The Perfect Pop Song: "There She Goes" by The La's

Sometimes magic happens and you get a Perfect Pop Song, a song that is enjoyable not just in the moment, but remains thrilling forever. “There She Goes,” by the La’s, is one of those.

Pop is disposable by nature. Once, long ago, Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” was inescapable. And then it practically vanished. A few years later, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” seemed to be everywhere, and then it was similarly gone. More recently, the same thing with Weezer’s “Beverly Hills.” There were okay for a summer, but I don’t miss them. 

Hits are so often so ephemeral that even the people skilled at churning out one after another sometimes treat pop as something disposable. Take a look at Kelly Clarkson’s handlers – they hire the producers that are hot that day, come up with a couple decent hooks, and it’s off to the mid-teens on the Billboard charts. Sixteen months later, after the tour, the process starts all over again. 

But that in no way invalidates the extreme durability of some of the best pop. Durability is no small thing – it speaks to a confluence of talent, craft, and opportunity. There’s most of The Beatles’ catalog, Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors,” Fountains of Wayne’s career, much of the output of the New Pornographers… The list is fairly long, long enough to give anyone at least some faith in pop music.  

But a Perfect Pop Song? Lightning has to strike, and it doesn’t always happen to even the most talented artists. 

“There She Goes” came from a band that has been together, on and off, for decades, but still eked out but a single studio album, in 1990. The La’s eponymous major label debut did okay in their native U.K., but it sold only about 50,000 copies in the U.S. (I accounted for two of those sales. I bought it on cassette because I wasn’t sure those newfangled CDs would catch on. I bought a CD player a month later, and replaced my cassette with a disk).

The album is a minor pop masterpiece, but with “There She Goes,” the band achieves the sublime with a song that perfectly encapsulates that first rush of attraction. 

The classic pop song goes verse-chorus-verse. “There She Goes” blows up the map. It’s chorus-chorus-chorus, there's an irresistible hook, and the bridge is only long enough to get you back to the chorus again. The structure brilliantly embodies the giddy exhilaration of infatuation. It’s all chorus, all the time. 

The song starts with a ringing electric guitar picking a wistful descending line, like the girl you’ve got a crush on skipping down a short flight of stairs and away from you. 

An acoustic guitar comes strumming, the rhythm section punches in, and then the vocal enters with a yearning falsetto – “There she goes / There she goes again.” And after she’s gone the singer drops to a lower register, deflated, but his heart still swollen with desire and hope – “and I just can’t contain / this feeling that remains.” 

 

The thing about Lee Mavers’ vocal performance is that it perfectly embellishes the sentiment merely outlined in a lyric that barely rises above moon-spoon-June mundanity, filling in all the emotional details – the giddy rush, the lingering high, and back again. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

That performance goes a long way to elevating “There She Goes” to the height it reaches. Listen to Sixpence None The Richer’s take on it. The hook is so catchy it’s almost impossible to stick to the blueprint and blow it, and Leigh Nash has a pleasant enough voice. But she merely sings the song, and that makes Sixpence’s rendition adequate at best.

I live for Perfect Pop Songs –2½ to 3-minute aural gems that make everything all right – at least for 2½ to 3 minutes. Often that’s all anyone needs. That definition requires the song lift your spirits, but there are always exceptions, and the exceptions are often where interesting things happen. 

You can dance to “Tears of A Clown” – in fact, it’s hard not to. It sounds like a happy song, but it’s anything but. It’s a man trying to “appear to be care-free,” but he’s only covering up the hurt of losing you. The melody itself becomes part of the cover-up, part of the camouflage for Smokey’s sadness.

Creating tension between melody and lyrics is hardly unique, but it is rare, and while you might come up with an example of someone who did it as well, nobody did it better than Smokey in this cut.

There’s so much in “Tears of A Clown” to admire. There’s the opening riff suggesting a circus calliope – send in the clown. The internal rhyming scheme pulls you along. And in the bridge, Smokey amplifies his pop lament to the level of tragedy, by proclaiming himself heir to Pagliacci, the ultimate tragic clown.

Perfect Pop Songs

·         That Thing You Do – the Wonders

·         Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen (here's the version done with Jimmy Fallon & the Roots)

·         Still the Night -- The BoDeans (live version, from KINK-FM)

·         Trouble Times  – Fountains of Wayne

·         Sing Me Spanish Techno  – New Pornographers 

·         Try A Little Tenderness – Otis Redding 

·         Gang of Rhythm  – Walk Off The Earth

·        Papa Gene’s Blues  – The Monkees 

“Surrey With The Fringe On Top” – Blossom Dearie

I hate “Surrey With The Fringe On Top.”

Yes, I agree it serves a function in “Oklahoma,” and I suppose it serves it well. But isolated from its context – the way most people hear it most frequently – it sounds like the country cousin of

blackface, an urbanite’s hokey caricature of what the yokels in the middle of the country might listen to. The pronounced rhythm scheme – BAH, bop-BAH, bop-BAH, bop BAH-DAH-DAH – is irritating enough, but layer in lyrics with a cadence that matches the beat and we have ourselves the aural equivalent of a baby walker, something that will help the little darlings get across the dance floor safely without hurting themselves, just remember to close the door to the basement steps.

And ducks and geese and pigs in the first line? Kill me now.

I recall hearing it in my teens and cringing in revulsion: please, lord, not that crap again. And then one year “Oklahoma” was my high school’s musical; for three months the horror was inescapable.

One night in my early 20s I and some friends stumbled into Sammy’s Roumanian on Chrystie. The restaurant had cleared a small space in the far rear corner of the packed dining room for a two-man band. Both members appeared to be nonagenarians, I assume husband and wife, both wearing coke bottle glasses that made them look out at their audience in a manner that suggested they were worried the entire crowd might inexplicably wink out of existence at any moment – it’s happened before, you know, a pity, really. As we walked in, the fellow started bouncing his fingers on a bottom-of-the-line Casio keyboard set to Musical Cheese, and the gal started warbling “Surrey With The Fringe On Top.” Lovely people, no doubt, but the evening could not have got worse, which should indicate how very low my regard is for that song, and how very, very wrong I can be about things getting worse.

Sometime later I discovered Blossom Dearie and her version of “Surrey With a Fringe On Top.”

Covers remind you of the original. An interpretation takes a song and makes it new. Peggy Lee, Marlene Dietrich, and Nat Cole are among the many vocalists who have covered that song, and I dislike nearly all of those versions.

But Dearie decided to chuck the song’s blueprint, and came up with an almost entirely new “Surrey With The Fringe On Top.” Have I mentioned how much I adore that song?

The song was written as a hopeful invitation. Dearie’s inspiration was to turn it into a sexy come-on. She slows the tempo to a languid pace. There is no hint of equine clomping in her piano, nor in Ray Brown’s elegant and spare bass, nor in the brushes drawn subtly across the drums. She sings in her trademark little-girl sigh, with a knowing inflection that makes it clear she is not a little girl. The cadence of the lyric is no longer a blatant reference to horses; it now intimates the suggestive sway of her surrey.

Ducks? Geese? Pigs? Why, Miss Blossom, riding here with you, I can’t say as I noticed.

Dearie’s romantic version of “Surrey” was not the first time I heard demonstrated the difference between merely covering a song and interpreting it, but it’s my most memorable example of how interpretation can turn hate to love.

The phenomenon must be common enough. Stephen Frears not only recognized it but was able to deliberately reproduce it in the film “High Fidelity." John Cusack’s Rob Gordon arrives at a bar. From inside, he hears the opening strains of a "Baby I Love Your Way." "Is that Peter fucking Frampton?" he indignantly asks the bouncer. Once inside Rob (and his friends) find themselves captivated by Lisa Bonet’s aching rendition. I didn’t just know what was happening in that scene; I had already felt it, several times over.

I love Joe Cocker’s charged growl through “She Came InThrough the Bathroom Window,” as much as I do The Byrd’s chiming version of “Mr.Tambourine Man,” The English Beat’s nifty ska-ification of “Tears of A Clown,” Puddles’ melancholy rendition of Lorde’s “Royals,” and Lydia Loveless’ honky-tonk workout of “They Don’t Know.” They all did enough to make their versions distinctive, but none of them taught me anything about the originals.

There’s a lot in Little Feat’s catalog that I love, but the band’s output is uneven, especially the earlier disks. “I’ve Been The One” made no impression on me at all. Syd Straw (with The Golden Palominos) found both the pain and the wistfulness latent in the lyric, and she turned it into almost an entirely new song that can still stop me in my tracks.

Go listen to Frank Sinatra’s largely forgotten version of “TryA Little Tenderness.” Now crank up Otis Redding’s sublime smolder-to-a-burn reworking. That’s how to not just interpret but seize ownership of a song.

Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” left me cold, but I love Walk Off The Earth’s version. Their rendition is hardly a radical departure from the original, but maybe that just goes to show that you don’t have to change the beat, the tempo, the idiom (or all three) to create a successful interpretation.

And then artists can try so hard to interpret a song that they lose it entirely.

Pat Boone deserves all the disapproval he gets as the proud epitome of musical exsanguination, taking often extraordinary music and deliberately leaching from it all emotion and relevance. Paul Anka’s misguided lounge version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” might be the apotheosis of … something, I’m not sure of what, but it’s bad.

A few years back, somebody who really ought to have known better decided to turn “Take Five” into some sort of easy listening / hip-hop / pop hybrid. “Take Five” was composed in 5/4 – that’s part of the point – but these people decided to record it in 4/4, demonstrating that not only can a song be interpreted, but also badly misinterpreted. I can’t find it to identify the perpetrators, but I didn’t look hard, for fear of accidentally hearing a few bars. My default impulse is to give artists points for trying, but sometimes you just have to actually hand out demerits for getting it so wrong.