Still from a telecommunications advertisement, 1970s

This just came on WCBS. It’s a cover of “Here Comes My Baby,” the best tune on Cat Stevens’ first record, Matthew and Son (1967). The Tremeloes made into a hit the same year by employing two apparently-contrary strategies. Their first, extremely traditional move, was simply to make it jauntier. They twist what started out as an elaborate campside curio into a full-band dance floor romper, punched in with percussion and party sound effects: the latter reminiscent of the Trini Lopez version of “If I Had A Hammer” or Gary U.S. Bonds’ (perhaps legitimately live) “Quarter to Three”—both rather antique, each having charted five or more years prior in a very fast decade.

In fact, in appropriating that format they tread rather heavily on the concept of the song: the original warbler isn’t quite a tear-jerker, but it certainly is by-the-book bittersweet (which, paired with its vintage, guaranteed its usage in a Wes Anderson movie). Strangely, at the same time they also move the song in the opposite direction: they omit the last verse, in which Stevens starts to dream a little: “I’m still waitin for your heart, / cause I’m sure that some day it’s gonna start. / You’ll be mine to hold each day, / but ‘til then, this is all that I can say.” Maybe it was a time-constraint issue, but the two together make the song considerably brassier, dressing it more for La Bamba than Rushmore. But the same sort of decision can have the opposite effect, too: Neil Young’s version of the Don Gibson country standard “Oh Lonesome Me” normalizes the music to the gloomy lyric by replacing Gibson’s wry self-pity with uncut melancholy: the result is sort of a morass. A rather pretty morass on the surface, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s almost a spoof on Gibson’s character, who has “thought of everything from A to Z” while “she’s out and fancy free”—not sentiments that sit easily on Young’s rough, gloomy intonation. The Gibson song and the Tremeloes version here are similar, actually: they are in a tradition of songs (perhaps alongside, say, “Alone Again, Naturally”) that leaven an inner darkness with a outward spring, however half-hearted that may be. I guess sometimes there’s something to be said for playing a song against itself.

Detail from a music promotion, 1974

Delbert McClinton and the Ron-Dels put out a handful of 45s in the mid-60s. The second, “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go,” was cut in 1963, in an era where Texas seemed uniquely blessed at combining blues and country music: blues structure and sentiment were married to country subjects and instrumentation. This combination seemed on the whole less conscious than that of examples elsewhere—e.g., the brilliant, but more deliberate musicians at Muscle Shoals. (And in later decades, much of the work in this direction dressed itself a motley of the exterior tics and lyric tropes of both genres.) McClinton’s lyric is as simple as any: somewhat repetitively emphasizing the sense of desperation at the prospect of loss. It’s the strain in his voice, reinforced at intervals with harmony, that provides necessary dimension. I would contrast this with typical genre-form lyrics, which may be successful combinations of words and music, but fail to convey a particular sense of the speaker: they are songs—often good songs—but songs without a voice. McClinton connects.

McClinton was a professional musician from fifteen—not quite as prodigious as Doug Sahm¹—at which point he was in a Ft. Worth house band backing Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Parker, and Bobby Bland. In a story recounted in Hit Parader he says:

One night we were playing a song called “Fanny Mae” by Buster Brown. We were backing him up and Jimmy Reed in the same night, and I had just bought me a harmonica because they were two of the best, ya know, and I was ready to learn. Well, we were sittin’ in the dressing room before the show—I didn’t drink at the time—but they were both passing a quart of Old Grand-Dad, and I was sittin’ in the middle helping em drink it—never did see the show.

But anyway the harmonica took him on a European tour for Bruce Channell’s “Hey Baby” in 1962, where he met the Beatles and, as quoted in Hit Parader “taught whichever one to play something on blues harp” (some other accounts have it as Lennon). A certain resemblance also follows between “If You Really Want” and the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party.” Perhaps that was what helped it eventually hit Billboard, if two years after its initial release. It finally became something of a Texas country standard probably thanks to a version recorded by Waylon Jennings. But success eluded McClinton himself until the late-70s, when he penned “Two More Bottles Of Wine,” which became a number one hit for Emmylou Harris. And in the ’80s—on, as it happens, the Muscle Shoals label—his music became commercially successful but slackened compositionally, trading its hard-earned blues for what sounds to these ears like second-hand soul.

1. Sahm was a San Antonio blues-country musician asked on as a permanent member of the Grand Ole Opry while still in primary school. In fact, Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet covered this tune on their first LP, Mendocino — in 1969, by which point they were hippies and this song was firmly an oldie; yet reconfigured on that album to accommodate Augie March’s Vox transistor organ, it melds in perfectly with their repertoire: McClinton and Sahm, as different as their lyric personalities may be, do seem to share that particular Texas country-blues sensibility.

Detail from the cover of IDCA brochure, 1976

William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon, a carriage driver. Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics, and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return. Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Sheldon is also known as ‘Stag’ Lee.

This 1895 account from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat gives the background for the blues standard known variously as “Stagger Lee,” “Stagolee,” “Stackerlee,” “Stack O’Lee,” and “Stack-a-Lee.” It was recorded definitively by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, and adapted by Lloyd Price in the late-1950s into this parcel of straight R&B. By regularizing the extant folk lyrics, which revolved with many variations around the Lee Sheldon story, he constructed a narrative clear enough that it could be performed for the military in the Korean War: “There were hundreds of lyrics for the old song, but no story. While entertaining the troops, I had put together a little play based on it. I’d have soldiers acting out the story while I sang it.”

The result is the unusual marriage of a high-form Tin Pan Alley lyric (complete with scene-setting intro) and a loose R&B recording. Unexpectedly, it went to #1 in 1959, probably near the end of the era that a recording with a band this wobbly could achieve that. Though Price didn’t put together the framework of the song or invent the story, his contribution is extraordinary in its own merits: the meter of the verse and its consistent tenor wear their craft subtly, through the pitch-perfect significant details: the moon and leaves in the intro (an established metaphor for fallen soldiers), the narrator’s bulldog, the “swore” in the couplet “Stagger Lee threw seven / Billy swore that he threw eight,” Lee’s euphemistic apostrophe about “paying that debt I owe.” It’s classicism, and the structure of the chorus reflects that: its straining repetition, rather than emphasizing a recurring verbal theme and setting verses off from each other, is merely interpolated into the drama (it’s a chorus in the oldest sense), which adds textural emphasis while allowing Price’s plot to advance at a set pace. The relative reserve of all this development sets up the last — hyper-cinematic — line to stand out more plangently: “Stagger Lee shot Billy / Oh he shot that poor boy so bad / ‘Til the bullet came through Billy / And broke the bartender’s glass.”

Still from a Peter Paul Candy television advertisement, 1970s

I’m not sure quite when it was, must have been age six or eight, that I first pumped gas. After much pleading, I recall my mom handing me the ungainly, unexpectedly heavy nozzle. I hooked it awkwardly into the Honda, and, using both hands, squeezed with all I had. There was the lurching of the hose under me, and the gas shot out, sloshing against the inside of the housing for the gas cap, and coming right out again, directly into my wide-eyed excitement.

Marshall Crenshaw was one of the better pop revivalists of the ’80s, though the deliberateness of his act weighs heavily on some of the tracks and a shimmery gloss of production at times can distract from the craftiness of his borrowing. He covers Arthur Alexander’s “Soldier of Love,” and — like the Beatles and Stones, who took on “Anna” and “You Better Move On” respectively — firms it up somewhat without squeezing any new feeling from the song. But on the lead-off, “There She Goes Again,” the influence is perfectly tempered. When I heard it eight or so years ago in college — not knowing what it was — it glowed like that splash of gasoline under my nose: and I returned to that afternoon, when, wiped down and placated with Dairy Queen, we resumed our errand at the laundromat. The first chords brought me back there, where the song jangled through a tinny overhead radio. From my dorm I had the brief sensation I was seated very high up, on a folding table, above the mountainous sound of the machines, swaddled with the smell of fabric softener, unusually sedate at age eight.

Calvin Klein advertisement (detail), 1993

Every time I go to Rosemary’s Tavern (a red vinyl cave on Bedford Avenue that, for me, usually bookends a sausage pizza) I hear Can’s “Mother Sky.” It doesn’t really matter when you come in during the first half, since even on the record it starts in the middle of a guitar solo — but at the midpoint it takes several turns that aren’t really comprehensible without the previous seven minutes of tortured development. Rosemary’s serves Budweiser in thirty-two ounce styrofoam cups: the bartender is an old man in a state of contented stupefaction: the color of the decorations has gradually averaged to a warm ochre. A few minutes in, Damo Suzuki sings a meandering pattern around a languid bassline, and the setting and the song settle into a comfortable congress with each other.

“Mother Sky” is the first cut on the flip side of Soundtracks (1970), a compilation album of Can’s early work for films, and Suzuki’s first work with the band. In this period their deep, loose psychedelia proved to be unusually well-suited to his frail wailing. With most fourteen-minute freakouts, the danger is in formlessness: improvisation gradually unwinding until the song’s drive relies entirely on the thinning appeal of a clocked-in rock beat. But the level of technical competence of Can was always dangerously high, and they go in the other direction: the longer they’re allowed to attach and reattach components to their compositions, the more formally airless they can become. That doesn’t happen with “Mother Sky,” though, its shrill guitar tones just gauze over a lock-step but ductile rhythm section, and it finds its changes at just the right moments, allowing the groove to deepen only just long enough and then get slowly rubbed out, always moving at the pace of one individual instrument. The familiar metaphor of schizophrenia in psychedelic music seems like it might be oversold by Suzuki’s plaintive refrain of “madness is too pure like Mother Sky,” but the combined effect is opioid, sensually balming while remaining distantly unsettling.

Salsoul, magazine advertisement (detail). 1978.

Wizzard’s “Come Back Karen” appeared on Introducing Eddy and the Falcons (1974), the second record Roy Wood filed under that appellation, a loosely conceptual album in which he pays tribute to his pre-Beatles pop idols, though his stylistic promiscuity still sends it to an alternate universe. On each song, he cheekily borrows a tic from someone — Elvis Presley, Duane Eddy, Jerry Lee Lewis — and then plasters over it with his idiosyncratic interpretation of Wall of Sound. The previous release, Wizzard’s Brew (1973), managed to claw its way up to number 23 on the UK charts, but it did so despite consisting of ten-minute tracks filled with a honking, rococo juxtaposition of early R&B, doo-wop, rockabilly, and whatever else. Eddy and the Falcons, by contrast, keeps to self-consciously restrained song structures in its dedication to imitation — it only goes far enough to test Wood’s “anxiety of influence.”

Schmidt's Beer, TV ad (still). 1970s.

I’m sure the rest of Pere Ubu’s catalog is just fine. I’ve listened to Dub Housing and that other one, um, the Modern Dance, and they’re good and interesting, which is to say a) I haven’t listened to them probably as thoroughly as they deserve, and b) they didn’t grab my throat. “Final Solution” though, is one of the greatest songs of all time.

Beech-Nut Lifesavers, television advertisement (still). 1966.

For a moment in the nineties, some rap songs achieved a believable ambivalence to drug dealing. It’s easy to forget—often through association with their videos, where a combination of overly-literal interpretation and fear of censorship tended to skew messages toward moralizing. I went into this at some length when I wrote about the video for Juvenile’s “Ha”—the images are too easily categorized and what is reflected isn’t the actual voice of the song, but its subject-matter. Scarface’s “Money and The Power” (Rap-A-Lot, 1992) is a single in which he builds a tightly-wound narrative pattern without denaturing the song’s voice.

Wrigley's, magazine advertisement (detail). 1987.

Susan Jacks’ “I Thought Of You Again” was her first solo single, which came out on Goldfish Records in 1973. With her husband Terry, they were the fine AM pop group The Poppy Family, often characterized as the “Canadian version of the Carpenters.” It’s a cute phrase, and not badly off, but the Poppy catalogue is actually deeper than that of their more famous American equivalent, and Terry Jacks’ compositional style and chops are really more in the range of someone like Lee Hazlewood. In 1973, Terry decided groups were passé and the duo decided to try their hands at solo singles (which were really still collaborations) — Terry penned this original for his wife and recorded an adaptation of a Jacques Brel song himself.¹ Well, Terry’s “Seasons In The Sun” ended up going to number one in every anglophone market. “I Thought Of You Again” didn’t chart. A year later the couple split. Susan’s single may be the weaker of the two, but it is full of craft, bottom to top with typically lush orchestration.

It’s also a lyrically dextrous homage to “I Thought About You,” the 1939 standard by Johnny Mercer with music by Jimmy Van Heusen.² The Mercer song is a pinnacle of economical pop writing, only two verses and no chorus:

I took a trip on a train and I thought about you
I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you
Two or three cars parked under the stars, a winding stream
Moon shining down on some little town
And with each beam, the same old dream

Terry Jacks squeezes six unique verses and a soaring chorus into two and a half minutes, and with a narrative twist! Mercer’s song turns on a line about looking at the train track tracing back to his origin and “What did I do? I thought about you.” Jacks rather neatly embeds the reference into the song (with, if I hear correctly, a musical quote in the background):

The train moved on
And with my nose against the glass I hummed a song
It made me smile and for a while
I just forgot that you were gone
But when I came to that line
‘Bout the one left behind I almost cried
And as we rolled around the bend
I thought of you again one more time

1. It seems not improbable that he took a cue from Pearls Before Swine, the eccentric psychedelic folk band led by Tom Rapp, who recorded a very good version of that song in 1970.

2. Sinatra put a heavy stamp on it with his version on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, but I think the one with Mildred Bailey backed by Benny Goodman is more in the spirit of the tune.

Mentioned in the Pooh Sticks’ “On Tape” (1988), in order of appearance:

1. “Falling And Laughing,” Orange Juice (Postcard Records, 1980)
2. “Songs For Children,” The Pastels (Whaam! Records, 1982)
3. Records by Sky Saxon
4. Records by The Velvet Underground
5. Head Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, The Monkees (Colgems, 1968)
6. “Whole Wide World,” The Soup-Dragons (Subway Organization, 1986)
7. Records by The Ronettes

In the verses, Hue Pooh Stick recites, in a mode of oneupmanship, his most prized musical possessions: “I’ve got ‘Falling and Laughing’ …” The chorus punch-line, “… on tape!,” cheekily takes apart the personal significance of music-ownership in an environment of virtually limitless and costless reproduction (all about the Walter Benjamins). The meaning of rarity is a central point — the original Postcard, Whaam! and Subway Organization singles are notoriously rare — and this emphasizes the diminution of that stature that is imposed by replication on cassette. The absurdity of the claim is cute, but its message is ultimately prescient, and bracing relative to the limitations of the process in comparison to its present equivalent (e.g., the absence of degradation in the duplication of digital files, the instantaneity and ubiquity of file-sharing).