I’m Like A Bird: “Rock-In Robin” by Bobby Day

The first one-hit wonder to appear in this list – or would have been, had Bobby Day not had a minor hit in 1957 with his song “Little Bitty Pretty One” (although Thurston Harris had a much bigger hit with his cover). However, as an effective one-shot hit, “Rock-In Robin” – that is how the title is spelt on the label of the original 45 rpm single – is an agreeable and engaging record. Born in Fort Worth, Day – real name Bobby Byrd (no, he was not that Bobby Byrd) – then moved to Los Angeles and worked with some doo-wop groups, including the Hollywood Flames and the Satellites, before going solo.

“Rock-In Robin” was written by one “Jimmie Thomas.” In reality this was Leon René, who had been around since 1902 and composed such classics as “When The Swallows Come Back To Capistrano” and “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” You might therefore be forgiven for thinking that “Robin” has a dubious reputation. In Britain this is probably down to the fact that Bobby Day’s original record was only a minor hit and the song is best known through Michael Jackson’s irredeemably twee 1972 cover (to which I will be returning here in due course).

There really isn’t much to the song, if truth be told, but Day gives it an authoritative and enthusiastic reading – his rhetorical pause after the word “oriole” is particularly striking - and it helps that the backing band rip through the song with such unashamed gusto, complete with concluding wolf-whistles. Flute solos in rock ‘n’ roll? There’s no sound in flutes, as Buddy Rich once complained, but Plas Johnson’s onomatopoeic piccolo – yes, piccolo - solo here provides the record with its necessary punctum. Unfortunately, René opted to use Day’s song “Over And Over,” which would undoubtedly have given him another major hit, as the B-side; however, the Dave Clark Five remembered it and took the song to number one in 1965.

Date Record Made Number Two: 18 October 1958

Number of Weeks At Number Two: 2

Record At Number One: “It’s All In The Game” by Tommy Edwards

UK Chart Position: 29

Other Information: Bobby Day went on to be the original “Bob” in Bob and Earl but was subsequently replaced by another “Bob” – Bob Relf, he of Northern Soul perennials such as “Blowing My Mind To Pieces.” It is Bob Relf whom you hear on “Harlem Shuffle.”

Comments

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su...

A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone...

Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

Search This Blog