- #The j. geils band first i look at the purse license#
- #The j. geils band first i look at the purse plus#
If he’d left the Contours, they’d have been sunk – but he stayed, and so that thread remained alive to be continued. Whole Lotta Woman, Do You Love Me, It Must Be Love… Gordon’s sandpaper voice makes classic work of them all. Whenever Billy Gordon is given the chance to cut loose and let rip – when he wants to do it, not when he’s being forced to jump through hoops like some kind of performing monkey (metaphorical hoops, that is, as Gordon was well-versed in jumping through actual hoops as part of the Contours’ famously athletic stage act) – the results are always knockouts. An entertaining buffoon, certainly, of the type we’ve all come across – annoyingly, he’s exactly as funny as he thinks he is – but I’ve no need to worry about keeping him away from my daughter, because I trust she’s got enough sense to give an amused snort and keep right on walking.Īnyway, back to the record. Perhaps the tone is still inexcusably sexist, but I think the misogyny is tempered by the absolute silliness of it all this is a song about the narrator, and he’s a buffoon.
#The j. geils band first i look at the purse plus#
I don’t believe for one moment it’s meant to be taken remotely seriously, but even if it were, Billy Gordon delivers this with such a stupid grin that says he’s already fully accepted he might deservedly earn himself a slap in the face, plus whatever the 1965 equivalent was of a badmouthing on Facebook and Twitter (like a crudely-phrased warning written in lipstick on a diner bathroom mirror, or something). The answer, really, is because this is funny the joke is on the narrator, not the woman, and (again like Shorty Long) the impression is of some louche reprobate boasting to his mates. For the narrator of First I Look At The Purse, his ideal woman has just one single make-or-break quality, and one alone:Īlert readers will be wondering why I’m not getting angry with this, when I blew a gasket over I’ll Be Doggone for spouting similarly sexist stuff. This, for those who haven’t heard it, is in the same musical family as Smokey’s upcoming Going To A Go-Go, and the same lyrical family as Smokey’s prehistoric Shop Around: a sweltering blues-flavoured rock-out with a narrator giving us his, um, unconventional take on romance. Like Shorty Long, they’re charming enough to get away with eyebrow-raising things the clean-cut Temptations couldn’t risk yet.
So, a new role beckons for a new Contours, in light of First I Look At The Purse and its predecessor Can You Jerk Like Me – they’re slowly, almost imperceptibly, transitioning from raucous, loutish novelty dance rockers to hard-edged mid-Sixties Motown R&B ambassadors, a Junior Walker-esque reminder that not everything coming out of Hitsville was a sweet pop-soul romp. And he does he and Bobby turn in a palpably silly record that nonetheless plays to Gordon and the Contours’ unique strengths while having just enough of 1965 about it to stay relevant. This, the “Mark 2” Contours’ first single in seven months following a drastic line-up change which saw only Sylvester Potts and lead singer Billy Gordon remain from the previous version of the group, is an early example of a strategy Motown would later use as its go-to play: got a group struggling for direction? Pair them with Smokey, he’ll know what to do. The great Bobby Rogers of the Miracles has passed away since the last time we wrote about him – but while this isn’t a Miracles track, perhaps it’s nonetheless the best way to remember him, as not only did he co-write First I Look At The Purse with his Miracles bandmate Smokey Robinson, it’s actually Bobby’s giggly voice we hear at the start here, to open what is a giggly kind of record:
#The j. geils band first i look at the purse license#
(Released in the UK under license through EMI / Tamla Motown) (Written by Smokey Robinson and Bobby Rogers) Tamla Motown TMG 531 (A), September 1965 b/w Searching For A Girl Gordy G 7044 (A), June 1965 b/w Searching For A Girl
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