“Everyday I Wonder” cops Del Shannon’s trademark lead-off (in “Runaway” and elsewhere) only to subvert it with some kind of “Ghost Riders In The Sky” treatment. Wood isn’t as strong a singer as nearly any of the prototypes, and so in his reinventions, his vocal part is allowed to buffet above a rambunctious arrangement — they’re somehow intricate but shambly, like frontier machinery. “Come Back Karen” refers to Neil Sedaka’s “Oh Carol.” It’s really the limit case for this experiment, since its development is almost identical to “Carol,” but Wood ingeniously recognizes a latent strain of Buddy Holly and promptly marries it to Linda Scott. Where Sedaka’s song is almost perversely willing to interrupt its momentum, Wood’s version is seamlessly plaintive, and creates internal tension through dilating and contracting rhythmic devices. “Karen,” despite so much surface similarity, has an effect almost completely different than its source material: it’s deeply sour and rovingly melodramatic, where “Carol” is bouncy and self-contained.

Roy Wood would seem to put himself in a difficult competition, with the likes of Shannon, Eddy, Presley, Spector, etc. — and these songs aren’t ever better than the “originals.” And yet I still find myself putting them on the turntable. On occasions my friends have complained: “oh, but that’s just—” or possibly, “it’s a nice trick—” but isn’t there something recognizably individual in each of these? “Everyday I Wonder,” despite the duplication of Del Shannon’s riff, is a song he would have never composed (see also, “Fun, Fun, Fun”). “Come Back Karen” is almost touching where Sedaka, with his spoken middle eight, stagey full rests, and ham-sandwich grin, clearly has no stock in that endeavor. What defines an acceptable degree of originality? Does the fact that Wood is canny and whimsical about his looting make it all right? Or the opposite? “Substantial similarity in expression” is the line for copyright infringement — but that doesn’t include copying an underlying idea. The peculiar thing about Eddy and the Falcons is that I think it reverses this: the similarity is precisely, and no further than, the surface appearance of the “expression” — it’s the underlying idea that changes.