Wedding season. Isn’t it grand? About $28 grand per wedding, actually, according to statistics. With its long days, fair weather, and customary time off work, summer is by far the most popular season for the taking of vows so sacred only 40-50 percent of people break them. It’s the time of year in which every other song piped into housewares department aisles nationwide will be “Chapel of Love”, the quintessentially brainless yet infectious carol of marriage season, written by a trio of marital train wrecks: Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and Phil Friggin’ Spector. The latter, needless to say, has three ex-wives and is slated to die alone in prison for the murder of his latest fling. As for the other two, Barry married Greenwich in 1962, not long after having his first marriage annulled, and then they too divorced in ’65, about a year after “Chapel of Love” first hit the airwaves.

As lots go tying knots with gay abandon (so to speak), another typical treat for us all is Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight”, virtually ubiquitous on the mainstream wedding scene. Clapton wrote it for model/photographer Pattie Boyd, with whom he’d fallen in love while her marriage to his good friend George Harrison was headed down the crapper. He wrote the song while courting Boyd after she split from Harrison, and the two got married in 1979, exactly one year after the single was released. “I feel wonderful because I see / The love light in your eyes,” Clapton wrote, back when they were single and swooning. Nine years later they were divorced, after Clapton had fathered not one, but two separate children in different extramarital affairs. Then came his album Journeyman, and the following singles in chronological order: “Bad Love”, “Pretending”, “Before You Accuse Me”, “No Alibis”, and “Run So Far.”  

Marriage is a sticky phenomenon, to say the least. It comes in as many forms as there are cultures and lines of tradition; sacred to some, a sacred cow to others, and to others still, a patriarchal sham rife with injustice and discrimination. It’s easy to poke holes in the wealth of outdated traditions related to weddings, which is why a lot of ceremonies these days maintain only slight and subtle vestiges of the absurdities of yesteryear so as to not tarnish those genuinely magical, emotional moments of love’s proclamation. The less traditional a wedding is, the more universally beautiful it has the potential to be, and yet, with so much planning and organizing involved, one area where people feel safe with old standbys tends to be the music. At the same time, it’s funny how much wedding season music has in common with the stodgy civil institution it’s come to be associated with; so pretty and so popular, yet with so many complications and extenuations behind the scenes deemed counterproductive to focus on, lest it distract from the prettiness. Even the stately wedding bedrock march we call “Here Comes the Bride” is not without its shadow. The tune, more officially titled “The Bridal Chorus” (“Treulich geführt”), comes from Wagner’s 19th century opera Lohengrin. In it, a woman ostensibly marries a complete stranger whose identity remains secret until after the wedding, at which point the new husband deserts the wife and she instantly dies from grief. In real life, Wagner’s first wife, Minna, ran off with an army officer only a few weeks after they got married, although the officer then abandoned her and good ol’ Waggie took her back. Twenty years later, Minna caught the composer having an affair of his own, and the couple split five years after that. Ya gotta hand it to them, though—they really did their best to stick it out.

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