118. Love Is Strange

Mickey & Sylvia (Groove 4G-0175, 1956 – b/w “I’m Going Home”);
composed by Ethel Smith

Composed by Bo Diddley (but credited to his wife at the time), his original recording of it - not released until decades later on his Chess box set – shows its subsequent recasting by these two pros as the miracle of art and commerce that it was and remains. For one thing, Bo’s version really sounds like the title – love is strange, mysterious, oppressively hermetic in its disinclination to give forth anything like clarity, and his rueful performance follows suit. In contrast, Mickey Baker and Sylvia Robinson make it sound more like a Bo Diddley record than Bo’s version does – a struck gong and a call to whatever the secular equivalent of prayer might be. Mickey’s adamantine guitar figures over the tremelo rhythm are even more flagrant come-ons (and come-here’s) than the cooing vocal duet, notwithstanding the colloquy that caps the duet at the end: “Sylvia?” “Yes, Mickey?” “How do you call your lover boy?” Mickey continued to play killer guitar for all kinds of acts over here, until he moved to France in 1962 and played killer guitar there. Sylvia went solo, palled around with gangsters, and brought us the Sugar Hill Gang and Grandmaster Flash. Fucked them over, too.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.