iPod Archives: Random "S" songs

"Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen is a beloved, much-covered classic, with Judy Collins' version being probably the most familiar, but you should hear the weirdly poppy version by Noel Harrison (Rex Harrison's son) from 1967 that made the Hot 100. It's good, but it's so poppy-catchy, not at all like Cohen's dreamy original.

"Sunset Grill" by Don Henley is an epic song about a rough urban neighborhood filled with "basket people" mumbling and working girls going by and boozers and "jerks" and no dignity, and yet the singer and his girlfriend just can't seem to get up the energy to leave, because, after all, all their friends are there. The lyrics and storyline aren't epic, but the length is (over six minutes) as is the arrangement, especially the long ending with its guitars and brassy horns and loud synthesizers. The song would have been great on a soundtrack, and when I hear the last 2 minutes of the song, I imagine a long tracking shot along a street after some kind of urban tragedy, with the camera moving slowly away, starting to pan up in an escape shot into the sky, but never quite making it into the clouds.

"Sweet Hitch-Hiker" was one of the last top 40 songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that, for all their numerous memorable hits, were only together for about four years. I love their music, but this one always struck me as really hot, as in sexy hot: it seems to be about a guy on a motorcycle who spies a hot blond girl hitchhiking and they either do or don't get together. It's got a speedy little rhythm and John Fogarty has a nice catch in his voice on "Hitch-a-HI-ker" in the chorus. But when I was 16, this song made me think of the scruffily sexy John Fogarty riding up to me in tight black leather, his legs hugging his hog (is that the right word?), and singing to me, "Won't you ride on my fast machine?" I still get a little shivery...

"Sway," an easy-listening mambo number from the 50's, has been done by dozens of artists, from Dean Martin to Michael Bublé, but my all-time favorite is by Rosemary Clooney, backed by Cuban bandleader Perez Prado and his band. It's from a fabulous album called A Touch of Tabasco in which Clooney and Prado perform exotic versions of standards like "Mack The Knife," "You Do Something to Me," and most memorably, put a riotous cha-cha spin on "I Only Have Eyes for You" (which was used as an ad jingle a few years ago). The album, from 1960, was available as an import CD but appears to be out of print now, so check iTunes.

"Sweet Cream Ladies" was a top 40 hit for the Box Tops, though my first memory of it was as an ad jingle for some kind of Jell-O cream pie confection, and that's how I always remember the song. It's a peppy little marching tune, but a cursory examination of the lyrics shows that it's a song about prostitutes: "Sweet cream ladies, do your part/Think of what you're giving/To the lost and lonely people of the night/...They will love you in the darkness/Take advantage of your starkness/And refuse to recognize you in the light." Yes, it's peppy!