Earworms: You Beat the Hell Outta Me by the Motors
All the thrills of punk rock plus the professionalism of pub rock
In the fall of 1978, I discovered a local 10-watt college radio station that devoted a few hours each Friday and Saturday night to playing the latest punk and New Wave records. KWUR was the student station of Washington University, but at the time, they had more slots for djs than they did students who were interested. So, some intrepid soldiers in the war against mainstream rock radio of the time would play the music nobody else anywhere in St. Louis was playing.
I lived, as the crow flies, probably 8 or so miles from Wash U, and I could pick up the station after dark. There was a lot of static, and I usually lay facefront down on my bed holding the antenna wire and constantly moving it to achieve the best reception until the wind shifted and it was time for another position. It was glorious. I discovered so many favorite records that way.
The Motors were an English band led by singer/guitarist Nick Garvey and bassis/keyboardist Andy McMaster, two former members of Ducks Deluxe. (Ducks Deluxe were a band I was fascinated by, as it also included Sean Tyla of the band Tyla Gang, and Martin Belmont of the Rumour which backed Graham Parker.) One member of the Motors, who went by the name Bram Tchaikovsky, managed after leaving them to have a bigger American hit than his previous band ever did,”Girl of My Dreams.” But that song, along with the work of the Motors, has dribbled far down the memory hole of all but the most rigorous students of late 70s underground rock.
Coming from the pub rock world of Ducks Deluxe, and being musicians who had accumulated more chops than the punk rockers who competed in the English charts at the time, albeit less than the prog rockers who were sliding out of favor, the Motors were quite simply a meat and potatoes pop/rock band. They wrote strong melodies with big hooks and played them vigorously but without aggression. Songs such as “Dancing the Night Away,” “Forget About You” and their best known hit “Airport,” once heard, are capable of jumping back into the brain at random intervals any time over the last 45 years.
I’ve never learned who the KWUR djs were that year that I discovered the station. Dave Thomas and Steve Scariano had started the tradition the year before, and those two have deservedly been celebrated for bringing this music to the airwaves first in St. Louis. But the three djs who took over for them in 1978/1979 influenced my impressionable taste for the new and exciting developments in rock’n’roll (and connected them to 50s and early 60s acts as well; it was always possible to hear an Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Beatles, or Kinks song on these shows now and then). Nobody has ever identified these people to me.
One song that jumped out at me from that mix was “You Beat the Hell Outta Me” from the Motors’ second album, Approved by the Motors. It was also the b-side of a single “Be What You Gotta Be” that wasn’t on that record, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was where the airplay came from, since there was a competition to pick up the latest import 7” records as fast as they hit the small bins in local record stores. The song was sort of a parody of punk rock, sort of an attempt to latch on to its coattails, and sort of a sequel to “Long Tall Sally” by Little Richard.
There is a scene in the Daisy and the Six mini-series which shows one member of the titular mainstream rock band being asked by another about the punk band they were seeing in some tiny club in 1977. “What is this shit?” he asks either directly or implied, I forget which. “It’s the future,” says the guy on top of the musical world. This was not what the average successful rock musician thought of punk. Most older musicians thought it was amateurish and beneath contempt.
I don’t really know what the members of the Motors thought of the bands that were roaring up the charts while their own records were holding their own but not selling in droves. But it’s clear from the sound of “You Beat the Hell Outta Me” that they at least figured they weren’t too old to play as loud and as fast as the Clash, or the Damned, or Generation X. Like fellow ex-pub rocker Nick Lowe with “Heart of the City” or the Springsteen-acolytes the Boomtown Rats with “She’s So Modern,” the Motors made a record that could appeal to those of us who wanted that power and passion while simultaneously convincing more experienced musos that they were poking a little fun at the new generation who weren’t playing with the same technical abilities as the older instrumentalists.
Garvey and Tchaikovsky set their guitars to roaring up the scale with a hard bashing introduction while drummer Rick Slaughter bounces hard on his snare, then adds bass drum quarter notes, and then thumps the tom toms before all stop on a dime. With McMaster joining in on bass, the band propels a chugging seventh-chord groove and the two singers belt out in unison, “You beat the / You beat the hell outta me / I was a hard-headed man, I could never see / Your love, your love, your love was exorcising me.” I think I was singing along loud and clear by the second half of the verse, same as the first. It’s goofy, it’s infectious, it’s exhilarating. The Motors were exactly in that punk sweet spot without being beginners learning the ropes.
“The leader of the world wants to call a summit / He’s found a little girl, thinks he’s gone and done it / Oh, oh, down the alley one night.” The second verse jumps all over the place, and it’s clear that, while on the one hand there’s a sex scandal of sorts, on the other these lyrics are aimed at politicians who put their own interests first. “Gotta leave the job, he knows he don’t believe it / She may be very young but he says “Let her leave it” / Oh, oh, down the alley one night. I admit this verse always felt like a placeholder to me, as I never learned to sing along with these lines. I wanted to get to the title hook again.
The bridge is where the Little Richard reference comes in. You’ll recall Uncle John ducked in the alley with “Long Tall Sally” when Aunt Mary was about to catch him in the act. The Motors pick up those names for the bridge: “Down the alley / She was Sally / He was Uncle John / She taught him how to live today / But then she heard him say.” This bridge slows the rhythm down a bit, the guitars get to throw down some short licks, and as the singers hod the word “say” the snare drum is smacked at a furious pace until we get back to that delightful first verse which serves as the chorus.
It's not a complicated song, but it is a thrilling one. And it’s ridiculously catchy. I don’t know why it wasn’t released as an a-side back in 1978. Sure, it was a big change from the songs they did release; it’s less melodic, much more of a chanted expression of id. It’s not pure energy, but it is a controlled release of tension every time you get to shout along with that title phrase. In my life, it’s a classic that never grows old.