Week ending: 25th December
And finally, Christmas, and with it, the final song of 1963, a year that has seen a seismic shift in the UK charts. This might quite literally be the most significant year we've had yet, full stop - from the shift away from rock and roll and towards Merseybeat, to the rise of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound R&B and finally, the convergence of those two trends as acts like the Beatles begin to conquer the US, it's been an absolutely wild year, and the music you're seeing charting now is completely different than what you would have got at this point in 1962, in a very exciting way. And yet, we're not finishing with a Merseybeat smash, either...
Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa - Gene Pitney (peaked at Number 5)
Instead, we open with horns, and an initially laid-back sounding bit of steel guitar, conjuring a sort of country mood. Except you've also got something very funky and almost Latin going on with the beat, and the metallic, jangly percussion that you've got in the background. Add in some big, stabby horn hits and some dramatic backing singers, and you've got something with a pretty unique sound, not quite country, not quite pop.
But the star of the show has to be the lyrics, which are confessional, in the mould of songs like Leroy Van Dyke's Walk on By, painting a small, realistic picture of an affair. Except unlike Leroy, who's trying to cover things up, Gene's a bit more open, with the song more taking the form of a letter, confessing to a partner that he's been unfaithful. Dearest darlin', he sings, the regret already palpable in his voice, I had to write to say that I won't be home anymore / 'Cause something happened to me / While I was drivin' home / And I'm not the same anymore. You see, he was a mere twenty-four hours away from getting home, and from being back in his first love's arms. Except en route he saw a sign, a hotel where he decided to stop for the night. And there she is, a woman, waiting to show him where to get something to eat. She takes him to a café, hangs around, and in a moment of madness, he asks her to stay, she says okay. The jukebox started to play, Gene admits, and night time turned into day. They dance, they kiss, and he promises never to leave this new woman. I hate to do this to you, he concludes, but I love somebody new, what can I do, / When I can never, never, never go home again?
In all this, there's a lot of ambiguity. For one, is Gene supposed to be sympathetic, here? Part of me thinks so - you can hear the regret and the self-hatred in his voice, and the song clearly paints him as somebody who was taken completely by surprised by love, caught unaware, but too smitten and too honest to try and carry on the affair more secretly, even if it means blowing his old life up. All of which is noble, in a flawed kind of way.
Except you can't avoid the fact that this is a letter he's writing back to his old love. So there's a degree of unreliable narration going on, Gene pushing this picture of himself as this tragic figure, reluctantly doing the honourable thing, however much it hurts him. Which makes it all about him, for one. Plus, once you think of it like that, bits of it do sound like quite flimsy excuses. Like, sure, you "lost control". Sounds totally believable. And the "I love somebody else, what can I do?" line sounds particularly flippant, given this. The picture's coming together, in my mind. You've got Gene, a man who clearly travels a lot for work, who perhaps sleeps around a little, but whose extracurricular activities have finally made their way back home to Tulsa - hence this rather sorry dispatch.
And yes, much of this is me reading into the song. Because, like I said, it's ambiguous. Both readings - or neither - could be true, and Gene's delivery doesn't give you much to hang onto, interpretively. He sounds broken up, but you can't quite tell why, or how much of it's a front. All you can say, in the end, is that there's a vulnerability to it, a willingness to paint yourself as this weak, imperfect character. It's the sort of thing I could also imagine Roy Orbison pulling off - like Gene, he's got a way with these complex, confessional lyrics, just specific enough for you to speculate, but just vague enough that you can't really reach any solid conclusions, and just stopping short of melodrama.
Instead, there's a low-rent seediness to it all, the lady in the motel, Gene's travelling work as a salesperson, or something of that ilk, the all night café they repair to - it's never outright lurid, but there's so much implied smallness and sketchiness to it all, and so much pain and hurt, just past the edges of the narrative, as well as an aching, slightly strained quality to Gene's performance. Whatever he's aiming for with this letter, you also get the sense he's ashamed of it all, not at all proud of himself. And the distance, the fact that he was only a day away from getting home... again, you really get a sense of the tragedy of it, but also the mundanity, the everyday, low-key grimness of it all. Which is honestly quite something to a 3-minute song.
(I should also note, finally, that it does feel like the spiritual ancestor of Hotel California. It's a bit more mundane and prosaic, sure. But one bad trip, and you just know that Gene would be on his merry way down that dark desert highway...)
I'm going to go out and say it, this song should be better known than it is. It's great, a little short story that feels straightforward, but soon proves to be more complex than you expected. It's a bit pop, a bit country, a bit rock - and while none of these were "the" sound fo 1963, they're all sounds that have quietly been throughlines. For every thumpy beat hit, there's been one or two of these, solidly well made country or pop ballads that are quietly exploring some sometimes quite interesting territory. As an end-of-year hit, then? Not bad at all.
Favourite song of the yes-I-maybe-overanalysed-it-but-I-had-a-lot-of-fun bunch: Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa
