“Hammond” - The Roches
File Under: But What Is The Song Actually About?
Released by Warner Brothers in 1979, the song features stunning sisterly blood harmonies and the most perfectly out-of-place Fripp guitar solo of all time. Lyrically, the song seems to present a parental warning to their (mostly) grown children & the children’s rebuke, but the specifics of the song are never quite explained. Where is Hammond and why is it a path to the wrong track? Here’s what I found:
In 1970, Maggie and Terre attended Paul Simon’s songwriting seminar at NYU. Two years later, they called him up and asked to audition for him. Simon was impressed enough to have them sing backup on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and he also introduced them to his lawyer, who negotiated an album deal with Columbia. Seductive Reasoning, an interesting, uneven record, which had four producers, was released in 1975 to resounding public indifference.
Devastated, Maggie and Terre retreated for several months to a friend’s kung-fu temple in Hammond, Louisiana, where, in Maggie’s words, “a lot of people went to learn how to beat people up.” When the temple dissolved, they drifted back north and into performing again. - Rolling Stone
Huh. Well, that’s unexpected, right? Louisiana? A Kung Fu Temple?
Suzzy Roche to Slate in 2020:
I mean, the song is a story, but, well, imagine Terre had met this guy who had a Kung Fu temple, as you do in Hammond, Louisiana.
And by the time I was was down there, when I arrived in the middle of the night by Greyhound bus, I realized quickly it was an abandoned telephone company building. And there were all these guys there who were studying Kung Fu. And us and Maggie and I had jobs at a truck stop and Terry was working at the Magnolia Diner. And I really cannot tell you how strange it was, is very extreme. But needless to say, my parents were not terribly thrilled about the whole thing. And I think that that song, the Hammond song, has to do with that.
Terre weighs in:
“We were humiliated,” Terre added. “We wanted to get out of the whole situation. We had a friend in Hammond, Louisiana, who was running a Kung Fu school. We gave up our apartment and told the record company, ‘We’re not going to promote the record anymore; we’re going away for a while.’ This was two weeks after the record came out. Maggie wrote the ‘Hammond Song’ about the whole experience.”
Cursory searches for more information about this Kung Fu temple in an abandoned telephone company building yielded nothing. Same with Magnolia Diner. So what about the town itself? Hammond highlights from its Wikipedia entry:
The city is named for Peter Hammond (1798–1870), the surname anglicized from Peter av Hammerdal (Peter of Hammerdal) — a Swedish immigrant who first settled the area around 1818.
During the Civil War, the city was a shoe-making center for the Confederate States Army.
The city later became a shipping point for strawberries, so a plaque downtown gave it the title of "Strawberry Capital of America."
During World War II, the Hammond Airport (now Hammond Northshore Regional Airport) served as a detention camp for prisoners of war from Nazi Germany.
The city was the home base for production of the first season of the NBC television series In the Heat of the Night, starring Carroll O'Connor.
Shoes, strawberries, and Nazis. Got it. Ok, so how did Fripp get involved? His own account from August, 1979:
RF: Originally, I'd been in..., I visited The Kitchen Arts and Video Center in Soho and John Rockwell was there, the critic from The New York Times. He introduced himself and I said... would he recommend anyone I should go and see? And he said, "Go and see The Roches." So I went to see The Roches at The Bottom Line not long aftrewards, they were there a few days later. Fell in love immediately, remarkably impressed. Since they were obviously so talented and seemed to be fairly innocent, I sensed that they were good canidates for being ripped, so I made one or two phone calls to make sure their affairs were being taken care of, which they were, and expressed interest in producing them should this arise. The Roches, for their part, felt that they needn't look for a producer, that when the producer came along, he would look for them. So eventually, I was interviewed by them for the job. They really gave me a grueling two hours, in which they said nothing. They simply said nothing.
RG: Just drilling you with questions?
RF: No, they said nothing. They just sat there and said nothing.
Delightfully strange. Terre says some King Crimson fans didn’t appreciate Fripp producing a folk act:
We were at that point every music career gets to where the honeymoon was over. The Roches had burst onto the music scene in 1979 with a shower of press infatuation rarely accorded a folk group. The unlikely pairing of King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, with his hard-driving English art rock, and the three singing sisters from New Jersey had caught the attention of music writers even before the album was released. Liz Rosenberg, our publicist at Warner Brothers, told us the press was calling her for interviews. She told us this was extremely unusual.
When the actual record came out, the momentum accelerated. The sound of three fairly soft voices and three acoustic guitars, with songs about waitress jobs, commuter trains and longing to be accepted by your parents, issued forth into the 1970s climate of disco fever like a drop of powerful medicine into a compromised bloodstream. Fripp, in an interview, put forth that people don’t realize gentle music can be revolutionary.
Some of his fans were upset that he’d traded in bombastic male music for lily-white warbling so delicate you had to turn up the dial to hear it. “The Roches” was No. 1 on The New York Times’s list of the year’s best albums. We were on our way.
Cristgau loved it. Marcus hated it.
And that represents the bulk of relevant information I could find on “Hammond.”
I’ll add that I appreciate how the song is aware that it’s a song (a sub-genre I try to keep a running list of) and how it seems to serve as direct communication to The Roches’ actual parents. I wonder if they ever gave their daughters an answer or told them they were ok?
Do your eyes have an answer To this song of mine They say we meet again On down the line Where is on down the line How far away? Tell me I'm okay
The combination of a folk song structure, three part harmony, and a prog-rock guitar solo suggests a new kind of musical genre that never quite got off the ground. I wish there was more music that could live comfortably next to this song.
Please reach out to me if you ran the Kung Fu temple in an abandoned telephone company in Hammond, Louisiana. I have questions.
