Monday Music Notes: A Lost Gem

Old Songs, New Songs, and a Question for Eric Clapton

Michel Polnareff performing the songs "Love me please love me" and "Ta ta ta" on Dutch TV programme Fanclub, 14 March 1967. Source: Beeld en Geluid Wiki, an initiative by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

Riding the Parkway with the Underground Garage on, Bill Kelly filling the black hole.

He present a challenge, a song from 1966 by a French singer in English, a song I’d never heard.

“Tell me this isn’t the best song ever,” he says (I think he said this; I was driving so I couldn’t take notes).

And then it starts, bass, guitar, and drum play the riff in unison. Repeat over a shuffling drum. Then the singer in upper register. “You say,” pause for the riff, for a twisting guitar fill, “you’re my little girl.” Repeat and into falsetto. Two minutes and 22 seconds of pure rock-and-roll pleasure. A simple, economic bit of mid-sixties pop that has now embedded itself in my brain.

This is the power of a guitar riff, especially the simpler ones. Economy meeting energy. The Beatles’ “Drive My Car,” “Taxman,” “I Call Your Name.” The Stone opening to “Street Fighting Man,” “Satisfaction,” or “Jumping Jack Flash.” “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes.

It’s also the power of free-form radio, like WNEW when I was a teen, of DJs like Bill Kelly digging deeply into the history of popular music and building playlists that highlight the most famous songs and the forgotten, breaking down genre barriers and weaving all of recorded music into a single thread.

Polnareff is largely forgotten, I assume, at least in the United States where the album on which it appears, Love Me, Please Love Me, failed to chart.

I’d never heard of him or this tune or album, but I woke up with that riff in my head, the song feeling contemporary, fresh. New.