Skip to main content

It’s Still The Sixties In Peace City: “Which Way You Goin’ Billy” by The Poppy Family

By Marcello Carlin



If 1970 was largely about putting the sixties behind itself and creating a new sunrise, Vancouver’s Poppy Family reminded us not to forget about the now-concealed darkness. Concealed? The success of “Which Way You Goin’ Billy” came in the wake of the Kent State shootings, and the Vietnam War was not yet over. Moreover, The Poppy Family recorded the song and its parent album in 1969; Canada always knows more.

Terry Jacks, a big Buddy Holly fan, had originally written the song as “Which Way You Goin’ Buddy” but his then wife (and Poppy Family lead singer) Susan persuaded him to switch the song’s gender, possibly as a result of hearing “Billy, Billy Went A-Walkin’” by Montreal band The Beau Marks, or perhaps just in honour of Susan’s brother Billy.

The song was to be addressed from the perspective of the women left behind as their lovers and/or husbands were drafted into Vietnam and its recording was fraught. Several attempts at a lead vocal were made but Terry Jacks (who also produced the record) was unhappy with Susan’s singing; he reckoned that she sounded too happy for the song. There was a quarrel, following which Susan reluctantly went back into the studio the next morning to record an exhausted and emotionally drained (and distraught) vocal – that was exactly the performance Terry had been looking for, and only one take was needed.

In view of the above, it may not be a surprise that the pair’s marriage only lasted for six years. Unfortunately, on an aesthetic level Terry Jacks was right; Susan’s vocal is near-ghostly in its once-removed despair, and precisely what the song needs - and I thought of Margo Timmins of Toronto’s Cowboy Junkies, a generation later, as a direct aesthetic descendant. Its function here is as a pause – before we stride off into the future, we had better make sure that we don’t leave everything, or everybody, behind.

Date Record Made Number Two: 6 June 1970
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Records At Number One: “Everything Is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens and “The Long And Winding Road/For You Blue” by The Beatles
UK Chart Position: 7

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“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

By Marcello Carlin
"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 ...
2 comments
Read more

Hey Now, Hey Now Now, Burn This Corrosion To Me: “Fire” by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown

By Marcello Carlin
More so than “Born To Be Wild,” “Fire” marks the dividing line, where pop turns into rock, where psychedelia mutates into progressive, between fun for all the family and parents keep the hell out. Number one in Britain when I was four years old, it scared the shit out of me at the time. Even in a year which could already have been classified as pop in extremis – Dave Dee’s whip on “Legend Of Xanadu,” Jagger’s sympathetic Devil make-up on “Jumping Jack Flash” – Arthur Brown’s flaming colander crown and a Top Of The Pops performance of the song which appeared to show the band burning in forests of flame gave me genuine nightmares; not to mention the moment in the long-gone Vale Café in Tollcross when I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the jukebox and “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE!” roared out. Now I already had cause enough to have nightmares in 1968, for reasons with which I shan’t bore you here. It wasn’t that pleasant a year, even from my juvenile perspective. But the...
1 comment
Read more

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

By Marcello Carlin
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...
1 comment
Read more