I think I've smoked about three cigarettes in my life, and each time was to impress a girl. The same girl. I suppose I kind of liked the buzz, but not enough (thankfully) to become addicted or have any desire to spend any of my own hard-earned cash on the things. How many fewer CDs would have I have been able to afford, if I'd developed a habit? How many comics would I not have been able to buy?
My dad smoked cigars when I was a kid, and I always loved the smell of them. As he got older, and had less money, he switched to a pipe and tobacco. I've probably mentioned this before, but one day in his early 60s, a doctor told him, "you keep smoking that pipe and you won't be here in ten years time". So my dad quit, cold turkey, and lived another 30 years... although arguably some damage had already been done, and he struggled with emphysema and other bronchial disorders, and (old age aside), those were probably what got him in the end.
My Mum only smoked the occasional cigarette, at parties. Whenever I saw her with one in her hand, I became upset. I grew up watching some pretty graphic smoking ads on TV... from an early age, I was pretty well indoctrinated against fags... unless I thought I might use one to get a girl to like me.
It's hard to believe now just how much the smell of cigarette smoke used to be everywhere when we were teenagers... and how rare it is to smell them these days. It's all bloody vapes with the kids these days. Horrible things, with their claggy, artificial scents. Makes me feel a certain nostalgia for fag smoke... and definitely for cigars.
This week, ten songs for Little Johns everywhere. Special mention to The Tallest Man On Earth, and Long Tall Sally, who had her moment in My Top Ten Sally Songs.
Liz Phair can indeed be a complicated communicator, but she couldn't possibly be any more scary even if she was a Big Tall Man. I like the talky style of this one.
I was very much into Ben Lee around the time he released this, as part of his third album, Breathing Tornados, back in 1998. Not heard a lot from him since, although he's still at it, by all accounts.
Right, the chemistry is right This boy has reached his height This feeling just goes on and on, and on and on From strength to strength I'm ten feet long
Andy lets Colin do the heavy lifting on this one, released as a single in the USA because it was as close as XTC got to a "West Coast" vibe.
Growing up in Hicksville, New York, and being a bit of a short-arse as a teenager led Billy Joel to take up boxing to defend himself. He became quite successful on the amateur circuit until his nose was broken and he decided to concentrate on his piano playing instead. He became a bigger man that way...
And so in my small way I'm a big man on Mulberry street I don't mean all day Only at night when I'm light on my feet
I was a huge Joel fan as a teenager (imagine how cool that made me!) and I also loved the TV show Moonlighting. So I was like a pig in clover when the two came together...
Six foot six He stood on the ground He weighed 235 pounds But I saw that giant of a man brought down by A thing called love
This is a song I remember Radio 2 playing when I was a kid but despite it being a biggish hit on both sides of the Atlantic, it doesn't often feature on Greatest Hit collections, so I had to hunt down the album of the same name - released in 1972, the year of my birth - to get it in my collection. A good move this, because the rest of the album is pretty cool too.
A Thing Called Love was written by Jerry Reed Hubbard who also gave Elvis Guitar Man and recorded the theme to Smokey & The Bandit... in which he appeared as Cledus Snow.
This early Human League single (from 1979, folks!) apparently deals with Phil Oakey's boundless ambition to become a pop superstar. Arguably, while the Human League would record far better pop songs (realising Oakey's ambition), they would sacrifice a little of the quirkiness and fun heard on this early track in the process.
With concentration My size increased And now I'm fourteen stories high At least!! Empire state human Just a bored kid I'll go to Egypt to be A pyramid...
Based on one of Jim Croce's old army "buddies", this song deals with a guy who's always on the lookout for trouble.
All the downtown ladies called him 'Treetop Lover' All the men just called him 'Sir'
But
no matter how big you are, or how bad you are (even if you're "meaner
than a junkyard dog"), there's always someone bigger and badder... and
by the end of the song, Leroy looks "like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple
of pieces gone".
Bad, Bad Leroy Brown was a US Number
One - Croce's last before his tragic death in a plane crash in 1973. The
song would later be covered by Frank Sinatra, as well as inspiring
Freddie Mercury to write Queen's Bring Back That Leroy Brown and Loretta Lynn to pen Mrs. Leroy Brown. There's even a couple of wrestlers who took their name from this song: Bad Leroy Brown & Junkyard Dog.
1. Jimmy Dean - Big Bad John
I've loved this song since I was a kid when Terry Wogan used to play it. This legendary giant, who was "six foot six and weighed two forty five" (ten pounds heavier than Cash's big bloke) was the strong silent type at the mine where he worked, although "everybody knew you didn't give no lip to Big John". Then one day a timber cracked and all the miners thought "they'd breathed their last... 'cept John". Some say the heroic measures he took to hold up those joists till all his fellow miners escaped were modelled on the Ancient Greek tale of Polydamas of Skotoussa, though something tells me that might be crediting Jimmy Dean with a little too much classical learnin'.
I learnt a couple of surprising things about Big Bad John while researching this post. First, about Jimmy Dean himself, who I always pictured as a big, bad-ass Johnny Cash type. Not so...
Apparently, he's most famous in the U.S. for his sausage: Jimmy Dean Sausages, a successful brand he founded in the late 50s.
But most surprising of all were the sequels. Firstly The Cajun Queen, in which Big John's ex-girlfriend arrives in town, finds his body, and resurrects him with the kiss of life. Like all bad sequels which destroy the integrity of the original movie, we can choose to pretend it never happened...
Except, then comes the third installment, Little Bitty Big John, in which John's son discovers what his father got up to down that mine.
And if that wasn't enough, there's My Big John by Dottie West, told from the perspective of John's Cajun Queen... wisely ignoring both previous sequels.
MGMT imagine being rock stars in a song inspired by their recently deceased preying mantis. You can't make it up, can you? Hilarious lyrics and the video is like some kind of Dali-esque nightmare.
We'll choke on our own vomit and the will be the end We were fated to pretend
Famously the song that caused lead singer Donita Sparks to take her pants off while performing live on The Word back in 1992. Very exciting when I was 20. And it was a feminist statement, so it was OK for me to rewind the video...
1. R.E.M. - World Leader Pretend
Weird how the Top 3 bands are all abbreviations. (Let's pretend that's an interesting observation.)
From Orange, the album where R.E.M. were on the verge of world domination themselves. Seems so long ago now, doesn't it?
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