Handy Man

It's been a year and a half since I last posted an entry here. I've been sucked into other social networking, and also trying to focus on, y'know, life and stuff. Maybe I'll pick up the pace here at The Songs in My Head, and maybe not. I tweet at twitter/soozenextthing with a touch more frequency, so follow me there!

For now, the lilting mellowness of a tune from my youth, with Mr. James Taylor's "Handy Man." The "comma, comma, comma, comma, come, come," refrain was ubiquitous on 70s radio, a song not to be confused with Sammy Davis Jr's "The Candyman" and the weirdness that is Neil Sedaka also spelling out that useful bit of punctuation. But I actually didn't realize that the song is much older. It's easy to attribute to JT, since he was mainly known for singing songs he'd also written, but the song was originally penned by roots rock and R&B singer Jimmy Jones and songwriter Otis Blackwell (who also wrote "Don't Be Cruel," "Great Balls of Fire," and many other very influential rock tunes). It's a case of the long, vague memory thread of a song that's been part of the culture for a very long time, arriving in my head one random day in 2015, in the form I'm most familiar with. Likely you've heard a couple of these versions of the tune yourself:

The 1959 original, by Jimmy Jones:



The chart-topper, later that same year, by Dell Shannon and his distinctive clavioline:



And who knew that Frank Black and Teenage Fanclub even banged out an indie cover of the song for a John Peel session record?



Artist: James Taylor
Year: 1977
Rating: Warm

Artist: Jimmy Jones
Year: 1959
Rating: Luke Hot

Artist: Del Shannon
Year: 1959
Rating: Luke Hot

Artist: Frank Black & Teenage Fanclub
Year: 1997
Rating: Warm

Rockin' Robin

I slept soundly last night and woke around 5:00 am to use the loo. This song emerged distinct in my mental landscape. No idea why.

Artist: Bobby Day
Year: 1958
Rating: Warm

The Cattle Call

My mom's second husband, Don, loved Eddy Arnold. When I was seven, eight years old, we listened to his albums over and over on the "hi-fi" (as Don called it) in the living room. The yodeling in this song lingers in my consciousness more than thirty years later. If you've never heard it before, you're more likely to wring your hands at me now than thank me. But I have a soft spot for it. No right idea why it came to mind this morning.

Artist: Eddy Arnold
Year: 1944, re-recorded in 1955; written by Tex Owens in 1934.
Rating: Warm

Note: Check out a recording by Tex Owens himself!

Splish Splash

How was I to know there was a party goin' on?

Artist: Bobby Darin
Year: 1958
Rating: Warm

Tutti Frutti

It's hard not to take this song for granted, hearing it approximately a bazillion times over the course of a lifetime, but it was a revolution in 1955, and it's still in my head in 2012.

Artist: Little Richard
Year: 1955
Rating: Luke Hot

Note: This performance is from the 1956 film Don't Knock the Rock.

Louie Lime Green

Yesterday at work, I was whistling to myself all afternoon. I do this a lot (it helps that my Friday bookkeeping gig is at an awesome local music school). Working down column upon column of credit card transactions, the mind can automatically conjure up tunes and still manage accurate data entry. I thought I'd share with you the sequence of songs I was whistling. The thematic progression: roots rock, prog rock, Elizabethan minstrel music. Somehow it flowed. It helps that Rush is like, totally, Ren Faire.





Louie, Louie
Artist: Richard Berry (writer); The Kingsmen; etc.
Year: 1957; 1963; various
Rating: Warm

Limelight (Redux; last in my head on July 13, 2010.)
Artist: Rush
Year: 1981
Rating: Warm

Greensleeves
Artist: various; unconfirmed origin.
Year: c. 1580
Rating: Warm

Young At Heart

Woke with this unmistakable melody this morning. A good reminder to us all to be young, and open, and view the world with fresh eyes every day.

Artist: Frank Sinatra
Year: 1953
Rating: Warm

I Get A Kick Out of You

It's strange to wake up with a song about the zing! and thrill! of love, and have no particular person come to mind. It's a blank, neutral feeling. Which is oddly refreshing.

Artist: Frank Sinatra (written by Cole Porter).
Year: 1934 (original); first recorded by Sinatra in 1953.
Rating: Warm

August Wrap-Up

I've had a lot of songs in my head over the last few weeks, but haven't had time or sufficient mental focus to post them. A quick inventory of the backlog for August follows, with notes where I'm moved to write them:

Stacy's Mom by Fountains of Wayne arrived on my brain after hearing a review of the band's new album on NPR's Fresh Air. Aside from the inanity of this 2003 radio hit (a band's gotta have one to make the collective radar) I kind of dig them, and it occurs to me that this band is totally the American version of Sloan (not that that would mean anything to more than, like, two people reading this blog). Sadly, Sloan has no analogous annoying radio hit of their own (in the States).

David Duchovny by Bree Sharp (A rerun, last blogged on 8/31/09).

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, popularized by the Platters, came to me in a most ethereal way, a familiar tune I couldn't identify until looking up the fragments of lyrics I woke with one day. It seemed significant to me when I learned that the song originally appeared in an operetta called Roberta, which was my mom's name. When a lovely flame dies/Smoke gets in your eyes. The synchronistic throat lump supplied by the song's lyric shouldn't be lost on anyone reading who knows me. My mom died last year of complications of lung cancer. Smoke, indeed, gets in my eyes.

Stop Draggin' My Heart Around by Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty. Pretty typical sooze-fare, nothing noteworthy about this one.

Give Me Back My Man by the B-52s. I'm relating to Kate Pierson's plaintive wail, I'll give you fish/I'll give you candy/I'll give you everything I have in my hand!



And then there was a song snippet that entered my consciousness somewhere between dream state and waking that was a bit peculiar. At first, I thought it was the theme from the film Ordinary People, but when I looked for the music for the film on YouTube and heard Pachelbel's Canon in D major I had to probe a different area of my memory banks. Then it just hit me: this is the theme from The Incredible Hulk TV show, which I'm sure I hadn't seen in more than 25 years. The memory is indeed mysterious, and I wonder how I was able to make the leap between a classical composition from the 17th Century and a spare piano riff from 70's TV. The song may bear some similarity to the melancholy musical themes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I'm currently re-watching.

Song: Stacy's Mom
Artist: Fountains of Wayne
Year: 2003
Rating: Lukewarm

Song: David Duchovny
Artist: Bree Sharp
Year: 1999
Rating: Luke Hot

Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Artist: The Platters
Year: 1958 (originally recorded by Gertrude Niesen for the Operetta Roberta in 1933)
Rating: Warm

Song: Stop Draggin' My Heart Around
Artist: Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty
Year: 1981
Rating: Luke Hot

Song: Give Me Back My Man
Artist: The B-52s
Year: 1980
Rating: Hot!

Song: The Lonely Man Theme (from The Incredible Hulk television series)
Artist: Joe Harnell
Year: 1977
Rating: n/a

Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In

Whoa! When the lyric Let the sunshine in, face it with a grin... came to me this morning, I actually couldn't place it, though I knew the melody so well. I'm shocked and yet not at all shocked that I know this song from a Flintstones episode. And I'm also a little shocked that it's actually a song about not letting the devil in.

Artist: Pebbles Bamm-Bamm (voiced by Rebecca Page & Ricky Page)
Year: 1965
Rating: Warm

Note: John Waters used the original from 1954 in his recent movie, A Dirty Shame.

Everyday

Unbelievably the first Buddy Holly song in my head since starting the blog.

Artist: Buddy Holly
Year: 1957
Rating: Warm

Tzena Tzena Tzena

No idea why this Israeli folk song was in my head this morning. Its melody is most familiar to me, because it was repurposed as the Camp Shalom alma mater that I sang on an almost daily basis every summer of my life from age five til my early twenties. The above version is by the Wellingtons from 1964.

The most popular version of the song was the Weavers' spin, in which the simple Hebrew lyrics (encouraging the girls to go find a good army man) were replaced by English words with an entirely different narrative (about dancing and celebrating in the city square). The web search for this song yields some surprisingly wonderful results, including an Arlo Guthrie rendition in which he riffs, in signature trickster style, on the "Gaelic" language in the song, and even a cover of the Weaver's version by trashpop icon Mink Stole and L.A. drag queen Vicky Boofont! Enjoy 'em.

Artists: The Wellingtons, 1964; The Weavers, 1950; Arlo Guthrie, c. 1978; Mink Stole/Vicky Boofont, 2005.
Written by: Issachar Miron, c. 1941; English lyrics by Gordon Jenkins
Rating: Warm

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo

I think this is in my head because I was playing a song game with the family on Friday night, and it devolved into renditions of Disney tunes. Not sure if this specific song came up, or if the mental connection was from having sung Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Ha! Now they're in YOUR head! Mwah-a-a!

Artist: Verna Felton
Year: 1950 (From the movie Cinderella)
Rating: Warm

The Ballad of Davy Crockett

In my head 'cause I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox a while back, and it's used in the opening credits. I can't find much info about this version of the song out there, but it's a resonant tune, lodged in the brains of many of us born in the States in the post-WWII era through maybe my generation. I wonder how many Gen Y'ers and younger know it.

Artist: The Wellingtons
Year: 1954 (original)
Rating: Warm

¿Dónde Está Santa Claus?

I have no idea whether I'd ever actually heard this super-kitschy-cute song in full before. The only reason it is lodged in my head is that my old junior high friend Misty used to sing it. This is about 25 years ago, people, and it's in my head now. And it ain't even Xmas time!



And how much holiday joy do I feel now, knowing that Charo covered it in the '70s?? Cuci-Cuci!

Artist (original): Augie Rios
Year: 1958
Rating: Luke Hot

Artist (cover): Charo
Year: 1978
Rating: Lukewarm

Singin' In the Rain

Yes, my unconscious soundtrack can sometimes be rather predictable and dependent upon obvious environmental factors. This clip from the 1952 movie is so sweet though; it's hard to resist. And here's a link to one of the early recordings of the song from 1929.

Artist: Gene Kelly
Year: 1952
Year: (original) c. 1927, written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown
Rating: Warm

Do-Re-Mi

Specifically, I woke with the "So-do-la-fa-mi-do-re" line in my head. I had absolutely no idea that the Sing Along Sound of Music was playing at the Castro this weekend. I swear it!

When you know the notes to sing/You can sing most anything!

Artist: Julie Andrews & co
Year: 1959 (original stage production) 1965 (film)
Rating: Warmly warm
Written by Rodgers & Hammerstein

Fly Me to the Moon

Holy shit! There's water on the moon! This song came to mind the day before, mind you, the historic announcement was made. I know, blogging about it after the fact really dampens my cred.

C'est la vie, et l'eau.

Artist: Frank Sinatra and Antonio Jobim
Year: 1966 (written in 1954 by Bart Howard)
Rating: Luke Hot

Turn Me Loose

"Eeeee!! Fabian!!"

I was a teenager in the '80s, not the '50s, and since this song hasn't proven to have legs like some other '50s pop hits (it's pretty hokey), I had to encounter it in some way other than listening to oldies stations. In fact, the only way I'd ever heard this song, which has apparently stuck around in my head for the last, oh, 25 or so years, is because it appeared on an episode of Laverne & Shirley, which I probably saw in rerun a few years after its original airdate in 1977.

The premise of the episode is that the girls, huge Fabian fans, miss out on getting tickets to his concert and so sneak into his hotel room to snap his picture and get an autograph. What's fantastically absurd about this scenario is that the show takes place in the late '50s, but is produced, of course, in the late '70s, and so Fabian, guest-starring as himself, is in his mid-30s in the episode when really he should be a teen idol.



There are a few more songs that have stuck in my head over the years as a result of having been featured on Laverne & Shirley. And now that I've opened up the L&S neural pathway, I'm betting the other songs will make their way into my conscious mind at some point…

Artist: Fabian
Year: 1959
Rating: Lukewarm

Mack the Knife by Louis Armstrong

The Louis Armstrong version of this song is certainly the definitive in my mind, though I will admit that it usually morphs into the McDonald's commercial eventually.

Year (original): 1928 (Weill/Brecht)
Year (Armstrong): 1956
Rating: Luke Hot