a wink shared with the listener. It is sophisticated without being slick, playful without being crude — a balance that looks easy and is anything but.

Finally, listen for the ending, where the record does something wonderfully old-fashioned: it just keeps swinging, the brass getting brighter, Williams riding the groove out like a man who doesn’t want the song to end. Thirty years later, when British television viewers heard those opening bars in a commercial break, they responded the way 1967 America had — with delight. Some songs are of their moment. This one turned out to be of every moment, including the ones nobody saw coming.

Listen underneath the brass and you will find the record’s secret ingredient: a bossa-nova lilt, that swaying, beachside rhythm that was sweeping through pop in the mid-sixties. It gives the song its strut — the feeling of a man walking down a summer street, hands in pockets, in no hurry at all. And listen for the whistling that threads through the arrangement, the most carefree sound in music, as if the whole production can’t quite contain its good mood. This was the Born Free album era, when Williams was at his most adventurous, and the record shows a singer completely unafraid of sounding modern. He was forty years old and swinging like a man half his age — not by imitating the young, but by being entirely, confidently himself inside a young groove. The soda jingle had grown up. So had the singer.