Mary Hopkin – "Those Were the Days" (1968)

Once upon a time there was a tavern

Where we used to raise a glass or two

Remember how we laughed away the hours?

Almost two years ago, I wandered into Smoketown Creekside – a craft brewery located in Frederick, Maryland – to check out their weekly trivia game.

I finished in the middle of the pack that night – not bad considering I was competing solo.  When I was young and foolish – as opposed to when I was old and foolish, which is now – I was arrogant enough to think that I might win at trivia all by myself.  But I learned that it’s virtually impossible for a single player to win – you need people of different ages and different backgrounds in order to cover the wide variety of questions that are asked at the typical trivia competition.

I noticed that the three bartenders who were working that night were playing as a team.  Since I didn’t know a soul at Smoketown, I asked the bartenders if I could play with them when I came back for trivia the following week.  They kindly agreed to join forces with them, and – as the saying goes – the rest is history.

One of the bartenders was a thirty-something woman, one was a forty-something woman, and one was a fifty-something woman.  I was a sixty-something man.  That may not sound like anything special, but our whole was somehow greater than the sum of our parts.  Together we were almost unbeatable

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Unfortunately, our reign didn't last long.  One of our bartenders quit her Smoketown Creekside job a few months later and never played again, while another one joined a different team.

We tried recruiting new players to fill our holes, but our results weren’t good.  A number of new teams started playing at Smoketown around that time, and several of those teams were quite good.  We had gotten used to winning two out of every three weeks, but suddenly we were finding it a struggle to win once a month.

But we eventually got our mojo back thanks to a motley group of new recruits who complemented each other well. 

And just like that, we were winning again.  For a few months, we took turns finishing in first place with one other team.  I became more than a little obsessed with beating that team – I didn’t care whether we won as long as we finished ahead of them.  But since the beginning of this year, we’ve dominated our rivals.

In fact, we’ve dominated them to such an extent that I don’t even consider them to be our rivals any more.  As Yankees fan Alec Baldwin famously said to Red Sox fan John Krasinski in a 2011 TV commercial for New Era baseball caps, 

John, for the last time, this is not a rivalry.  Just like fire doesn't have a rivalry with kindling.  Lawn mowers don't have a rivalry with grass.  And America doesn't have a rivalry with Costa Rica!

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Earlier this summer, we learned that the owner of Smoketown Creekside – whose wife was one of those three bartenders I had teamed up with almost two years earlier – had sold the brewery.

Tonight – which was the final weekly trivia competition ever at Smoketown Creekside – marked the end of an era.  Trivia at Smoketown has been a highlight of my week for a long time, and I’m not embarrassed to say how much I’m going to miss it. 

The new owners plan to continue trivia once they’ve finished  redecorating the building.  So my team will have the same players present when the new place opens in a couple of months.  

I was very worried that we might have to play at a different location, or switch to a different night of the week – which might have resulted in the loss of one or more of our team members.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I would have been very sad if that had happened.  (I never see the people on my team except on Tuesday nights at Smoketown Creekside, and I feel like I have very little in common with them -- but I love each and every one of them just the same.)  

As usual, we scored 20 for 20 on the bonus round this week

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We were riding a three-week winning streak when the final Smoketown Creekside contest kicked off tonight.

That three-game streak became a four-game streak when we correctly answered tonight’s final question and prevailed by one point over the second-place team.

That may sound like we just eked out the victory, but that wasn’t really the case.  We had a y-u-g-e lead going into the final question, so we bet conservatively – after all, a one-point win is as good as a ten-point win.  

By the way, the final question tonight was “Name the fictional character who first appeared in 1989 and was later chosen by Time magazine to be included on their list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.”  Not everyone playing tonight knew that the answer to that question was Bart Simpson, but we did.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

The winner gets to choose the category of the following week’s first question, and we commemorated our years playing trivia at Smoketown Creekside by choosing “Bart Simpson” as next week’s first category. 

By doing so, of course, we will also be reminding all the also-rans that they lost tonight when our host kicks off the competition next Tuesday by asking a Bart Simpson-related query.  

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Click here to watch Mary Hopkin singing “Those Were The Days” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968.  (That’s FIFTY-FIVE years ago, boys and girls.)

Click here to buy “Those Were the Days” from Amazon.

Mary Hopkin – "Those Were the Days" (1968)

Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser

For in our hearts the dreams are still the same

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about the 1924 Russian romance song, “Dorogoj dlinnoju,” which was given English lyrics in 1962 by architecture professor and folksinger Gene Raskin.  He called his version of the song “Those Were the Days.”  (Scroll down if you missed that post.)

Raskin and his wife – they called themselves Gene & Francesca – performed in folk clubs in North America and Europe for years.  From 1962 on, they usually closed their shows by singing “Those Were the Days.”

In 1968, the supermodel Twiggy told Paul McCartney that he should sign Mary Hopkin – a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Welsh teenager who Twiggy had seen perform on television – to the Beatles’ new record label, Apple Records. 

Paul McCartney and Mary Hopkin

When McCartney caught Gene & Francesca’s show at London’s Blue Angel club later that year, he thought that “Those Were the Days” would be a good song for Mary Hopkin to record.

Hopkin’s recording of that song, which was produced by McCartney, was the third single released on Apple Records.   (The first Apple single was “Hey Jude.”  Only one copy was pressed of the second Apple single – a Frank Sinatra recording called “The Lady Is a Champ – But Beautiful,” which was recorded as a gift for Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen Starkey.)  

“Those Were the Days” was a #1 hit in the UK, but only made it to #2 in the U.S. , where it sold 1.5 million copies.  (Ironically, “Hey Jude” was the single that held down the top spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” at the time.)

Hopkin not only recorded “Those Were the Days” in English, but also in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.  (The song made it to only #15 in Italy, but was a #1 hit in France, Germany, and Spain.)   

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“Those Were the Days” was recorded in a number of other languages languages by dozens of artists — ranging from Bing Crosby to Roger Whittaker to Dolly Parton to Wanda Jackson to Shaggy.

The song generated enough royalties for Gene Raskin to buy a sailboat, a Porsche, and a home on the Mediterranean island of Majorca.

President Francisco Macías Nguema

It’s not clear whether the then-President of the small African nation of Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Macías Nguema, paid royalties to Raskin when he had soldiers dressed in Santa Claus execute about 150 of his political opponents in a soccer stadium on Christmas Eve, 1975, as “Those Were the Days” played over the stadium public-address system.

Nguema later changed the country’s motto to “There is no other God than Macías Nguema.”

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Here’s Mary Hopkin’s recording of “Those Were the Days”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: