These are a few of my favorite B-sides

The first in a series in which I dig into my collection for boss flip sides

What follows is decidedly not a Holiday-themed No Such Thing As Was post. I’ll continue to half-seriously bah humbug that trend, yet I sure was happy to accept an invite from my pal and one of favorite writers Dan Epstein to his swingin’ Jagged Time Lapse Christmas Party. As requested I, along with nineteen other guests, arrived with a favorite holiday song to play. Crank up the carols, baby!

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What’s more heroic than the survival of the B-side? Ever since RCA released the first 45 rpm single in 1949, the flip side to the “plug side” has evoked the younger sibling tagging along at the party, looser, sometimes just a goof, sometimes more frankly revealing than their older bro or sis. The B-side nearly evaporated in the era of the CD single, yet even while threatened into the digital age with extinction the B-side has hung on somehow. It turns out that it never really went away, and can even claim mildly robust numbers in the current vinyl resurgence.

So here’s a handful of my favorite B-sides. (Narrowing down to five for this particular post was tough sledding.) I avoided writing about Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, and the Stones, whose B-sides were often fabulous but are also quite well known, and I limited myself to songs that never appeared on an album, save for a later compilation.

“Black Olives,” The Bad Boys (1966)

This swinging Link Wray-esque prowler from The Bad Boys, the flip to the band’s only 45, “Love,” really grooves. Members hailed from Frederick and Rockville, Maryland, near where I grew up, though I’d never heard of the band until I came across this record. The Bad Boys would metamorphose into Flavor and issue three more singles, including the fabulous “Heart-Teaser” (with its own inimitable B-side, “Yea, I’m Hip”). “Black Olives” was recorded in Louisville, Kentucky at Sambo Studio and produced by Charle Daniels—yeah, that Charlie Daniels—who played bass on the track with guitarist Demetri Callas, drummer Danny Conway, and keyboardist (and vocalist) Gary St. Clair. The song, as Callas recalled in a 2009 comment on the Chairshot to the Skull site, was always intended as the B-side. And the song’s origin story is a good one: “It took approximately ten minutes to record,” Callas admitted. “Charlie said ‘play a riff…any riff,’ and we did.”

In other words, Don’t think much, just play. The songs cranks open with that riff, a snarling Daniels/Calls line, and the rhythm enters just behind. Players trade moments in the low-beam spotlight—St. Clair’s bubbling Lowery organ solo leads to Daniels’s bass turn, a solo that proves that he knew how to move his fingers long before he made money with a fiddle—but Callas is the show-stealer, his Fender Esquire lines pushing the needle into the red and the party into an infectiously slinky and sexy mood. Of the raw sound, Callas remarked that Daniels “connected a cable from the speaker output on the Fender amp directly to a channel in the studio mixing console,” and that “no fuzztone devices were used,” that the guitar distortion/overload “was a natural occurrence.” Callas is aping ‘65/’66 Keith Richards, who’s aping his own heroes, all down the line. Turn it up.

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“Something Has Hit Me,” The Action (1967)

This B-side to “Shadows and Reflections” released in June of 1967 is an extraordinary reflection and embodiment of its heady era. (“To me the best single they made,” Paul Weller wrote in the liner notes to The Ultimate Action compilation, released in 1980.) In Rave magazine a month after the single’s release, the Action’s lead singer Reg King, who co-wrote “Something Has Hit Me” with Melody Maker writer Nick Jones, remarked on his band’s “new venture sound-wise,” acknowledging that “In the past we have concentrated more on the bass sound, but this time we are playing flower music. Flower music is soft, happy, gentle, full-of-life sunshine sounds,” adding, “This new sound is what we’ve been trying for a long time.”

Produced by George Martin, who must’ve been amazed, in his buttoned-up manner, with the “sunshine sounds” that he’d been hearing in his control rooms, “Something Has Hit Me” floats atop a knocked-out vibe of awed inspiration leavened with unease. Ecstatic, wide-eyed bowm-bowm backing vocals against a strummed acoustic guitar invite us in, and then King sings what that opening has already made clear: “Something has hit me.” He’s out of his mind, and “while I was dizzy / it’s you that I find.” What more can I say? he wonders, which feels as much as release as it does frustration. In the song’s most remarkable lines, the singer capture’s the era’s exhilarating promise of clean-slate, communal utopia: “I’m waiting for no one / come with me today.”

And yet the middle, as middles do, confounds things. Following two and-a-half bars of bliss as a piano smilingly mimics the backing vocals, a foreboding three note passage graphically drags down the song into complications, a warning duly attached. The result is one of the most haunting and powerful passages in late-60s pop music:

If you don’t know what it’s like, it surrounds you
If you’re weaker than me, it will pound you
Though I can’t get things straight, it’s confusing
Maybe it’s not too late, I’ll start using my head

Martin and his engineers bathe King and the backing vocalists in reverb, emphasizing the dark night of the soul. Following the insight in the last lime, the song resumes its cheery mood; the sun’s out again. But as with any bad trip, traces of unease linger—the song’s never the same again, and neither is the singer’s head, despite his optimism. As the backing vocals dryly insist “You don’t know what it’s like,” King sings “Something has hit me, something has bit me, I’m losing my mind,” with growing desperation. The reverb darkly expands, and so does the space between epiphany and bewilderment. As blissy pop songs go, “Something Has Hit Me” is scary as hell.

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“Babysitter,” The Ramones (1977)

I’m cheating a bit here, as Ramones fans know full well that “Babysitter” appeared on the U.K. version of the band’s second album Leave Home as a late replacement for the notorious “Carbona Not Glue.” (On the U.S. version the glue-sniffing ode was swapped out with “Sheena is a Punk Rocker.”) “Babysitter”’s only appearance in the States was as the flip side to “Do You Wanna Dance,” the final single from the band’s third album Rocket to Russia. As a United States citizen, I proudly claim the B-side. Though the Ramones released more than thirty singles in their career, there were only scattered non-album flip sides. The Ramones are best understood as an albums band. “Babysitter,” then, is unique, though utterly familiar sounding with its peak-era Da Bruddahs vibe.

“The Ramones own the fountain of youth,” Joey Ramone once declaimed. “Experiencing us is like having the fountain of youth.” Such an adolescent spirit clearly informs this B-side, credited as all Ramones songs were in the early days to the full band, but which has always sounded like a Joey song to me. Its considerable charms come from the sweetness of its mid-paced groove and from Joey’s patented blend of ironic and earnest singing, and that it’s essentially (yet) another song about blue balls but sung by a punk rock band that’s as interested in juvee weirdness as in teen romance.

Anyway, the story’s as familiar as the weather: she’s babysitting and purrs come over, it’s alright, and the next thing he knows he’s on the couch with his “special one” with the TV on, her folks gone, and their hormones blazing. I’m wondering if Dee Dee contributed to the bridge:

She went to see if the kids were asleep
She says they’re quiet expect for one little creep
We can’t start kissing and I’ll tell you why
We can’t start kissing because the kid’s a little spy

The punch line sounds like him, anyway, and in the context of the band’s songs, which have been known to traffic in adolescent paranoia, that spying brat might have metaphorically global, even sinister implications. Either way the singer’s not getting laid. Which is what makes “Babysitter” a Ramones song.

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“Hoover Factory,” Elvis Costello and The Attractions (1981)

Although credited to his full band, “Hoover Factory” was recorded by Elvis Costello alone, sitting with an acoustic guitar channeling bittersweet nostalgia. He taped the song in March of 1980, biding time in his restless fashion between album sessions for Get Happy!! and Trust. (It was eventually issued as the B-side to Trust’s “Clubland,” in 1981. Costello’s remarkable run of singles in the late 70s/early 80s featured some fantastic B-sides, including “Radio Sweetheart,” “Tiny Steps,” “Talking In The Dark,” “Heathen Town,” and “Big Tears,” which I wrote about here.) “Hoover Factory” dates to a few years earlier, “an ode to a splendid building that I used to pass on my bus route to work in the mid-70s,” Costello revealed in his liner notes to the 2003 reissue of Get Happy!! “The facade still stands today although the building now houses a supermarket.” He acknowledged that the song simply didn’t fit on any of his first few albums, and that this “solo assembly of sounds seemed to lavish even more affection on the subject of the song.”

Opening distractedly with a few seconds of white noise—an incoming daydream— “Hoover Factory” is over in all of two minutes. Yet on that small canvas Costello manages to move from a local observation to an existential argument. The singer’s on the bus and gazes during the ride at the factory “five miles out of London on the Western Avenue” that must’ve been beautiful in its early days, confidently heralding the future in Art Deco elegance. He likens the passing scenery in the streets to “scrolls and inscriptions like those of the Egyptian age,” a kind of transparency of ruins that settles over the boring bus route, shifting the singer’s mood, which clears and focuses in the bridge:

It’s not a matter of life or death
But what is? What is?
It doesn't matter if I take another breath
Who cares?

From nostalgia and wonder to decay and mortality—Costello travels far and wide in the brief “Hoover Factory.” Those last, contemplative “ahhh”s sigh philosophically and then drift away as the singer stands up. His stop’s arrived.

EDIT: I just came across this terrific interview from the Good Afternoon U.K. television show, broadcast on September 27, 1977, a couple of months after the release of Costello’s debut, My Aim is True and around the time of his bus rides past the factory. Host Mavis Nicholson asks Costello if he’s a rock singer.

“No, no, a pop singer, really,” he answers, adding dryly, “People get really worked up about art and everything, and that’s kind of why I’m a little bit skeptical about, as you’ve said, the ‘posh press’ we’ve had. The concerns of all these papers and the statesmen…they’re so self-important, you know. Those things are really not a matter of life and death. I mean, architecture and art galleries, if they all burned down tomorrow it might be a loss to the world, but it isn’t going to stop anybody breathing.” You can see the glimmer of "Hoover Factory" behind his eyes.

(And dig the reveal at the 1:20 mark.)

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“I Really Want You Right Now,” Lyres (1983)

Jeff Connolly, however history will write his peculiar, on-again, off-again career, will likely be remembered as a connoisseur of cover songs, the more obscure the better. His originals comprise a small minority of the many tunes he’s whipped into shape with various iterations of Lyres, but he’s written some killers, including “How Do You Know?”, “Buried Alive,” “Don’t Give It Up Now,” “Someone Who’ll Treat You Right Now,” “She Pays the Rent,” and of course “Help You Ann.” And the B-side to that classic is one of the best songs Connolly’s written.

Recorded in December 1981 (two years before it was released) on the same day as the A-side, “I Really Want You Right Now” featured one of Lyres’ more potent lineups, Connolly on organ and vocals, Mike Lewis on bass, Howie Ferguson on drums, and Peter Greenberg on guitar. Things begin paleolithicly: Connolly holds down a single drone-like chord on his Vox, two bars in the band vamps on the chord for a while and then adds a second, then a third, and that’s the whole terrain the song covers in its verses. Yet within those chords Connolly voices the whole range of desire, obsession, and regret. Greenberg’s magnificent solo, stretching over forty-four bars, moving from distracted to wailing, urgently voices the singer’s needs and wants when the singer runs out of words. Connolly, who’d often hit the stage with his allegedly Neo Garage band wearing a ratty t-shirt and jeans, is very much the Everyman here.

Something surprising happens in the final minute. You’d be forgiven for thinking that “I Really Want You Right Now” was recorded in mono—the sonic action is centered in the soundscape, and, hey, Connolly’s nickname is “Monoman”—until a voice enters in the right channel repeating the singer’s title phrase over and over (moving to the left channel a bit later). The effect is to graphically widen the mania of the singer’s pleas as his obsessions echo, finally, back onto himself only. It’s a knock out move, credit to the compulsions of Connolly or the smarts of producer Richard Harte or both. Whether this song attracted or freaked out his girl, I don’t know, but it sure as hell enacts something eternal and hungry. And it rocks like hell.

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See also:

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