Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Some day I'm gonna be happy / But I don't know when just now



Old friend Larry K. was quite precocious, critical-analysis-wise, as compared most denizens of my suburban Chicago high school (not including Gurlitzer, of course). I remember him explaining back around sophomore or junior year why he liked rock and roll: each song was like a small unit of Truth, packaged in a 3-minute piece of music. To illustrate, he pointed to this song --- "Lies" by The Knickerbockers. And even more specifically, to the two-line extract above the video. I've always felt Larry's aphorism was highly pertinent, and a pretty good criterion for rapid assessment of a pop song's general worth.

As for this group, I knew little without referring to The Wikipedia. A bit of irony related to Larry K's identification of this late 1965 tune with Truth is that it is a dead-on knockoff of The Fab Four about a year and a half earlier. That observation never troubled my opinion of this little rocker, though, because it's energetic, tight, and respects its inspirational material. When I first saw the video I was going to comment on the gratuitous use of a tenor sax as prop for vocalist "Buddy Randell," but the wiki writeup indicates he actually played the thing in real life. Apparently not on this cut, however.

It's funny that these guys are trying so hard to sound like the original British Invasion band but aren't trying so hard to look that way. The suits kind of say "British Invasion," but most of the guys just barely manage to simulate the archetypal haircut (which was already pretty much out of fashion by the anyway). All rely on generous nerdles of "greasy kid stuff" (look it up), and "Randell" is looking quite a bit like a less-ugly version of Wayne "CC Rider" Cochran. That's because "Randell's" recording heyday was in the previous decade, scoring a big hit as Bill Crandle with The Royal Teens on the godawful "Short Shorts" from 1958 (sez Wikipedia).

As regular readers know, I cannot close this post without rating the go-go dancers. I think it's a pretty prime performance --- they add visual rhythm and freewheeling party atmosphere. The ladies know what they're doing, movement-wise, managing both free-form individuality and exuberant synchrony at once. The fine art of go-go dancing was ruined, in my opinion, by the self-consciously "freestyle" arrhythmic thrashing that emerged with psychedelia, and then, later, by the highly contrived efforts to prepackage dancing feminine sexual allure through excessive coaching and wardrobery.

Update: on reflection I think I have something backwards re the dancers. If refreshed memory serves, they wouldn't have called the gals in this video "go-go dancers." I think that term applied to the dancers they started displaying in cages (yes, cages) around mid-1966, perched on pedestals flanking the bands. The classic go-go dancer would have worn a mini-skirt and calf-sheathing go-go boots like the ones first fetished by Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, in her winter 1966 hit. Then came the cages, and the acid-propelled go-go spazzery started showing up about a year after that. (This all comes from grade school memory, so I stand to be corrected by any cultural historians out there.)

Oh, okay --- double feature. Truth? Maybe not. But Beauty of a sort: