Having descended into the pop rabbit hole and realized that what I liked about my favorite Katy Perry songs aren’t evidence of my most critical thinking, but rather a finger confidently inserted into my amygdala, I bravely venture forth with another one.
This song has the advantage of, apart from an overamped mix, a simple piano figure and truly heart-felt, indeed almost cloying, lyrics. It isn’t an overproduced pop confection, it’s a sincere song produced to be a pop confection, sort of, and it really works. For me, obviously. Your mileage may vary.
I do wonder how many of the 367 million viewers of this YouTube video were more interested in Rihanna in the bathtub than the song. But I’m cynical, through and through. I feel like this song isn’t. Plus it’s catchy.
Songs like this seem so effortless, but it was written by Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn and produced by Penn at FAME Studios at Muscle Shoals. Pros all around! Or should I say, pros can make it all seem effortless?
I’m Your Puppet reached No. 6 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966. James and Bobby were cousins, by the way. Bobby Lee Dickey took his cousin’s surname for the stage. Later, Bobby retired for health reasons, and James joined up with a singer named Ben Moore, who adopted the Bobby Purify part and name. They rerecorded I’m Your Puppet in 1976 and had a hit in the UK.
It’s a very good song. I should also note that I got here because I was listening to the Box Tops first album today, which was kind of hurriedly put together after The Letter (have I mentioned that it is one of my favorite songs?) became such a big hit. The Box Tops other big hit, Cry Like a Baby, was written by Oldham and Penn, and the Box Tops cover I’m Your Puppet on that first album. But the Purify version rules.
This has been a sweet week for the discovery of rock ‘n’ roll. A week ago I’d never heard of the Chin-Chins or even had the notion of Swiss punk rock.
And a week ago I’d never heard of a rock ‘n’ roll band from Nashville called Hans Condor.
So far I haven’t found a copy of the Chin-Chins’ album, so I’m stuck playing the tunes one at a time on YouTube, which is fine, but after fixing Google Music All Access or whatever it’s called, the Hans’s Sweat, Pizz, Jizz & Blood went into heavy rotation. It is a fantastic piece of guitar rock songwriting, crudely recorded and lacking a real rock singer (he’s a shouter), but the band is so good and clever with the arrangements that these awesome swingy arrangement-y things emerge from the murk and remind me, anyway, of all the history of this music these guys are playing the life into. SWJ+B was released in 2010, shortly after which the band broke up. They’re now back together, with a new drummer named Ryan Sweeney, and I suspect he won’t be quite as punchless as the similarly named outfielder who recently played for the Cubs. Here’s an interview with a blog called West Ghost Media. They seem like nice guys who write rocking songs with good lyrics.
I posted what may be the album’s best song and the best video the other day, but the album is full of delights. I feel like this is the album the Box Tops would have made if they were starting today, rather than 50 years ago. Or maybe the album the Replacements would have made if they were starting out today, rather than 30 years ago.
The same love of soul and country music, filtered through a rock ‘n’ roll heart.
This is so polished, I’m not sure what to make of it. But the beat is so punky and our Chin Chin gals seem so direct, I’m on board. Shouldn’t you be on board, too?
This Chin Chin tune has the ecstatically Swiss refrain
Stop your crying
It makes no sense
I haven’t figured out the rest of the lyrics, but I suspect Chin Chin will hold us all to high standards, as long as they can, and why shouldn’t they. To do otherwise makes no sense.
The infatuation grows. These Swissers seem to have found a really sweet mix of a lot of rock strands, as they were in place in 1985, and managed to turn them into a sound. A pretty sweet and original sound for the time.
Here’s another winner from the small but fecund Chin-Chin songbook:
I know Jah Wobble from PiL, but have to say that after their first two albums I didn’t really think of them much and, since he left, him not at all. So, his album and song Betrayal is new to me, and just as confoundingly beautiful as I find much of those early PiL records.
Looking into Wobble’s post-PiL career I discovered this tune, Visions of You, which was his first chart, um, hit. Reached number 36 in the UK, and number 10 on the US modern chart, though who knows what that was. Certainly a commercial for something that never came. We’re all pre-modern now.
But I like Sinead a lot, she’s fearless, and this World Beaty bit of New Age churn has a bit of edge, thanks to Wobble’s bass playing and lyrics that aren’t straight out banality. He may have said some of these things to his shrink. And it’s all pretty catchy, as befits a Top 10 US Modern Chart hit.
I’m trying to put this in context. This music sounds like contemporary bands like the Dum Dum Girls, who mine the same influences (girl groups, punk rock, jangly guitar harmonies) only 30 years later. Were there other bands in the mid-80s and before who sounded like this?
The standard line seems to be the English C86 sound made similar noises, but it’s far from direct. I’m making no claim for Chin-Chin’s originality, but they sound so much like they could be playing today, it confuses me. Which end is up?
Three girls love punk and form a band, though their musical training is a little thin. This is the plot of the great Swedish movie from 2014, We’re the Best, but it’s also a Swiss story from the city of Biel in 1984. The girls call themselves Chin-Chin, find a singer and record an EP. They start playing live, the singer leaves and they record an album with some pretty swell songs in 1985. This is one of them, and I bet you haven’t heard it before.
Overplayed at this point, and many points before, but I was in an Irish bar tonight in Times Square where this came on between Creedence and Steppenwolf, and it fit!
