5 Songs Friday June 20, 2025

I bet you don't know all these - I didn't before this week

The Satintones – “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart” 1959 single available on The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 1: 1959-1961. Yeah, Motown released some doo wop records in the early days. In fact, if you ever get faced with the trivia question “What was the first vocal group to record for Motown?” this is your answer. The Satintones released six or seven singles, with this cover of the 1935 Broadway showtune that Judy Garland made famous, though I know it best by the Move who learned it from the Coasters. . . and also the Trammps had a hit with it once. This arrangement takes about 30 seconds to get going, as the solo bass singer Robert Bateman and lead singer Vernon Williams sound better than the group as a whole. It’s always a goofy song, but it also has a way of making me smile.

The B-52s – “Hot Pants Explosion” 1992 from Good Stuff. The B-52s were soldiering on without key member Cindy Wilson, who left the band for a few years after the massive success of their previous record Cosmic Thing and the single “Love Shack.” Down a member and with pressure to produce a follow-up, the B-52s came up with an enjoyable if way less memorable record, produced with a big budget by Nile Rodgers and Don Was. I like this song more than many from the album. It’s an equal opportunity admiration of the short shorts known as hot pants, which were briefly back in vogue somewhere around this time. Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson take turns celebrating the sexual splendors revealed by this fashion, while maintaining their usual ironic distance and making it all seem cuddly and fuzzy rather than truly lustful. I guess it’s not too far away from “Love Shack” as a piece of music, but hey, follow-ups can be good, too.

Roy Wood – “Look Thru’ the Eyes of a Fool,” 1975 from Mustard. I remember in the 70s there was a concerted effort by young people to change the spelling of the word “through” to “thru,” but I’m pretty sure this song title is the only one to put an apostrophe at the end, implying a contraction from a spelling none of us have ever seen. Roy Wood was the type of guy who would do that, though. He had big hits in England as leader of the Move, he co-founded the Electric Light Orchestra, and then he had more big hits in England as a solo artist and leader of Wizzard. He is a pop music genius. His solo records were truly individual efforts – he wrote, produced, did all the vocals, and played all the instruments. This one is a typically catchy melody with lyrics that admit he’s a fool for loving the person he loves. But his reasoning is all over the place. My favorite of his complaints comes in the couplet “You get real mad when I oversleep / Or dance so closely with the friends you keep.”

Peggy Lee – “Forgive Me” 1952 single available on Lover. I recognize that a record like this, with is ultra-sweet string section wrapped around Lee’s vocal over a gentle jazz backing, with the background multi-part male & female chorus capable of singing “doo doo doo doos” as well as lyrics as if they were putting jam on white bread on the same time, is not for everybody. But I’m not everybody. I mean, first of all, Lee invests all the emotional resonance a song like this needs. It’s a plea for a lover to forget about whatever indiscretion she may have caused, and to become her sweetheart again. She doesn’t oversing, just rests in the pocket of the beats and lays out her case with a combination of ache and hope and love. So all the rest of the recording is the kind of sweetening that as I get older, I find more and more comfortable to hear. The song, by the way, was written by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager, who were also the writers of “Ain’t She Sweet” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The Proclaimers – “Wages of Sin” 2009 from Notes & Rhymes. A lot of people don’t realize that the Proclaimers never stopped making records. (Well, it’s been three years now since the last one, but I assume there will be more.) They have documented their changing interests over the years, writing about marriage and parenthood and other issues of adulthood. This song is kinda sorta about the realization of mortality. Craig and Charlie Reid herein tell us that they know they’ve been imperfect people, and that they have more sins than good deeds on the ledgers of their lives. They are hoping the wages of sin don’t get reaped today so they have time to behave better. It’s a funny sort of gospel song; in fact the last minute or more is turned into an explosive double time gospel dance. The rest of the song is punchy r&b sung by two very Scottish people.