I always imagined R. Dean Taylor, the guy who gave us 1970’s “Indiana Wants Me,” as King of The Flash in the Pans. And the epitome of the perennial second-teamer who kicks the dust of his small town off his shoes and catches the Greyhound to Record City USA, determined to become a pop star. And does, for about 10 minutes, before fading back into the obscurity from whence he came, just another one-hit wonder, like Mouth & MacNeal and Looking Glass.
Except “Indiana Wants Me” isn’t in the same league as “How Do You Do” or “Brandy.” It’s not even in the same galaxy. As far as I’m concerned, “Indiana Wants Me” is the coolest pop song ever recorded by homo sapiens, and I truly believe that listening to it thrice daily is your fastest route to Satori.
Anyway, these imaginings of mine made me think Taylor should have entitled his 1970 debut LP I Wrote ‘Indiana Wants Me’, Therefore I Am. Shows what I know. Because Taylor, far from being just another one-hit wonder at the obscure fringes of the music industry, was in fact a bona fide player, and an important cog in the mighty Motown machine. That’s right, Motown. R. Dean, who hailed from Toronto but moved to Detroit to be closer to the action, joined Motown subsidiary Rare Earth in 1964, becoming one of the label’s few white songwriters. He even became a member of Motown’s much-vaunted writing and production team, The Clan, which wrote songs for Diana Ross and The Supremes and many others.
Taylor recorded a few minor regional hits during the 1960s, including 1967’s “There’s a Ghost in My House” and “Gotta See Jane”—both of which Mark E. Smith liked so much The Fall covered them. (Golding Earring also covered “Gotta See Jane.”) But it wasn’t until the dawn of the seventies and “Indiana Wants Me” that Taylor reached the top of the pops in the U.S. (according to Cash Box magazine; the song only reached No. 5 on the Billboard charts) and Canada, and No. 2 in the U.K. And small wonder; “Indiana Wants Me” is pop’s perfect storm. It has everything you could ever want in a song—sirens, gunfire, some super-sappy but cool lyrics, Taylor’s plaintive vocals, and best of all a fantastic melody, the simplicity and beauty of which never fail to amaze me. And who can resist a song about a “bad” guy with a heart of gold who goes out in a blaze of police lead?
Not one of the one-hit wonders I love comes within 10,000 leagues of “Indiana Wants Me”: not Lobo’s great “Me & You & a Dog Named Boo” or the Buoys’ cannibalism classic “Timothy” or even “Chevy Van,” Sammy Johns’ creepy ode to picking up young skank in that most quintessential of ’70s shaggin’ wagons. And I adore Sammy Johns’ “Chevy Van.” Sammy never says, but dollars to donuts his far-out four-wheel fornication machine had a flying horse airbrushed on the side panel. And a mattress in back for snatch, natch.
But on to I Think, Therefore I Am. Taylor produced the LP—an intriguing mix of pop, country, and soul—himself, and Rare Earth released it in 1970. The Motown label then rereleased it the following year under the title Indiana Wants Me, either because Berry Gordy wanted to capitalize on the song’s popularity or he found LP’s original title too Cartesian for his tastes. (Berry is a fanatical Pascalian.)
I Think, Therefore I Am opens with “Back Street,” a perky and fast-paced number with cheesy female backing vocals and heaps and heaps of strings. None of which mesh particularly well with the bleak story line—girl gives birth out of wedlock, shames her family and friends, is reduced to selling her body, and ultimately dies. As for the chorus, I can’t decide whether I love it or hate it. But I do know the disconnect between the song’s bouncy melody and it dour subject matter is too jarring for me, and the lyrics are too maudlin for my cynical tastes. “Woman Alive,” on the other hand, is my cup of tea, thanks to one great melody. It tells the story of a woman who works from 9 to 5, then spends the hours from 6 to 10 in the bar, hoping to meet Mr. Right. The strings work, the song has a sweep and a majesty I can get down with, and the chorus is tres cool, with Taylor singing, “Woman alive/You just want the eyes of the world to see ya/Woman alive.”
Perhaps the weirdest ecological protest song ever written, “Ain’t It a Sad Thing” pulls out the stops and goes right over the top, but I like it for just those reasons. It moves at a nice clip and has a great melody, and features lots of guitars, some nice piano, and a big sing-along chorus that goes, “Down by the river where the river don’t flow/We can’t go there no more/Down by the river where the river don’t flow/The birds don’t sing, ain’t it a sad thing.” But the song’s piece de resistance is the cheerful whistling that takes up the better part of the second half of the song. Once again the song’s happy-go-lucky musical elements are at odds with the subject matter, but in this case I don’t care. This song is so flat-out strange I can’t get enough of it.
While I love the drumming and guitars that keep “Love’s Your Name” chugging along, it’s a tad too schlocky for yours truly, what with its bells and too prominent female backing vocals. As for “Gotta See Jane,” it’s probably the most unique cut on the LP. Taylor’s vocals are distorted, and he rushes through the lyrics to keep up with the song’s mad propulsion. Sure, it boasts the usual strings and over-the-top female backing vocalists, but it also includes a great rhythm section and such sound effects as a roaring car and rain and squealing wheels, to let you know just how much of a hurry Taylor is in to see his baby. “Gotta See Jane” could almost pass for a glam classic years ahead of its time, and I love the way Taylor sings on the speeding choruses, “Red light, green light/Speeding through the dark night/I gotta see Jane.” No wonder Mark E. Smith covered it; “Gotta See Jane” is a weird amphetamine classic.
The LP includes four covers, a surprising number for a prolific songwriter, two of which he pulls off quite nicely. The two he doesn’t are country and folk-pop songs. Taylor’s pipes aren’t strong enough to do justice to Kris Kristofferson’s immortal “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and it doesn’t help that he sweetens it up with enough strings to tie every shoe in Bolivia. The last thing “Sunday Morning Coming Down”—a heartbreaking song about a journeyman singer-songwriter’s dark morning of the soul—is prettying up. Taylor oversweetens James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” too, in the form of female vocalists and strings, and while it’s hard to imagine somebody with insufficient vocal chops to pull off a Sweet Baby James tune, it turns out Taylor is that somebody.
Taylor’s cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “Two of Us,” on the other hand, has a nice shuffling drumbeat and some cool guitars, and Taylor’s vocal chords are up to the material. Even the female backing vocalists don’t feel intrusive. And Taylor’s version moves faster than the Beatles version, which pops it up real nice. I actually prefer Taylor’s take to the original, and I’m not—I swear—saying that because I’m notoriously indifferent to the Fab Four. Finally, R. Dean’s cover of “Gonna Give Her All The Love I’ve Got”—which was written by the legendary songwriting team of Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong and recorded by both Marvin Gaye and The Temptations—is a flat-out victory of radical adaptation. Taylor speeds it up significantly, sanding off some of the soul edges while he’s at it, and in so doing succeeds in transforming it into one very cool pop song. Taylor’s vocals—which are so limited in so many ways—are spot on, and the guitar riff, drumming—and those female backing vocalists again—work to a T. It’s so good, I’m surprised it didn’t become a hit. The Brotherhood of Man’s execrable “United We Stand” became a hit. Marmalade’s utterly forgettable “Reflections of My Life” even became a hit. Why not “Gonna Give Her All The Love I’ve Got”?
Taylor’s attempts to replicate the success of “Indiana Wants Me” (such as 1972’s “Taos New Mexico” and 1974’s “Window Shopping”) didn’t chart particularly well stateside, although he scored a few minor successes in Canada and the U.K. Nor did his second and final LP, 1975’s L.A. Sunset (on Polydor) make any waves. His songwriting stint for Rare Earth ended with the label’s folding in 1976, and he has made peripatetic attempts at a comeback as a recording artist since then, and also started his own label, Jane Records.
Taylor had his limitations as a songwriter, and I suspect some of the production habits he picked up at Motown (lush orchestration in particular) didn’t do his own work any favors. Still, “Indiana Wants Me” is a marvel, and the cover of I Think, Therefore I Am makes me like R. Dean Taylor even more. He’s shown hugging a big shaggy black dog, and sitting on a white picket fence with an acoustic guitar along with some clean-cut young people, and who cares if he bears a disconcerting resemblance to Richard M. Nixon? He’s the King, and not just of the Flash of the Pans. He’s the King, period.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
