Darling Be Home Soon
If you write a great song, it can be covered by anybody. Even Slade.
Yes, Noddy Holder sang John Sebastian’s lyrics, and even the great songwriter in his own right, Jules Shear, and I’ve got this live solo acoustic version by Bruce Hornsby that’s so wistful it makes you remember not only your summer camp girlfriend, but the person you’re involved with right now, even if she’s only in the next room.
But the version that closed me was Joe Cocker’s.
I was in my freshman year in college. And I told my mother to send me two records, Joe Cocker’s second and the Band’s second too, to go to Korvette’s and mail them, it would still be cheaper than buying them at the Vermont Book Shop.
But my mother sent me "Stage Fright". Which is probably why I know "W.S. Walcott Medicine Show" so well, even though I had a hankering for "King Harvest" in an era where if you didn’t own it, you couldn’t hear it. But she got it right with Joe Cocker.
I needed "Delta Lady". Even though the take on Leon Russell’s debut, which I’d bought the previous spring, was more energetic, just a bit more satisfying.
And I came to love "Dear Landlord". Which contains my favorite Dylan lyric ever:
Now, each of us has his own special gift
And you know this was meant to be true
And if you don’t underestimate me
I won’t underestimate you
But the track on the second side I could not stop playing was the one that closed the album, "Darling Be Home Soon".
Let me pull the vinyl…I want to make sure the piano part is played by Chris Stainton, not Leon Russell. Unfortunately, both get credit for "piano, organ and guitar", and the feel would indicate Leon but I want to believe it’s Chris, because Elton’s not about to give him a comeback. Still, it’s the piano figure, one that’s not even on the Lovin’ Spoonful original, that puts Joe’s version of "Darling Be Home Soon" over the top.
Just take a listen…
Great intros are not made for the radio, but your soul. The piano part gets inside you and makes you dance and swing, just like the one in "Hitchcock Railway".
That’s the best track on "Joe Cocker". Definitely played by Chris Stainton. And what are those, SPOONS in the background? "Hitchcock Railway" is a tear. As if the train has left the station and if you run real fast you can catch up and you can’t give up, you can’t resist, because the sound is so damn fine.
Not that you’d hear any of these songs on the radio forty years on. Not even Lovin’ Spoonful’s "Darling Be Home Soon" original. Still, if Badfinger’s "Without You" can be a hit in every decade, I can’t see why "Darling Be Home Soon" cannot.
Then again, "Without You" is a bit bland lyrically, whereas "Darling Be Home Soon" is positively intimate, hearing Sebastian sing you truly believe the story is his own.
Come
And talk of all the things we did today
We did them. And only we know the joy, only we shared the experience, it’s unique to us.
And now
A quarter of my life is almost past
One word can make a record. It’s the way all the singers of this song sing "quarter".
And the way the word "beat" in "beat your crazy head against the sky" is emoted later in the song.
Still, it’s the totality of the Lovin’ Spoonful original that makes us remember the sixties without forgetting who we are today. The strings swirling bring us back to then but even though we’re so much older now the lyrics are still prescient. We don’t want to be alone. And we’re constantly having revelations, insights about the human condition, even though for some reason the musicians of yore had them long before us, were wise for their years.
How do you write a song this good? How do you make a record this good?
That’s what they call genius.
There was no committee of usual suspects, no songwriter du jour punching up the lyrics.
"Darling Be Home Soon" is one of the few songs that Clive Davis could never complain about, could never try to rework. It gets to the chorus soon enough, it’s laden with hooks, it’s perfect.
If you don’t know it, you’re in for a treat.
