So I’m in the shower the other day and suddenly the theme song to “All in the Family” pops into my head, and it occurs to me that all the complaints Archie Bunker listed — welfare recipients, gender fluidity, crappy modern music — are pretty much the same complaints conservatives are whinging about today. They’re still fighting the social changes of the ’60s, which we now label the culture wars.
“Those Were the Days” was the work of the songwriting team of Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, the same guys who wrote “Bye Bye Birdie” for Broadway. As is often the case with TV theme songs, Adams wrote more lyrics than the ones TV viewers were intimately familiar with –“All in the Family” was the No. 1 show in the country for five consecutive years from 1971 to 1976. They were heard once the song was released as a single in 1972, when it reached No. 30 on the Adult Contemporary chart:
People seemed to be content.
Fifty dollars paid the rent.
Freaks were in a circus tent.
Those were the days.
Take a little Sunday spin,
go to watch the Dodgers win.
Have yourself a dandy day that cost you under a fin.
Hair was short and skirts were long.
Kate Smith really sold a song.
I don’t know just what went wrong.
Those were the days.
The closing theme, “Remembering You,” written by pianist Roger Kellaway, was an instrumental, but O’Connor liked it so much he asked Kellaway if he could write lyrics for it. He debuted it on Sonny and Cher’s variety show in 1971. Listen to the applause when he’s introduced and you’ll get some idea of what a sensation “All in the Family” was.
