Click here for a transcript of this week’s show.
Sometimes when I’m looking for a show to cover, I look at any potential patterns I may have been following, just to break out of them. Have I been doing too many hard rock songs? Too many from a given decade? Too many of a specific genre? That sort of thing. I like to use some songs as an entryway to discovering other songs. So, for instance, I know that “Classic Rock” songs tend to pull in the downloads, but I’ve gotten comments from people who tune in to hear about “Another Brick in the Wall” but stay to learn about “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”
So in searching for patterns, I also look for songs I don’t like to see if I can defend them, or make them somehow interesting to me (looking at you, Episode 30), or just get into “What haven’t I done so far?”
And that’s pretty much why I went looking for a song that begins with the letter Q.
But as usual, it turned into one of those things where your basic party song turns out to have a richer history behind it than one would ordinarily suspect. (A lot of times I think I’d like to cover a song and the research turns out to be a bust.) So check out the story behind Gary US Bonds’ song and how its popularity with another hitmaker led to his working on Bonds’ comeback hit:
Incidentally, I’ve started doing the artwork for each episode early in the process, since it makes for a great procrastination project. How am I doing so far?
Subconscious plagiarism,
Yeah, he could have had a George Harrison thing going on, there.
Back in those days, there was a certain naïveté about that sort of thing. It was only a year later that Chuck Berry sued the Beach Boys for nicking “Sweet Little Sixteen” when they made “Surfin’ USA”. Brian Wilson viewed it as a kind of homage, and just something that one did. To hear Wilson tell it, certain chord progressions and blues licks were just kind of out there, being used by everybody. But ultimately he (more accurately, his father and the band’s manager) settled the issue by giving Berry’s company the publishing rights, and Berry got a writing credit after 1966.