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wrote this song with my friend and bandmate John Kargacos around 1978 in San Diego where we were playing in the band Streetlife. I can’t exactly remember who wrote what but we called it a 50-50 composition. John sang it. It was many years later, when the song was long dormant, that I got a hankering to sing it.
I thought it was a good song and I wanted to record it so it would have a place in the world. The Streetlife version was a rock affair. The song has an simple structure, like Mack the Knife, just a verse A-B pattern with four verses interspersed with instrumental verses. John took the first and third solos and I took the middle one. In that sense it was similar to a basic jazz structure—just give the soloist room to move.
I wanted to take it in a vocal jazz direction, with some vocal harmony parts that came out of the Lambert Hendricks and Ross tradition. Lenne and Eliza’s harmonies comprised two parts, the “doo-DOO-ya” structure and the two-part lyrical tracks where they came in to accent specific lines or phrases. On those parts I used extended chord forms, which you hear on words like “dad” and “three-minute tune.”
We used the backup vocal arrangements to accent the rhymes, as in “’bone and a tuba” with “all sing Aruba.”
I reimagined the song far over to the jazz side to keep our original version separate as the original arrangement that it was; that was totally John’s and my arrangement. So I minimized the lead guitar and gave the solos over to jazz piano, which were nailed by Twin Cities trumpetist and pianist Jon Pemberton. He improvised on the changes, I comped a few takes and we had it.
My walking bass anchored the rhythm section leaving room for John O’Reilly Jr. room to stretch out on the drums. By the fourth verse he was slipping in some counter-time jump figures that put me in a mind of Gene Krupa. It caught the fifties vibe so nicely and all put together it had a lot of swing.
Lyrically, the song was a bit of a romp. John and I were born in the fifties were friends since we were four, and started playing guitar together (though he punked me in a heartbeat) around age 11. He had a cool uncle who saw the world as a member of the Navy and a much older brother so we became aware of the artifacts of fifties culture at an early age—things like Mad Magazine and Japanese transistor radios and tape recorders. And I owned a series of books called the Unicorn Book of the Year for 1950-59 that must have come from a cousin or uncle. I read it diligently, especially for its lurid true crime and Hollywood scandal sections.
Decades always don’t end and begin on their decade years. Lots of decades bleed over into the next, as I maintain the 50s and 60s did. The Beatles and the British Invasion blew the fifties out of the water. But John and I sort of knew what the 50s had been like—so innocent and so not always pretty, so far in the rearview mirror. So without any forethought we just threw out some lyric riffs and they stuck.
I think we got it as right as you can get it in three minutes, but we grew up with songs like “Penny Lane” and lyricists like Donald Fagen, so there you go. I like the lyrics for their simplicity and the song for its brevity.. And I like that I can’t remember who came up with the germ of many lines. And, for the record, the original verse 3, line 3 was, “And nobody ever expected to die, no to die no” not “We’ll all live forever no never to die no.” That was me taking liberties.
I like how Lenne was able to play with phrases like “…drove an old Chevy” and “…three-minute tune.” And yes, dad didwear a crew cut. I got my hair cut at Louie’s Barber Shop in Mount Prospect once I convinced my dad to stop butchering my hair with his Sears clippers (very, very, very traumatic I can assure you). He got his hair cut there, too. That was the fifties.
As you went in there was a large black and white poster with the primary haircuts of mankind on it, and those were the choices you had: crew cut, buzz cut, flat top, flat top with fenders, and whatever was left. You picked one and if your hair could pull it off you were done. That’s the world we were writing about. And in back of the gym where the heavens were blue, well, that’s where they were blue.
