Some of you will have already noticed that the original Wall of Paul slogan, "Paul Tatara on Movies (and so forth)," now reads "Paul Tatara on Pop Culture (and so forth)." In the winter of 2007, when we launched this site, I knew I'd initially draw readers who were familiar with my CNN and Goodauthority movie coverage, so I mostly wrote about movies. But I live in the same world everyone else inhabits, and I contemplate a lot of things besides motion pictures. It was my goal, then, to eventually examine music, sports, politics, religion, firecrackers, action figures, babies, fast food, heroes, hypocrites, air conditioning, parades, cream puffs, and a slew of other topics that have come to shape my consciousness. Thus the altered, and far more accurate, slogan.Contact Paul RSS Feed
As I repeatedly made clear back in my CNN film critic days, I have no use for dumb movies. I do, however, embrace dumb rock & roll, if it’s catchy and appears to rise from a genuinely moronic heart.
I think the key difference is that a bunch of kids can get together and bang out three chords with a backbeat in one afternoon, in a musty garage, then break for sandwiches and beer. But dumb movies require months-long shooting schedules, Teamsters, caterers, and massive crews of people sweating their asses off. You can hardly explain away the absurd results by saying you were overcome with passion. Lay down a dumb rocker, in other words, and you appear charmingly unemployable. Make a dumb movie, and you’re fit to work for the government.
It makes sense that the low-rent stuff works. Rock & roll, in its purist incarnation, is primal— anger, lust, betrayal, throwing a haymaker at somebody, and sex-sex-sex. It wasn’t until Dylan came along that any of that changed, but, if you listen closely to an album like “Highway 61 Revisited,” you’ll note that even His Bobness was more or less preoccupied with these very themes. It’s just that he read a lot and ate the right amphetamines.
The great thing about Sixties radio, though, was that there was room for everybody from spokesmen for a generation to remedial keyboard players on a budget. And that brings us to the greatest dumb rock & roll song of all time. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...“96 Tears,” by ? and the Mysterians.
? (pronounced “Question Mark”) was and is a wiggy cat from either Mars or Bay City, Michigan (more on that later) who actually had his name legally changed to a punctuation mark when he began fronting the Mysterians. That’s him wearing the shades, as he poses with his band mates beside the carport of their palatial estate.
You might rightfully wonder why Question Mark didn’t opt to christen himself !, but all you have to do is listen to “96 Tears” to understand. The tune raises far more questions than it answers, the pivotal ones being, “Are these guys for real?” and “Why don’t I think this is terrible?”
This must have been the prevailing sentiment, because “96 Tears” managed to reach number one on the U.S. charts in 1966, right around the time the Beatles were releasing “Revolver.” The Beatles are the band we really remember, though, because they had better management.
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Lyrically, “96 Tears” makes “Louie Louie” sound like a recently discovered passage by Yeats. In a nutshell, the protagonist is hoping to see his ex-girlfriend cry “too many teardrops," and, in an apparent idiot savant moment, he’s managed to calculate the exact number of drops that will fall. I’m guessing 48 plunked from each eye, unless the chick's a cyclops, which, given the caveman-like urgency of the tune, is completely possible. Either way, four less than 100 tears will be caught in the gravity.
I’ve always been particularly fascinated by the song’s more or less spoken - you couldn’t really call it “singing” - bridge. If I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it 500 times, and I still couldn’t tell you exactly what thought is being conveyed here:
And when the sun comes up I’ll be on top You’ll be right down there Lookin’ up And I might wave, ”Come up here” But I don’t see you wavin’ now I’m way down here, wonderin’ How I’m gonna get to you But I know now I’ll just cry, cry I’ll just cry
I’d cry, too, man. Get back to me when things coalesce.
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The hook to “96 Tears,” of course, is a swirling organ figure that sounds like a funky drunk guy with a couple piano lessons under his belt working out on a calliope. This is a Vox organ, the kind played on “96 Tears”:
It says a lot about this dinky little instrument that it can lift a tune as primitive as “96 Tears” to the pop culture stratosphere while making the Doors (Ray Manzarek played one, too) sound like a bunch of self-absorbed, pretentious twats. One way or the other, once you hear it, you never forget it. Elvis Costello even co-opted its supreme cheesiness whole cloth, for his 1978 conniption-fit masterpiece, “This Year’s Model.” Interestingly, Costello dropped the Vox a couple albums later, and eventually started sounding like a self-absorbed, pretentious twat. So, you never know.
Oh yeah! Question Mark’s place of birth. Rudimentary research reveals that his real name is Rudy Martinez, and he’s from Michigan. But he’s forever insisted that he’s from Mars, and that, in a past life, he lived among the dinosaurs. If it weren’t for the facts, I’d have every reason to believe him.
Download: “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians. Album: “Best of ? and the Mysterians: Cameo Parkway 1966-1967” (song recorded in 1966).
During my time as a radio DJ, I once came across a blurb about this song in a Billboard Magazine reference book. It said that Billboard considered this to be the first punk rock song ever on the charts. Your mileage may vary.
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CDjockey:
During my time as a radio DJ, I once came across a blurb about this song in a Billboard Magazine reference book. It said that Billboard considered this to be the first punk rock song ever on the charts. Your mileage may vary.