The Hottest Hit On The Planet:
It’s “My Girl” by The Temptations
Let’s talk about “My Girl” (MY GIRL!)
Let’s talk about those slick moves!
Spin around, clap, point to the sky, jog on the spot for a second, do a quick slide, a surprising amount of what looks like medieval bowing… R&B vocal group choreography was always on point. But with “My Girl” The Temptations are off the hook!
“I’ve got sunshine, on a cloudy day
When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May”
Such simple lyrics, but The Temptations deliver them with more dramatic interpretive dancing than you might think possible.
They shiver and hold their tuxedos tight when it’s cold outside. They flap their hands like the birds in the tree.
And they manage to do this and still look as though they aren’t taking the piss. When The Temptations say they’ve got so much honey, the bees envy them, you can tell they mean it!
One reason why The Temptations choreography was off the hook is that they’d had a lot of practice. The Temptations had been around forever. They’d had time to perfect their act. They were also something of a doo-wop supergroup, the fusion of two existing doowop groups competing with each other for Detroit doowop dominance.
One of those groups was The Primes.
Before they were The Supremes, Diana, Mary and Florence (not to forget Betty) performed as The Primes’ sister group The Primettes.
Both groups were managed by a pimp named Milton.
The Supremes wouldn’t be The Temptations’ little sisters for long. Nor would they be managed by a pimp for long. The Supremes were meant for something much, much bigger.
Given that they had been matched together from (nearly) the beginning, and given that opposites attract, it’s worth considering just how opposite The Temptations and The Supremes really were.
Male and female, obviously.
Whilst, as described above, The Temptations couldn’t seem to stand still for a second, standing still, and maybe doing a little wiggle or a jiggle, was virtually all the Supremes ever did.
The Supremes were poised and polite, even before Berry Gordy decided they should be given etiquette training.
The Temptations were banned from Bermuda for trashing a hotel room.
Whilst virtually everything that the Supremes released instantly became a super-sized hit, even the best records by The Temptations – 1966’s “Get Ready” for example, or “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” from the same year – often couldn’t get much further than halfway up the Top 40, despite both being 10s!
The Supremes’ hits were all written by Holland, Dozier and Holland. The Temptations were largely beneficiaries of the Smokey Robinson faction of the Motown machine. He’d written their previously biggest hit*, “The Way You Do The Things You Do” (it’s an 8.)
“The Way You Do The Things You Do” was typical of how Motown hits sounded before “My Girl” came long. Catchy, but also a little chintzy. The production, a little tinny. Perfect for coming out of car stereo speakers, or a plastic portable record player, or the kind that you could carry around in their own tailormade suitcase. Not so good for stereo systems in bachelor pads.
I don’t think I’m alone in suggesting that “My Girl” was different. In terms of production and arrangement, “My Girl” is a Great Leap Forward compared to everything else coming out of Motown at the time. “My Girl” possesses a grandeur.
The kind of grandeur that you get when you hire the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out just who or what is responsible for “My Girl” being Motown’s Great Leap Forward?
- A new producer coming on board**?
- A new member of The Funk Brothers?
- Some fancy new whizz-bang machinery in Studio A?
I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s just because the song is slow.
Whilst so many of the previous Motown singles – particularly anything by Martha & The Vandellas -pushed the excitement levels into the red, “My Girl” gave the vocals and pretty much every instrument:
The “ba da-da” bassline, the “bung ba-ba-ba bung bung” guitar riff – room to breathe, an opportunity to shine.
Something had changed within The Temptations,though. They had a new… I was going to say lead singer, but that’s not quite right for a group like The Temptations where most of the members got spotlighted during at least once in every show… so, The Temptations had a new MVP?
And that new MVP was the bespectacled David Ruffin.
David had been hanging in the background of the Motown ecosystem for a few years at that point, living with Berry Gordy’s father, helping to build Hitsville USA – by which I mean helping out with building the literal building – but not being allowed anywhere near a hit record of his own. David finally got the Temptations gig at just the right time, right at the moment they were getting so popular it was causing problems. That problem being too many encores.
One night in Detroit the crowd kept begging for encores. The Temptations had already done two, or maybe it was three, they couldn’t possibly do another… or at least that’s what Paul Williams – the second-most popular Temptation – thought.
But Elbridge “Al” Bryant – usually described as “the forgotten Temptation”, although he had delusions that he was the breakout star – was far more enthusiastic,
And also more drunk. He shouted “YOU CAN’T F*UCKIN’ TELL ME WHAT TO DO,” and smashed a beer bottle down Paul’s face. After that, “Al” was out of the band, and David was in. In the long-term David would bring his own problems, but for now he more than adequately filled the “Al” shaped hole.
Dave was an insane showman. David hadn’t sung lead on a hit yet, but when the Temptations were on tour, they’d give him the chance to shine on some of the covers they slipped into their routine.
Stuff like “Under The Boardwalk” and “Shout”, during which he’d “toss the microphone up, do a 360, fall to his knee, rise up, and without looking, reach into the air and catch it as it came down.”
When a guy can do that, you need to let him sing on your next single. If you are Smokey Robinson you might even write their next single with that guy specifically in mind.
“My Girl” was written as an answer record to “My Guy” by Mary Wells , even though the “ba da-da” bassline sounds as though it’s playing “I Will Follow Him.” The writer of “My Guy” had the right to write an answer record, since it was the same writer. Both songs were written by Smokey Robinson.
Smokey had written so many hits that “My Girl” would soon be included on an album titled The Temptations Sing Smokey Robinson, as if he were Cole Porter or Irving Berlin or someone.
Which he was. The album includes pretty much every Temptations hit so far – it was pretty much just a greatest hits album with a couple of bonus tracks – plus “You Beat Me To The Punch” and “You Really Go A Hold On Me.” Smokey had written so many hits that the album doesn’t even include “Shop Around.” Probably less surprisingly it doesn’t include “My Guy.”
Smokey had written so many songs that, even as early as 1957, when he was still in high school, he was carrying around a notebook containing 100 of them!
Writing an answer record to “My Guy” was an obvious and cynical pop music move, but however “My Girl” sounds, it’s certainly not cynical. Instead, the vibe David captures in “My Girl” is an odd and complicated one. In his head, David is not singing to a romantic partner.
He’s singing to his daughter, one that he’s separated from.
But not his actual daughters – of which he had and with whom he spent as little time as possible– but some imaginary daughter. Which is why the love he’s expressing on “My Girl” sounds like a dream, and barely sexual at all. David may sound “gruff” on later hits like “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”, but here he sounds about as lustful as an 11-year-old Macauley Culkin.
“My Girl” is a 10.
* The Temptations could have scored a classic hit a few years earlier with “Do You Love Me?” aka the “you broke my heart… because I couldn’t dance” song (it’s an 8).
Gordy wanted them to record it, but it was a Sunday, and they were all at church watching gospel groups. So he gave it to The Contours instead.
Just to give you an idea of how convoluted Motown group membership can be, the lead singer of The Contours – Dennis Edwards – would later become the lead singer of The Temptations, but Dennis was not the guy who sang “Do You Love Me?” He wasn’t in the group yet, or even part of Motown. Dennis was The Contours’ replacement-guy when they’d stopped having hits and had basically become a nostalgia act.
**Norman Whitfield did start working for Motown about this time, producing The Velvettes’ “Needle In A Haystack” (it’s a 9), but if he had anything to do with “My Girl” it never ended up in the credits.
Meanwhile, in Beatnik Land:
It’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan
“WHAT?”
That’s what the last of Bob’s karaoke-cue-cards reads, and it’s a completely valid question. And begs the additional question: does Bob understand what he’s going on about half the time?
What does one make of such lyrics as:
“The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten”
Is it, as some have suggested, a commentary on the effects of inflation on drug prices?
And is Davy Crockett a drug dealer?
“Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters”
A lot of people seem to have a lot of thoughts about what the deal with the parkin’ meters is. Like, conspiracy theories and shit.
“Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles”
Standing in the alley with Bob Dylan:
An alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London, because Bob was on his first UK tour –
Standing on the pavement, no doubt thinking about the government, was beatnik king Allen Ginsberg. This feels relevant. Particularly since the title of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is believed to have been taken from on Jack Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans.”
Bob was going full on beatnik at the time. Bob was coming across almost as a Kerouac character. The only people for Bob were the mad ones. Bob wasn’t writing a song, he was typing it.
Bob Dylan was treated extremely seriously in 1965.
He gave press conferences. Not just interviews but press conferences, for educational television stations in… but of course… San Francisco.
They introduced him, not as a pop star, but as a “poet.”
And he was hanging out with Allen Ginsberg. And he was touring the UK, and a movie was being made about his tour of the UK: Don’t Look Back, of which the video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is the opening scene.
And he was getting interviewed by Time Magazine. That didn’t go so well. And when I say,“interviewed,” I mean that in the very loosest sense:
Bob basically used the opportunity to go on a diatribe about how the media was too scared to tell the truth.
How they didn’t show the world how it really was.
Bob seemed particularly disappointed that Time didn’t publish montages of everyday life (an idea that only seemed to have occurred to Bob himself about five seconds earlier), like “a tramp vomiting into the sewer, and next door to the picture Mr Rockefeller, or Mr C.W. Jones on the subway going to work.”
Bob seemed particularly upset that “there’s no ideas in Time magazine, there’s just these facts.” Bob didn’t need Time Magazine to know which way the wind blew.
You have to feel sorry for the round-faced, crooked teethed reporter; a man of irredeemable uncoolness who had never felt less hip in his life. Something was happening there, and he didn’t know what it was.
Bob starts the interview describing what to expect from his concert:
“It’s gonna happen fast, and you’re not going to get it all, and you might even hear the wrong words, and then afterwards, I’m not going to be able to talk to you afterwards, I got nothing to say about these things I write, I just write em, I don’t write them for any reason, there’s no great message”.
Bob was talking about his concerts, but he could just as well have been talking about “Subterranean Homesick Blues” itself.
That hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure out the message in “SHB”, or in every other Bob Dylan song for that matter. And it’s not going to stop me. Because there’s definitely some sort of message, some sort of reason, in amongst all the surrealist sloganeering – and a vague-plotline that begins with getting busted by police for selling drugs and ends with an invitation to join the underground, to “jump down the manhole”, thereby escaping the daily grind of conventional, commercial life. There’s the sense that it’s your creativity and individuality against “The Man.” That you’re not the one who’s messed up, it’s the system, man! … or maybe it’s just a bunch of nonsense that means nothing.
Short rapid-fire existentialist observations on the pointlessness of modern life weren’t an entirely original innovation of course; Bob himself said he stole his flow from Chuck Berry, specifically from “Too Much Monkey Business.” The main difference being that Bob sings his song in nothing by 100% hipster-beatnik speak, and Chuck’s song actually has a chorus.
“Too Much Monkey Business” aside, “SHB” was so unlike anything else that was happening in pop, anything else that was happening in folk music, that a whole lot of people have said a whole lot of stupid things about it: such as it was the first rap song. Even I, who only a couple of weeks ago, referred to “One Night In Bangkok” as a rap song, can tell that “SHB” is not a rap song.
Still, reaction videos of “Rap Fan Hears Bob Dylan For The First Time” are always fun: “he’s flowing on this muthaf*cka right now”, “BOB GOT BARS?!?!”
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is a 10.
Meanwhile, in Country Land…
It’s “King Of The Road” by Roger Miller
60 Years Ago… Roger Miller had a hit with “King Of The Road.” 60 Years is a long time. How long ago is 60 Years?…
Well, back then: You could rent a room for 50 cents!
Roger Miller had been around. Probably not as much as the fictional narrator of “King Of The Road” had been around, but a fair bit.
He’d been to Korea as part of his military service for example. Roger had agreed to join the army in order to get out of jail.
Turns out he’d stolen a guitar. He’d stolen the guitar because he wanted write songs on it. It was during a phase in his life – his teenage years – when he was constantly running away from home – a home that was seemingly little more than a shack – for a life as an itinerant country-singer. That’s difficult to do that if you don’t have a guitar.
But Roger felt guilty about stealing the guitar. And he did the right thing and gave it back the next day. But he was still threatened with being sent directly to jail and decided to join the army instead: Roger got jailed, jumped bail, joined the army if he failed.
Roger had been in various country bands, mostly as a drummer. Pretty big names too. Ray Price. Faron Young.
He ended up playing violin in Minnie Pearl’s band.
Roger played drums and violins because he couldn’t play guitar. He couldn’t play guitar because he was constantly too poor to own one. Once, when in Nashville, he auditioned for Chet Atkins – who leant him his guitar so that he could play – and accidentally played it in two different keys. He didn’t know what he was doing. And this was years after he came back from Korea and was no longer a homeless teenager.
Roger wrote songs too. Big country hits. When he started recording his own hits, they didn’t exactly possess the most promising names: “Dang Me”, “Chug-A-Lug”, “Do-Wacka-Do”.
Ridiculous song titles.
A year after “King Of The Road” he’d come-up with the most ridiculous song title of all… “You Can’t Rollerskate In A Buffalo Herd.” Good advice that, but it’s still astonishing that a song like that could become a hit.
Other songwriters used to follow Roger around, because when he spoke, it came out like potential song lyrics. He’d just say something random, and it would sound like a song title, the same way The Beatles wrote “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Eight Days A Week”, out of random things Ringo said. And yet they still didn’t give Ringo a co-write on those songs.
As one might expect by looking at those titles, Roger usually didn’t spend a whole lot of time writing his hits. Roger was a “first-thought, best-thought,” kind of guy.
But, perhaps sensing that “King Of The Road” was his masterpiece, he spent a perverse amount of time struggling to get it right. Roger holed himself up in Boise, Idaho, which, being a town with absolutely no distraction, was the perfect town for his purposes. He holed himself up in a hotel room and bought a little statue of a hobo to inspire him.
“King Of The Road” starts off with finger-clicks, a sure sign that we are talking about some extremely poor character. This is some “Sixteen Tons”-level shit. Apparently Roger was aiming for something closer to “Mack The Knife” though, which makes the lyrics about knowing all the unlocked doors a little troubling.
“King Of The Road” is a curious creature.
A song of hobo pride. A song that sees little wrong with being homeless, other than the constant lack of cigarettes.
Roger seems to have pride in the way he’s working the system.
- The way he’s not paying union dues.
- The way he’s getting free travel in the “third boxcar, midnight train.”
- Bragging about the way he knows every handout in every town, and every door that ain’t locked when no-ones around.
He doesn’t even seem to consider smoking “old stogies” he “has found” – presumedly left in an ashtray or perhaps thrown on the ground – to be quite as undignified as you or I.
Maybe “King Of The Road” simply considers smoking “old stoogies” yet another way of working the system.
Maybe “King Of The Road” considers smoking old stogies – and his entire transient lifestyle – in much the same way as Macklemore embraces budget-hipsterdom in “Thrift Shop”?
Buying an entire stogie? Roger calls that getting tricked by a business!
If a song like “My Guy” could inspire an answer song like “My Girl”, then naturally “King Of The Road” would soon inspire a song titled “Queen Of The House.”
Recorded by Jody Miller; which means I need to include the disclaimer “no known relation.”
I honestly don’t know how I feel about “Queen Of The House”. “Queen Of The House” feels like one-up-man (or one-up-woman) ship, as if it’s a competition for who’s life is toughest. It’s like Jody’s saying “you think you have it tough you homeless hobo? I’m a housewife! I don’t have time to fix my hair! I need a new dress to wear! I’ve got bridge club on Tuesday night! I don’t have a maid!”
Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? Radio stations played “King” and “Queen” one after another. How was the listener supposed to empathize with having to go to bridge club, when they’ve just maxed out their empathy on the guy smoking “old stogies?”
The video isn’t helping either.
Jody didn’t write “Queen Of The House.” It was Mary Taylor. But she couldn’t release it because she already had another song in the charts, and she couldn’t afford to compete with it. Exactly what Mary Taylor’s supposed charting single was I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t a big one. All her records appear to have been flops. She wouldn’t even be allowed to record an album until 1971.
But it might have been “He’s Coming Home”, which, curiously enough, was another answer-song to a male-country-hit. In this case: Bobby Bare’s “500 Miles”
Answer records may have peaked in the 1950s, but they were still running hot a decade later.
“King Of The Road” is an 8.
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