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Ich kann mich nicht erinnern, eine solche Rede für einen Alex Chilton vergleichbaren Künstler im deutschen Bundestag gehört zu haben ...


via Bedazzled (--> unbedingt auch die 1 im unteren youtube-Menü ansehen: BOXTOPS - eine ganz frühe Live-Aufnahme!)

This song is about a guy who gets a letter from his former love telling him that she wants him back, and the guy wants to fly out and see her immediately. The Nashville songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson wrote the song after his father gave him the line "Give me a ticket for an aeroplane." Thompson gave this to The Box Tops on the recommendation of his friend, Chips Moman, who ran ARS Studios and liked the sound of an unnamed band headed by then-16-year-old Alex Chilton, who auditioned for him in 1967.
Thompson played guitar on the recording. He didn't like the singing, believing the lead vocal was too husky, and wasn't fond of the production either. The addition of the jet sound "didn't make sense" to him. When producer Dan Penn added the airplane sound to the recording, Wayne Carson Thompson clearly thought that Penn had lost his mind. He hadn't - several weeks later it became one of the biggest records of the '60s, and The Box Tops went on to score with a few other Thompson compositions, including their follow-up release, "Neon Rainbow" (#24, 1967), "Soul Deep" (a #18 hit in 1969) and "You Keep Tightening Up On Me" (their last chart hit, which peaked at #74 in 1970).
At 1:58, the Box Tops' version of this was the last #1 hit to be shorter than two minutes in length. (Songfacts)

Warum der Song so gut ist, erklärt The Song In My Head Today:

When this single came out in late 1967, I'm surprised I paid it any attention. Sgt. Pepper's had been released the preceding summer, changing the pop music landscape forever; besides, I was still at least partly a Tiger Beat-programmed adolescent, who'd evolved (if you can call it that) from the Fab Four on to Herman's Hermits, the Monkees, and Paul Revere and the Raiders.

But I know I was hearing other tracks on the radio, primarily a lot of Motown -- hits like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "I Was Born to Love Her," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and "I Second That Emotion." Some part of my brain was wired to love that sweet soul music too. So when this single by a new band called the Box Tops rocketed onto the air waves, how could I not love it?

I didn't know that the lead singer, Alex Chilton, was just a teenager, barely a couple of years older than me. I didn't know the band was from Memphis; I doubt I even knew whether they were white or black. I sure didn't read about them in Tiger Beat. But this was a song you could not deny. I bought the single (which, given my paltry allowance, was a serious vote of faith) and listened to it so often, every beat was branded on my memory. It's one of my candidates for Most Perfect Single Ever.

It's only 2:03 and it doesn't waste a second; the drummer knocks half a dozen brisk strokes on the rim of his set, the guitar nimbly plucks another half-dozen notes, then Chilton's voice rips in urgently, "Give me a ticket for an aeroplane / Ain't got time to take a fast train," the melody jittering back and forth between two notes, words accented off-beat, everything jumpy as hell. He's at the ticket window, hair rumpled, out of breath -- a man on a mission. "Lonely days are gone, I'm a-going home" he proclaims, then his voice drops into an awestruck growl: "My baby just wrote me a letter" -- and his hoarse shiver on the word "letter" seals the deal for me.

That explains why he's hopping from one foot to the other, telling the ticket agent, "I don't care how much money I gotta spend / Got to get back to my baby again." He doesn't even need to tell us what the letter said, though he does in the bridge: "Well, she wrote me a letter, said she couldn't live without me no more / Listen, mister, can't you see I got to get back to my baby once a more" -- pregnant pause here, while the horns swing around, the drummer knocks twice, then Chilton's voice swoons wildly -- "Any way, yeah!" That's pretty much it, except for a long fadeout where the oddly perky electric organ repeats its calliope-like refrain and you hear a jet take off (I've always heard a seagull squawk too, though I could be wrong).

Though this wasn't released in the summer, it still feels like a summer song to me -- I have a distinct memory of standing on the midway at the Indiana State Fair, eating a corn dog, watching the Tilt-A-Whirl, standing transfixed while this song blared over the PA system.

Nobody writes letters anymore, I know -- but I just can't imagine this song being updated to "My baby just sent me a text message." Just like Paul McCartney asking to hold your hand, that letter is code for the whole sexual shebang, and it's Chilton's gritty, earthy voice that puts in all the subtext. He may have just been imitating the Muscle Shoals and Sun Records r&b singers he'd grown up around, but that groan of longing, that husky urgency, means just one thing. I was even younger than Alex Chilton when I first heard this record, but I could feel the heat all right. Whew.

Musikalisch interessant sind die Hinweise auf die Einflüsse von Motown und Muscle Shoals auf die Rockmusik in den späten 60er Jahren. The late great Bonzo Bonham hat mal gesagt, dass das Neue bei Led Zep eigentlich die Kombination von Yardbirds-Brit-Blues mit Motown-Drum&Bass war: Man höre mal auf Bass und Schlagzeug hier - unglaublich! -:



Ganz anders, aber sehr schön auch Chilton mit Big Star, z.B. Big Star - Ballad of El Goodo