But the song first became a hit for an LA band called the Leaves.
The song was apparently written by a folk singer by the name of Billy Roberts, who at one point assigned the rights to the song to his buddy Dino Valenti when Valenti was in jail, so that he’s have something of his own when he got out. Valenti was a founding member of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and is perhaps most famous for writing the song Get Together, under his pen name Chet Powers.
Love had a hit with a great version of the song, though it pales besides Hendrix. As does everything.
For instance, The Offspring in 1993.
Back in 1975, Hey Joe was Patti Smith’s first single. In recent years jazz musicians like Medeski Martin and Wood, Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau have found melodicism in slow quieter versions. Patti got the slow part first.
So, appalling sexual politics aren’t all Steve Gibbons delivers.
These two tunes are full of stylistic and rhetorical contradictions, none more clear than Gibbons reacting to the English punks and their obvious rock appeal, while maintaining his own solid rock fundamentals. Eddie Vortex is a straight ahead rockabilly ride, full of style signifiers that Gibbons says are okay, though at that point he’s not having much of it. Eddie Vortex ain’t too bad.
No Spitting comes a year later, and Steve is dressing more like a modern rocker while playing a Bo Diddley-White Reggae hybrid. This is the music of uprising, both of the 50s and Kingston, but in the voice of a man for whom a part of the job is maintaining public order and getting people to work.
There were two revelations on the Stiff’s Live album. I’d heard much of it before, but I hadn’t heard Larry Wallis’s Police Car, which is a brilliant bit of rock poetry. And I hadn’t heard Elvis Costello, who I was infatuated with, singing Burt Bachrach’s and Hal David’s I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself. It is so very soulful.
I later came across Dusty Springfield’s version. She is a great singer and interpreter, but the stripped down Costello version seems so much more appropriate.
There is a Linda Ronstadt version out there, which I think bridges the two, but the YouTube video id’d as Ronstadt is actually Springfield. Bet that’s the first time that has happened.
Which brings us to the end of the song. The White Stripes have made some good records. And I like the idea of taking a slow one and making it hard. But random noise only works sometimes.
Like a lot of Jack White music, it seems to be more about him than the tune. Which is fine. Up to a point.
Another one of Zager and Evans’ losers was this story about a psychopath named Fred who finds success in the military, but then disgraces his family by killing someone civilian.
One of Eminem’s greatest hits was this one about Stan, Em’s biggest fan, who can’t control his love.
Sometime not long after my eventual betrothed and I cohabited, her dad sent us a Sony Dream Machine, which was a pretty great clock radio. I know, now we have the history of the world on our phones which also work as an alarm clock, but it wasn’t always so.
What was so is that we set our wakeup to WNEW, which was New York’s classic rock and somewhat-a-little free form station, even in the mid-80s. At this point I’m guessing that it was WNEW’s 20th anniversary, and they started one of those things. They counted down the 500 or 1000 or 5000 greatest songs of all time, who can remember, and while we didn’t listen all day, it was a topic of some conversation each day, because we woke up to it.
And as they counted down, as we woke up each morning, we heard songs listed as No. 324 that we considered Top 10. (I have no memory of any rankings, sadly, since it would be better if I could explain why Psychokiller should have been top 100 rather than 406th, or whatever the actual facts were, but I can’t.) In this context the last few days of this marathon were truly suspenseful. This was the best radio station I knew limning a pantheon of rock tunes at a time when that wasn’t something available all over the internet. It was something music geeks might do, and they really had no good way to know that there were so many other geeks out there doing the same things. They were a band that had yet to meet.
So, while I have no memories of specific songs, I remember commenting in the final days that they were using up all the good stuff in the countdown. There was nothing good left for number one, it seemed, the morning of the big reveal. But there was.
At the appointed hour, the appointed DJ (it had to be Scott Muni), played the Greatest Rock Song Of All Time! Here it is:
You might ask What’s my point. I might say that’s my point. Hold your head up.
This live version of the classic lusty slow jam has a heckuva ambitious vocal over an acoustic jazzy sound. Passionate and funny. And not that different except the album version is shimmery and smooth as can be. The effort of the live version cuts the smarm.
