17 “Lost” Hits of 1965

Jeff Tamarkin on November 6, 2015

For many baby boomers, 2015 has served as something of a reality check as we’ve celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the formation of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and several other bands that would later become game-changers. But in 1965, the 45 r.p.m. single was still where it was at—at least until the release of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album in December. In fact, it was one of the greatest years ever for hit singles. For starters, there are these: “Satisfaction,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Yesterday,” “The Sounds of Silence” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You could easily write a book on the impact of any one of those songs!

Want more ammunition? How about “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” the Phil Spector-produced Righteous Brothers masterpiece that, in 1999, BMI named the most played song of all time on radio and TV? There are plenty of other great songs from that year: From the Motown machine, there were the Temptations’ “My Girl,” the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears” and the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself.” How about the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” and “Help Me, Rhonda,” James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and the Yardbirds’ first, “For Your Love”? Even the year’s biggest-selling hit, “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, remains, despite its inherent silliness, something of a classic.

But those mega-tunes only scratched the surface. There were dozens of other gifts to pop history that found their way to record buyers that year—some top 10s that have largely been forgotten and others that didn’t make that huge a dent at the time but should have. Here are 17 of them.

1) Sandie Shaw—“Girl Don’t Come”

When David Johansen of the New York Dolls launched his first solo tour in 1978, some astute audience members at his gig at New York’s Bottom Line noticed a photo of a sexy young brunette (sort of resembling a proto-Chrissie Hynde) perched on one of the amplifiers. Her real name was Sandra Goodrich but she was known professionally as Sandie Shaw. In the mid-’60s she’d been—along with Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Petula Clark and a few others—one of the reigning female stars in the U.K. In America her luck wasn’t as great. Signed to the Frank Sinatra-founded Reprise label in the U.S. she’d just missed the top 50 in 1964 with her classy cover of Bacharach-David’s “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” and this, her followup, didn’t fare much better. But “Girl Don’t Come,” written by Chris Andrews, is a stunningly framed, utterly compelling piece of music. In little more than two minutes, Shaw, to a shuffling rhythm straddling waltz and bossa nova, the melody punctuated by emotionally swirling choruses, regales the listener with a sorrowful tale of the humiliating pain of being stood up. “You wanna see her, oh, you wanna see her, oh, yeah, but you wait, you wait and wait, girl don’t come,” she sings, in the third person (no one in their right mind would stand up Sandie!), to the dejected male half of the date (it’s the girl that “don’t come,” remember). Shaw’s delivery is so sympathetic that you end up hoping that she’ll stand in for the MIA snob and give the guy a date he’ll remember, but we never do find out. As for Johansen, he loved Shaw enough to include a snippet of the song on the live album he ultimately released from those NYC gigs. Shaw was later re-discovered by a young British fellow named Morrissey, whose band the Smiths cut a hit track with her in 1984 called “Hand in Glove.” Today, although she remains active in political and social causes, Shaw is apparently retired from music, never having done a proper tour of the United States.

2) Adam Faith—“It’s Alright”

Adam Faith (1940-2003, nee Terence Nelhams-Wright) was virtually unknown in the U.S. but in his native Britain he was, for a short while, hot stuff, both as an actor and as one of a handful of pompadoured pre-Beatles pop stars who churned out a string of largely innocuous top 10 singles beginning in 1959. Oddly, “It’s Alright” wasn’t even released as a single at home, but in the U.S. it found its way to the independent Amy label and in early ’65 piqued interest at just enough radio stations to provoke a climb to the number 31 position in Billboard. The song is utterly uncharacteristic of Faith’s other, more sedate, work, but what a killer! Backed by his regular band the Roulettes (whose members Bob Henrit and Russ Ballard later joined Unit 4 + 2 and then Argent), Faith turned into a raging, growling rocker for this tune. It starts off almost drearily, Faith droning, “Well, if you want me it’s alright” a few times over a lone bluesy harmonica. Then, suddenly, without warning, Faith transforms into a maniacally obsessed demon with one thing on his mind: the lyrics throughout the record almost never deviate from variations on the repeated “If you want me, it’s alright” refrain, save for a few breaks to tell the recipient of this plea that she’s welcome to call him anytime and that he wouldn’t mind being held real tight. Just how does he feel about this girl though, really? This is our only clue and it’s slyly mysterious at that: “I really, really love you a lot, dear, really love you, so what dear, if you want me it’s alright.” So what? We really wouldn’t blame her for thinking maybe Adam—who only scored once more in the States, with a song that stalled at #97—was a wee bit too mercurial and intense to get involved with.

3) Sir Douglas Quintet—“She’s About a Mover”

They took a British-sounding name in order to appeal to the teenybopper set, and then the Sir Douglas Quintet went about creating one of the all-time great Texas rock classics. Doug Sahm was, at 23 when he formed the band, already a veteran within the state’s South Central region, having performed on stage and on the radio, largely in the country music field, since he was 5 years old (at 11, in 1952, he shared a stage with Hank Williams just before the country giant died). By ’64 though, with the British Invasion sweeping so much homegrown American music aside, multi-instrumentalist and singer Sahm decided to grab a piece of the action and formed a group—with Vox Continental organist Augie Meyers, bassist Jack Barber, horn man and keyboardist Frank Morin and drummer Johnny Perez—with the hope of fooling buyers into thinking they were English. Under the guidance of producer Huey P. Meaux, the Quintet released Sahm’s “She’s About a Mover” on Tribe Records, and although it bore almost nothing in common with the latest Brit imports—it fused a basic chugging Tex-Mex rhythm with simple blues changes—the song, with Sahm on lead vocals, soared to number 13 in the spring of 1965. Although the title phrase understandably caused some head scratching (what exactly did they mean by “about a mover”?), the danceable beat and the much less ambiguous lyrics (“Well, she strolled on up to me, and said, ‘Hey, big boy, what’s your name?’ Hey, hey”) caught on with the nation’s teens. The SDQ, with slightly altered lineup, returned to the singles chart three more times, most notably with 1969’s “Mendocino.” Sahm went on to enjoy an amazingly prolific solo career, with Meyers joining him on many of his subsequent ventures, most famously the Texas Tornados, an Americana supergroup that reigned from 1989 until Sahm’s death a decade later.

4) The Zombies—“Tell Her No”

Their first hit, 1964’s “She’s Not There,” made it immediately obvious that the Zombies were not like other British Invasion bands. For starters, their lead instrument was Rod Argent’s electric piano, not a guitar—his solo on the record was intricate, jazzy and technically flawless, and when combined with the breathy, sensuous lead vocal of Colin Blunstone, it gave the quintet (rounded out by guitarist Paul Atkinson, bassist Chris White and drummer Hugh Grundy) a refinement absent from most of their contemporaries’ music. A few months after their debut, the Zombies returned with another Argent-penned single on the Parrot label, “Tell Her No,” which traded in much of the complex arrangement of “She’s Not There” for a tighter rhythm, hookier melody and syncopated chorus. There really wasn’t much to it—in place of the first hit’s lyrical ambiguity was a cautionary tale (“if she tempts you with her charms,” stay away—she’s bad news), its titular refrain repeated ad infinitum (to be exact, the word “no” is sung 21 consecutive times in the chorus, just to make sure you got the message). Midway, the band breaks away and revs it up. “I know she’s the kind of girl who’d throw my love away,” Blunstone roars in a keening voice, “but I still love her so don’t hurt me now, don’t hurt me now.” All of this is set to a clever combination of major and minor chords, Argent repeating the same piano phrase in a hypnotic way that grabbed listeners, who sent it to number 6 on the chart (four points lower than “She’s Not There”). The Zombies would return one final time, with “Time of the Season,” from their album Odessey and Oracle, released in 1969—two years after they’d already split. Ignored at the time, O&O is now considered one of the great rock albums of all time. And Argent and Blunstone are still at it—since the ’90s, they’ve reunited several times and continue to create excellent music together. As this is being written, they’re currently on tour, perform Odessey & Oracle in its entirety, along with music from their new album, Still Got That Hunger, which recently became their first album to hit the Billboard charts since 1969.

5) Fontella Bass—“Rescue Me”

In the first 15 seconds, before Fontella Bass even opens her mouth, “Rescue Me” has already stopped you in your tracks with a driving bass line by Louis Satterfield and crackling drums played by one Maurice White, who would, several years later, find his way to massive success with a little band he put together called Earth, Wind and Fire. That formidable rhythm section was, for now, part of a virtuosic studio team at Chicago’s Chess Records, which was in sore need of some hits by 1965, long after its peak as one of the world’s greatest blues and early rock and roll labels, home to such American music legends as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Bass was no kid—at 25 the St. Louis-born singer had already logged a respectable number of years on the R&B and gospel circuits, most notably with the band of blues great Little Milton. An audition for Chess landed Bass a deal, and, on the company’s Checker imprint, she’d already scored a couple of chart hits in 1965 when an impromptu jam during some studio downtime led to what would become “Rescue Me.” Credited to producers/writers Carl Smith and Raynard Miner, the recording took shape after arranger Phil Wright and producer Billy Davis joined the club. (Bass later claimed to have co-written the lyrics, but, typical of the day, went uncredited.) At the session, Bass gave it her soulful all, backed by Chess’ in-house musicians (one of the guitarists on this record, Pete Cosey, would later become a key component of Miles’ Davis’ fusion-era lineup) and singer Minnie Riperton (later an R&B star in her own right). It’s a tour-de-force performance, packed with punchy horns and a sexy outro that leaves Bass “um-hmm”-ing to herself with only Satterfield’s bass offering support. The song’s sentiment isn’t complicated: “Rescue me, take me in your arms, rescue me, I want your tender charm, ’cause I’m lonely and I’m blue, I need you and your love too, come on and rescue me,” Bass sang. But it wasn’t the words themselves, or her Aretha-level vocal delivery (Franklin, in fact, later covered it), or even that all-star backing crew that made “Rescue Me” a number 4 hit in the fall of ’65; it was all of it, the entire package. It was ’60s dancefloor soul personified; to this day it still sounds electrifying and contemporary. Fontella Bass later married jazz musician Lester Bowie and tried her hand at jazz, gospel and soul recordings but she never again reached this level of fame. She died in 2012 at age 72.

6) Them—“Here Comes the Night”

To most American record-buying kids in the mid-’60s, “Gloria” was a rockin’ little top 10 record by a group out of Chicago called the Shadows of Knight. Few who bought it in 1966 had ever heard the original the previous year by some northern Irish quintet with the curious name Them, whose version crashed at number 93 in the States. Fewer still had probably given any consideration at all to the author credit on either version, which simply said Morrison. Over in the U.K., however, rock and roll fans were already hip to Them and their diminutive, later-to-be-legendary frontman, George Ivan Morrison, a.k.a. Van, who possessed a blues-informed voice as startlingly pure as Mick Jagger’s or Eric Burdon’s. Strangely, “Gloria” was a non-starter there, relegated to the B-side of an old blues standard, “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” which made the British top 10 in early ’65. For their followup, Them chose to cut “Here Comes the Night,” which wasn’t penned by Morrison but rather the aforementioned Bert Berns, an American songwriter and record producer who’d discovered the band during a U.K. visit in 1964 and offered his song and his services. “Here Comes the Night” had already been released by the singer Lulu a few months before Them’s version hit the market but had topped out at number 50, clearing the way for Them to give it a shot. Theirs took, ultimately making it all the way to number 2 in Britain on the Decca label and number 24 in the U.S., on Parrot Records. Typical of the times, the members of Them didn’t even play on their own recording—instead, Berns used studio musicians, including a young upstart guitarist named Jimmy Page, whose weighty, stinging chords and skippy rhythms provided a perfect complement to Morrison’s clenched-teeth tough but subtly vulnerable vocal, filled with tension and release. The song itself ? Little more than another what-are-you-doing-with-that-bum-instead-of-me tearjerker, but a classic nonetheless—and the real career launcher for one of the most significant artists of our time.

7) Roy Head—“Treat Her Right”

“Treat Her Right” is like a million other uptempo soul vamps based on traditional blues changes—except that it’s not. For starters, there’s the opening half-minute: lead guitar, crisp unison horns and a take-no-prisoners rhythm section holding court as the lead singer sets the scene. But that singer, Texan Roy Head, is in no hurry to do any singing—like the rest of us, he’s having too much fun grooving to his band, the Traits. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, yeah, my man,” he says in a cool and sly voice. “Alright! Hey! Aw, you lookin’ good, baby!” That disposed of, he gets down to business: “I wanna tell you a story every man oughta know,” he continues. “If you want a little lovin’, you gotta start real slow/She’s gonna love you tonight now, if you just treat her right now.” And so it goes. It’s a life lesson, told by one who obviously knows of what he speaks. Written by Head and bassist Gene Kurtz, the track was recorded in Houston at Gold Star Studios and released on Don Robey’s Back Beat label, which promoted it till it reached number 2, kept out of the top spot only by the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” That latter song may be the most recorded of all time, but “Treat Her Right” has also had a good run, covered live or on record by everyone from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, Sammy Davis Jr. to Mae West. Take that, Paul McCartney! As for Roy Head, as of today he’s 74 and still at it, and still a showman to be reckoned with.

8) Mel Carter—“Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me”

Romantic ballads have always been around and will never go away, and that was so even at the height of the ’60s rock era. But few have ever been quite as unabashedly sexy as this one, cut in early 1965 for Imperial Records by the Cincinnati-born singer/actor Mel Carter. The song, written by Harry Noble (and bearing no relation whatsoever to U2’s “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” other than the lifted title), had been a hit for the largely forgotten Karen Chandler in 1953, in a comparatively orchestral big band arrangement conducted by Jack Pleis. Carter took it to another level, maintaining the orchestral setting, adding backup vocal and basic rock-soul instrumentation and imbuing the lyric with off-the-charts drama and sensuality. Noble’s lyric is inherently poetic and dreamy but it really reaches for the stars in the third verse: “They told me be sensible with your new love, don’t be fooled, thinking this is the last you’ll find,” Carter sings with appropriate caution. “But they never stood in the dark with you, love, when you take me in your arms and drive me slowly out of my mind.” That last bit, sung with bursting erotic desire by Mel Carter, who at 76 is apparently still performing, has to be a contender for the single most impassioned line ever put down on record, and that’s saying something.

9) The Fortunes—“You’ve Got Your Troubles”

By any measure, the Fortunes, from Birmingham, England, were not one of the top-tier groups of the British Invasion. But they did manage to place half a dozen chart hits in the U.S. and five at home, of which this top 10 single was their first and finest. They were, primarily, a vocal group, singing in harmony more often than not, and in fact every line of “You’ve Got Your Troubles,” save one, is rendered in close three-part harmony. It’s that one line, however, that jumps out and makes the song memorable. For the first two-and-a-half minutes, the group faithfully relays Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook’s sorry story of two sad-sack guys who’ve both lost their loves. “I see that worried look upon your face,” sings the first love-loser, only to be interrupted by love-loser number two, who doesn’t want to hear it: “You’ve got your troubles, I’ve got mine,” he offers. He then proceeds to relate how it was until one day it wasn’t: “She used to love me, that I know, and it don’t seem so long ago, that we were walking, that we were talking, the way that lovers do.” This goes on and on for a while, to a half-cheerier-than-it-should-be, half-melancholy folk-rock-ish melody arranged by Les Reed and punctuated by mournful trumpet and plucked guitar. Then, out of nowhere, that single solo vocal line breaks out, bassist Rod Allen stepping up to the plate: “It must seem to you, my friend, that I ain’t got no pity for you,” he sings, “well, that ain’t true, you see I lost my lost my lost my little girl too.” It only lasts a few seconds, those couple of lines, and then he’s gone back into the harmony pool, but the line sure does touch the heart and make us feel for the poor fellow. “You’ve Got Your Troubles” was later covered by a variety of artists from Brenda Lee to Neil Diamond, and the Fortunes, undergoing numerous lineup shifts along the way, remain active today. They returned to the U.S. charts notably with “Here It Comes Again” later in’65, and a full six years later with “Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again.” The true success story here, though, were songwriters Greenaway and Cook, whose many subsequent hit compositions included the New Seekers’ “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” and the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.”

10) Jr. Walker & the All Stars—“Shotgun”

Sure, it’s easy to rave about Motown. This was, after all, the hit factory that produced dozens of timeless chart-toppers by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations and so many others. But often lost in that shuffle are Jr. Walker & the All Stars, who churned out a string of proto-funky floor-shakers beginning with this one in early ’65. Walker was born Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. in Arkansas in 1931, which made him considerably older than most of the label’s other mainstay artists. But his age also gave him some serious experience, and he was a killer saxophonist with a simultaneous streetwise and smooth style by the time Berry Gordy picked him and his group up. “Shotgun,” written by Walker and produced by Gordy, probably makes more out of a single chord (an A-flat 7^th) than any other record in history, and it didn’t hurt that Gordy used some of his top studio musicians, including bassist James Jamerson (and possibly drummer Benny Benjamin, although there are no confirmed studio logs), on the session. “Shotgun” shot up to number 4 on Motown’s Soul subsidiary and was followed by such other R&B tunes—generally grittier in sound than was typical for Motown at that time—as “(I’m a) Roadrunner” and “Pucker Up Buttercup.” Walker enjoyed one more top 10, “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love),” in 1969, then faded from the charts by the ’70s with Motown’s move to L.A. He died of cancer in 1995.

11) The Shangri-Las—“I Can Never Go Home Anymore”

They were the darlings of Cambria Heights, Queens, a working-class neighborhood in outer New York City that wasn’t exactly known for producing hitmakers. But for a few years, they defied those odds several times over, beginning with “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)” and, just a couple of months later in the fall of 1964, the number 1 “Leader of the Pack,” as iconic a girl group record as the world has ever known. The Shangri-Las were originally two pairs of sisters, lead singer Mary (all of 15 when they signed with Red Bird Records) and Betty Weiss and identical twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser. Aligned with producer George “Shadow” Morton, the Shangri-Las, looking like the tough, gum-chewing, wisecracking girls at school no one wanted to mess with, appealed to both teenaged girls and boys with their melodramatic sagas and real-life language (“When I say I’m in love, you’d best believe I’m in love, l-u-v,” began their timeless “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”). By the time they got around to “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” in the fall of ’65, the Shangs’ fortunes had already begun to wane but this Shadow Morton tune was strong enough to carry them to the top 10 one final time. Like many of their songs, it takes teen angst to a new level, Mary proclaiming at the get-go that if her annoying mom doesn’t leave her alone, she’s going to run away. Don’t do it, caution her friends, because there’s no turning back, but Mary doesn’t listen and … let’s just say it doesn’t end well: “Don’t do to your mom what I did to mine, she grew so lonely in the end, angels picked her for a friend.” And, as the song tells us at the very end, “That’s called sad.”

12) Joe Tex—“Hold What You’ve Got”

Joseph Arlington Jr. was born in Rogers, Texas, and as Joe Tex, he became one of the most successful and acclaimed R&B singers of the ’60s and early ’70s. Most of his hits, exemplified by the ass-kicking “Show Me” and the quasi-hilarious “Skinny Legs and All,” were uptempo hard soul or, later on, funk and disco—who could forget “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)”? But his very first chart hit, on the Atlantic-distributed Dial Records (where he remained for most of his career), was a rather tender ballad that gave little indication that Tex had the makings of a fiery showman. He’d been around for a while by that time, signed initially to King Records in the mid-’50s and then other labels, but he’d had no luck gaining a foothold—he’d reportedly released 30 singles already, to no recognition worth getting excited about. “Hold What You’ve Got,” written by Tex and recorded at the legendary Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, had something different, though: two spoken-word sections in which Tex lectured first the boys, and then the girls (“Ha, ha, listen girls, this goes for you, too”) not to lose their good thing. It was a simple enough message—hold on to what you’ve got—and it caught on. So too, did Joe Tex, who quickly showed his diversity and became one of the great soul men of his era. Tex died in 1982.

13) Paul Revere and the Raiders—“Steppin’ Out”

Most folks in America first saw Paul Revere and the Raiders on TV’s Where the Action Is or Hullabaloo. Or they heard them when the quintet broke through in late 1965 with “Just Like Me” or, the following spring, when they hit the top 5 with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s anti-drugs anthem “Kicks.” But by that time the Raiders had already been kicking around for a good seven years, having formed in Idaho when restaurant owner/keyboardist Paul Revere (real name: Paul Revere Dick) met wannabe vocalist Mark Lindsay and they agreed to form a band. By the early ’60s they’d become popular around the Pacific Northwest playing a brand of R&B-inflected garage rock, and the group—whose classic mid-’60s lineup included Revere, Lindsay, guitarist Drake Levin, bassist Phil “Fang” Volk and drummer Mike “Smitty” Smith—had released a handful of singles, only one of which, 1961’s “Like Long Hair,” had made the charts. (Another single, their version of “Louie Louie,” may or may not have predated the Kingsmen’s, but the latter had the major smash with it.) It took a few smart moves until the Raiders found their way to the top rung of American rock and roll: first, their decision to don silly but memorable Revolutionary War costumes and, second, their signing to Columbia Records. The label nurtured the group, and a regular gig on the Dick Clark vehicle Where the Action Is turned them into a household name. “Steppin Out,” co-written by Lindsay and Revere, and produced by Terry Melcher, was released by Columbia in the early fall of ’65, and although it didn’t become a major chart hit (it reached number 46 in Billboard), its stomping beat, finger-wagging have-you-been-cheating-on-me? lyrics and, especially, Lindsay’s hard-charging vocal, served notice that this was a band to watch out for.

14) The McCoys—“Fever”

What an unlikely choice for a rock cover—or maybe not. “Fever” was written in 1956 by Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell (under the pseudonym John Davenport) and was turned into a fair-sized hit that year on King Records for Little Willie John, an R&B singer out of Arkansas. But his version, great as it was, was eclipsed by Peggy Lee’s cover two years later. The Caucasian Lee had long had an ear for great black music and her sultry, finger-snapping take on “Fever” caught on big, making it into the top 10 and becoming the star performer’s signature hit. Others covered it as well, including Elvis Presley, but it was the McCoys who gave it yet another life with their 1965 turn. With members from both Indiana and Ohio—the latter including two brothers, drummer Randy and guitarist Rick Zehringer—the McCoys had been around since 1962 but didn’t find their way to national success until signing with Bert Berns’ Bang Records in 1965. They attracted immediate national love there with “Hang on Sloopy,” written by Berns (under his sometime pseudonym Bert Russell) and Wes Farrell and recorded originally the year before by the R&B group the Vibrations, as “My Girl Sloopy.” The McCoys gave the song a pronounced, mid-tempo progressive beat and a nothing-held-back chorus and went straight to number 1 with their version (later curiously named the state song of Ohio), but what to do for a followup? Easy—take another old song, strip it down to a couple of verses and a chorus, give it an almost identical rhythm and arrangement and see what happens. It worked—“Fever” too took off, climbing to number 7 in Billboard and giving the McCoys their second big hit of the year. It would also be their last, ever—although the McCoys did place several other singles on the charts, none came close to matching the performance of those first two. No worries for them though—both Zehringer brothers and bassist Randy Hobbs teamed up with guitar superstar Johnny Winter in 1970 and became the “And” part of his new group Johnny Winter And. Oh, and Rick Zehringer? He changed his last name to Derringer and is still going strong today at age 68.

15) Roy Orbison—“Ride Away”

Nearly a year after his biggest hit, “Oh, Pretty Woman,” first entered the Billboard chart, the Sun Records veteran—who’d left rockabilly behind four years ago to apply his quasi-operatic tenor to a string of mega-successes at Monument—returned with this midtempo tale of heartbreak. Like the protagonist of Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” Roy, in his typically dramatic manner, longs to hit the road. Unappreciated, in need of something greater, he sings, “I’ll ride the highway, I’m going my way, I’ll leave a story untold.” The single stalled at number 25, his last to make it that high until 1989, and these days it’s providing the soundtrack for a GEICO commercial that inexplicably ties it to a “free-range chicken” on the road. It deserves better.

16) Dixie Cups—“Iko Iko”

A lot of history here, and almost none of it suggesting that “Iko Iko” would some day become a hit for the girl group best known for their number 1 smash “Chapel of Love.” To fully grasp the cultural significance of “Iko Iko,” it probably helps to know a little something about the New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indians, “tribes” that attire themselves in elaborate Native American-inspired costumes that can often take a full year to design and sew, and then parade through the city’s streets proudly on various occasions. The tribes each chant and sing and some of their more popular songs have become embedded into New Orleans’ cultural history. “Iko Iko” is one of those songs. Like much of the music of the Mardi Gras Indians, its origin is somewhat murky but it’s generally accepted that it started life as “Jock-a-Mo,” written in 1953 by James “Sugar Boy” Crawford and recorded by him as Sugar Boy and his Cane Cutters. Not much happened with it then, and it wasn’t until the Dixie Cups—New Orleanian sisters Barbara Ann and Rose Lee Hawkins and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson—that the song found its way to the popular music lexicon. The trio, signed to Red Bird Records—the vanity label formed by songwriters/producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and record man George Goldner—had already become stars via “Chapel of Love” and the followup “People Say” in 1964 and were goofing around in a New York studio when they began getting down with “Iko Iko” without prompting. Singing it a cappella with only an aluminum chair, a studio ashtray and a Coke bottle as percussion, the girls’ rhythmically mesmerizing and lyrically mysterious tune (“My flag boy and your flag boy were sittin’ by the fire/My flag boy told your flag boy I’m gonna set your flag on fire”) was captured on tape by their producers. The studio mavens added minimal rhythm and some backup vocals and released “Iko Iko” in the spring of ’65. Somehow it caught on, making it all the way up to number 20, the Dixie Cups’ final chart entry. (It was later the subject of authorship court battles but that’s another story.) Many others have since recorded it, notably Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, Cyndi Lauper and the Grateful Dead, and it’s become something of a performance staple in New Orleans.

17. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames—“Yeh, Yeh”

Like many other British male rockers of the early ’60s—Billy Fury, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, etc.—Georgie Fame started life with a more mundane name, Clive Powell. Unlike those other rechristened pinup boys, though, Fame—a skilled pianist and organist who wore his jazz and blues influences on his sleeve—had no interest in being a pop star; his debut album, recorded in the fall of 1963, was in fact called Rhythm And Blues at the Flamingo. Due to that purist approach, Fame wasn’t finding much success. Then he stumbled upon “Yeh, Yeh,” a rhythmically addictive Latin-tinged tune written by Rodgers Grant and Pat Patrick, with lyrics added by Jon Hendricks of the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Originally recorded by Afro-Cuban great Mongo Santamaria, Fame put a drawling, Mose Allison-like vocal to his recording—a simple tale of lights-low/hi-fi-high romance—which featured his group the Blue Flames. Its soulful come-hither sound and tension-and-release pacing caught the ear of the British public first and then crossed over to the U.S. in early ’65, released here on the Imperial label. It only reached number 21 and although Fame never found true fame, he eventually made the top 10 with “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” three years later. Still active at age 72, Fame has served as a member of Van Morrison’s band, worked with the Stones’ Bill Wyman and, most recently, collaborated with jazz star Diana Krall on her own cover of “Yeh, Yeh.”