You've Got a Hole in Your Brain
I just belatedly caught up with the deeply satisfying "Case of the Missing Hit" episode of the Reply All podcast (thanks to Mark Armstrong for the rec). Long story short, it's about a guy who can't track down a song he knows he heard on the radio in Flagstaff, Ariz., some time in the late '90s—remarkably, he can remember almost all of the lyrics, much of the tune and instrumental parts, but can find no trace of the song online, let alone anyone else who remembers hearing it. The lengths he and the podcast hosts go to track down the song, which turns out to be not half as bad as it threatens to be, are truly worth the listen.
And it brought to mind a similar mystery cut, a song I remember hearing on Arizona radio in the 1980s but lost track of. My case is far less dramatic: I recalled far fewer of the song's particulars than Tyler Gillett miraculously did of "So Much Better," the song recovered by the Reply All podcast; and mine wasn't nearly as hard to track down on the internet. My mystery song even charted in the U.S., though only to #56 on the Hot 100.
As I've written in this space before, a car I drove in high school only got AM radio, and there were only a few stations I could stand, between which I flipped constantly: the R&B and the Christian pop stations. It was on the former that I first heard Sade, on the latter that I first heard Leslie Phillips, later Sam. It was also on the former that I remember occasionally catching a transfixingly oddball dance track with very few sung lyrics, a single-chord vamp, and a brief and thrillingly anomalous distorted-electric guitar solo. The only thing I could really recall about it: the bouncy new wave vibe and a woman's voice sample-stuttering, "N-n-n-n-no, señor." My internet searches of maybe a dozen years ago, pre-Spotify, took me a while (en route I happily discovered the song "Si Señor" by Control Machete), but I eventually found it online.
It was very much worth the rescue effort: The song was "Don Quichotte (No Estan Aqui)," by Magazine 60, which I learned were a French synth-pop band. This wasn't quite their only hit, but it was by far their biggest, and it's not hard to hear why it caught on, almost in spite of itself: Its hypnotic repetition of a bouncy, video-game-sounding synth riff over a not-too-fast disco beat, off-set by a slightly out-of-tune phased guitar and sound effects, and a light, sing-song chorus in bad Spanish which chiefly consists of, "Don Quixote y Sancho Panza / Hoy también siguen luchando," or, "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still fighting today," and then a refrain of, "Baila, borriquito" ("Dance, little donkey"). The odd spelling of the title is the French version of Cervantes's iconic knight errant, and it's only heard in a spoken-word bit in which a man who sounds uncannily like Eric Idle says, after a phone ring is answered, "Hello, can I speak to Mr. Don Quichotte, please?" At one point the band seems to conjure a drum-sampled shoot-out between these two literary figures. (The song's main guitar riff was later sampled in Will.i.am's lukewarm "I Got It From My Mama.")
What sealed it, among all these many goodies, was that dirty electric guitar, biting into the synth beat for only a few bars (at 2:21 above) but somehow reframing the whole song:
I thought back to this part when I later marveled at the harmony-bending guitar break of the Talking Heads' "Wild Wild Life" (at 1:06 here):
It's not quite Marc Ribot, but it has similar ear-cleaning properties. And it's what indelibly locked "Don Quichotte" in my ear's memory—that spiky electric solo cutting through the song's '80s synth wash and dance-floor novelty kitsch. That I could recover the rest of the song with the help of the world's virtual memory bank—well, it's so much better.
And it brought to mind a similar mystery cut, a song I remember hearing on Arizona radio in the 1980s but lost track of. My case is far less dramatic: I recalled far fewer of the song's particulars than Tyler Gillett miraculously did of "So Much Better," the song recovered by the Reply All podcast; and mine wasn't nearly as hard to track down on the internet. My mystery song even charted in the U.S., though only to #56 on the Hot 100.
As I've written in this space before, a car I drove in high school only got AM radio, and there were only a few stations I could stand, between which I flipped constantly: the R&B and the Christian pop stations. It was on the former that I first heard Sade, on the latter that I first heard Leslie Phillips, later Sam. It was also on the former that I remember occasionally catching a transfixingly oddball dance track with very few sung lyrics, a single-chord vamp, and a brief and thrillingly anomalous distorted-electric guitar solo. The only thing I could really recall about it: the bouncy new wave vibe and a woman's voice sample-stuttering, "N-n-n-n-no, señor." My internet searches of maybe a dozen years ago, pre-Spotify, took me a while (en route I happily discovered the song "Si Señor" by Control Machete), but I eventually found it online.
It was very much worth the rescue effort: The song was "Don Quichotte (No Estan Aqui)," by Magazine 60, which I learned were a French synth-pop band. This wasn't quite their only hit, but it was by far their biggest, and it's not hard to hear why it caught on, almost in spite of itself: Its hypnotic repetition of a bouncy, video-game-sounding synth riff over a not-too-fast disco beat, off-set by a slightly out-of-tune phased guitar and sound effects, and a light, sing-song chorus in bad Spanish which chiefly consists of, "Don Quixote y Sancho Panza / Hoy también siguen luchando," or, "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still fighting today," and then a refrain of, "Baila, borriquito" ("Dance, little donkey"). The odd spelling of the title is the French version of Cervantes's iconic knight errant, and it's only heard in a spoken-word bit in which a man who sounds uncannily like Eric Idle says, after a phone ring is answered, "Hello, can I speak to Mr. Don Quichotte, please?" At one point the band seems to conjure a drum-sampled shoot-out between these two literary figures. (The song's main guitar riff was later sampled in Will.i.am's lukewarm "I Got It From My Mama.")
What sealed it, among all these many goodies, was that dirty electric guitar, biting into the synth beat for only a few bars (at 2:21 above) but somehow reframing the whole song:
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