Why don’t you tune in and turn them on?

I DJ’d on Tuesday night at the bowling alley and played one of my favorite Kinks songs, “Come Dancing.” It’s totally different from most of the Kinks’ library, and it was a polarizing record when it debuted in 1983:

It also made me realize that I love songs that have happy melodies but melancholy lyrics.

In fact, “Come Dancing” actually makes me sad, ever since I learned the back story. Do you know the back story?

If you don’t want to be sad, you may want to skip this next part.

Ready?

On the surface, “Come Dancing” is melancholy enough. Ray Davies, the narrator, is singing about the ballroom — the palace or palais (“pally”) — he remembers from his hometown, growing up in the 1950s, where the local teen-agers used to go:

That’s where the big bands used to come and play
My sister went there on a Saturday

Come dancing
All her boyfriends used to come and call
Why not come dancing?
It’s only natural

In McKeesport, that might have been the Palisades (still there, thankfully, and still used for dancing), or in Pittsburgh’s North Hills, it might have been West View Danceland, where the Rolling Stones made their infamous 1964 debut — a crowd of Pittsburgh teens who had come for an evening of dancing found out they couldn’t slow-dance to the Stones and got mad.

That makes me plenty nostalgic, even though I didn’t grow up in the 1950s; I just visit there on Saturday afternoons.

Still, I can relate to the feelings of loss:

The day they knocked down the palais
My sister stood and cried
The day they knocked down the palais
Part of my childhood died

But here’s what makes that song even sadder. So sad that even though I love it, it chokes me up a little bit, every time I hear it.

Ray Davies’ sister died while dancing at the local ballroom. She was only 31. Earlier the same day, she had bought her little brother Ray his first guitar.

Now, watch the video again. At the end, Davies is dancing with his “sister.”

In real life, she never got to have that dance.

Sad yet?

Here’s another song that I love, and sometimes, if I feel like I need a good cry, I put it on.

“The Commander Thinks Aloud” by The Long Winters starts out as an ethereal, trippy song about a spacecraft returning to Earth.

In the instrumentation and chord progressions, there are hints of “Telstar” by the Tornadoes and “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. The spacecraft’s commander is jubilant as he looks out onto the planet:

Boys and girls in cars
Dogs and birds on lawns
From here I can touch the sun
Yay! Yay!

Put your jackets on
I feel we’re being born
The Tropic of Capricorn is below
Yay! Yay!
Yay! Yay! …

Can you feel it, we’re almost home
Yay! Yay!
Yay! Yay!

But gradually, the happy, trippy melody gets more confused and disjointed, the voices start to overlap, and it’s almost as if the song itself is malfunctioning:

The radio is on
And Houston knows the score
Can you feel it, we’re almost home
Yay! Yay!
Yay! Yay!

And then:

The crew compartment’s breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)
The crew compartment’s breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)
The crew compartment’s breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)
The crew compartment’s breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home to you)

And the song abruptly ends.

The spacecraft is the Space Shuttle Columbia, which burned up over Texas upon re-entry in February 2003.

John Roderick, lead singer-songwriter, is imagining commander Rick Husband‘s last thoughts of his family.

(As an aside, I was working at WRCT that Saturday — my show used to be on 6 to 9 a.m. Saturday mornings — and I remember staying at the station to do reports throughout the day. But that’s a story for another time.)

There were several songs composed in honor of Columbia’s final crew and mission, but “The Commander Thinks Aloud” is the one that rips my heart out, and I love it.

On our recent trip to New England, we stopped for lunch in Scranton, which prompted me to play for my wife Harry Chapin’s “30,000 Pounds of Bananas,” the real story of an out-of-control truck that crashed in 1965, killing the driver:

And he sideswiped nineteen neat-parked cars
Clipped off thirteen telephone poles
Hit two houses, bruised eight trees
And Blue Crossed seven people

The song doesn’t make me sad, but like the other two, I love it because it juxtaposes sad lyrics with a happy, bouncy melody.

Probably too happy and bouncy, to the point that it’s in questionable taste. (As the song was playing on our drive into Scranton, my wife just looked at me with bemusement.)

The song’s original ending features an off-key piano and an old man comically keeps repeating “bananas!” in a quavering voice; the widow of the dead truck driver reportedly hated it. Like I said, questionable taste, considering most of the people involved in the incident were still alive when it was released in 1974.

In a later live version, recorded in 1976, Chapin reports that his brothers told him, “Harry, it sucks,” and he recorded an alternative ending that depicts the widow’s point of view, crying as she watches her fatherless child sleeping.

How about one more song with a happy melody but deeply, deeply sad lyrics? OK. It’s a 1971 pop classic that many writers have dismissed as hopeless sappy bubblegum of the kind that ruined AM Top 40 radio and drove listeners to the FM dial.

But I love it. In “Alone Again (Naturally),” the narrator is planning to commit suicide after his bride abandons him before their wedding:

Despite the fact that a not insignificant number of people hated it — do a web search for “Alone Again (Naturally),” and you’ll find it on many, many lists of “worst songs of the 1970s” — it went to Number 1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts, and is ranked No. 137 on the all-time Billboard Hot 100.

Is it the juxtaposition of the sad lyrics with the happy music that gets to me? Or is it just that it feels cathartic sometimes to have a good cry?

If you have a favorite sad song with an absurdly upbeat and happy melody, post in the comments so that we all can give it a spin. And I’ll see you on the radio Saturday from noon to 3 on WRCT (88.3 FM) and Tube City Online.