From time to time, we give ourselves over to the shuffle gods and see which of the nearly 12,000 tracks in my laptop music stash will come up first. Despite the fact that the stash contains everything from Monty Python to John Coltrane to the Starland Vocal Band, there’s not a single train wreck on this list. Not to my ears, anyhow.
“Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)”/John Mellencamp. I have never found comparisons between Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen to be all that persuasive, and “Key West Intermezzo” doesn’t sound much like Springsteen, either. It does contain some lyric lines from Springsteen’s discard pile, though. For instance, “In the bone-colored dawn me and Gypsy Scotty are singing/The radio is playin’, she left her shoes out in the back.”
“Sugar Sugar”/Archies. Bubblegum music’s “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s no wonder that Archie would propose to Veronica—if somebody whispered “I’m gonna make your life so sweet” to you the way it’s whispered it here, you’d marry her too. Now I suppose it’s possible that it could be Betty singing that line . . . but why am I so sure it’s Veronica? The video provides no evidence either way.
“Harlem Shuffle”/Booker T and the MGs. Originally recorded by Bob and Earl, whose recording just missed the Top 40 early in 1964, “Harlem Shuffle” was also famously covered by the Rolling Stones, plus the Righteous Brothers and by Edgar and Johnny Winter on a 1976 live album. The Booker T version was recorded sometime in the 60s at Stax, but not released until 1995.
“Is That News?”/Gypsy. A Minnesota band of the 1970s much beloved by people who remember them. Like whiteray at Echoes in the Wind.
“Engine Number 9″/Wilson Pickett. In which Pickett’s soul shouting meets some seriously burnin’ guitar under the direction of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. That something so hot was on Top 40 stations at the same time as “I Think I Love You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” leaves me woozy with delight.
“Joey”/Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. “A song about a restraining order,” as Grace puts it, and my favorite song on Nothing But the Water, the Nocturnals’ 2005 breakthrough album. The version that popped up today was recorded for Free at Noon, a live radio concert series produced by WXPN in Philadelphia; another version recorded in Birmingham, Alabama, is here.
“Coca-Cola Commercial”/Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. From a whole series of Coke spots I’ve collected, this jingle is sung about as well as anything else Marvin and Tammi did together.
“Barb’ Wire”/Jimmy McGriff. What the purpose of the apostrophe following “Barb” might be, I have no idea, but this is a pretty decent blues featuring Jimmy Ponder on guitar. Ponder played for several years with Hammond B3 player Charles Earland in addition to working with McGriff, and even on his own recordings as a bandleader, he frequently features the B3.
“I Got a Woman”/Johnny “Hammond” Smith. Another B3 player, less well-known than McGriff but still mighty mighty, doing the Ray Charles tune that mixed the secular with the sacred so successfully that some fans found it blasphemous. It closes Smith’s 1967 album Soul Flowers.
“Dancing in the Moonlight”/Boffalongo. For a long time, I knew this band only because they are name-checked during the fade on Reunion’s “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me).” As it turns out, they were the first band of Larry Hoppen, later of Orleans. One of his bandmates was Wells Kelly, also later of Orleans. Kelly’s brother, Sherman, joined Boffalongo in 1970, and brought a song along: “Dancing in the Moonlight.” It appeared on Boffalongo’s second album, Beyond Your Head, although it wasn’t added until a second pressing of the record, and Sherman Kelly doesn’t appear on any of the album’s other tracks.
Man, I love trivia like that.
“Engine Number 9″/Wilson Pickett (buy it here)
Filed under: Random Universe, Tracks, YouTube | Tagged: Archies, Boffalongo, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
I vaguely remember as a little kid that my older brother had saved a copy of “Sugar Sugar” that came as one of those “records” that came attached to a cereal box. (Which, come to think of it, is oddly appropriate for a song like that…)
I never knew “Dancin’ in the Moonlight” was a cover until I stumbled up the Originals Project, a site that will kill many hours if you’re a song geek like me.
http://www.originalsproject.us/
jb,
It took a while but I noticed your subject heading misquotes the song. I always heard it as “we get it on most every night….”
Of course when I was 13 I didn’t know what “get it on” meant even though Chase, Marvin Gaye etc were on the airwaves, though I had a vague idea.
Yeah, it was a simpler time (for me anyhow)