Like She Don't Even Care
Texas rocker Bobby Fuller reportedly hated what producer Bob Keane and bassist Randy Fuller added to his straightahead rave-up "Keep On Dancing." Oh, how wrong Fuller was! With the ecstatic "Let Her Dance," the song's new title, Keane didn't just help create one of the great power-pop bangers of the mid-1960s—he also got Fuller to sharpen his lyrics in the bargain. (The song first came to my delighted attention on the soundtrack of The Fantastic Mr. Fox.)
The opening guitar-and-bass figure is one of those earworms that surpasses a song's own vocal chorus for catchiness, a la "Day Tripper," "Satisfaction," "Walk This Way," "How Soon Is Now," etc. And its genius lies in its odd, circular, three-against-four chord changes, which manage to suggest both insistence and dancing-in-circles dizziness:
As the song gets rolling, this is joined by a yet more insistent vocal chant:
And then there's an instrumental break, which faintly anticipates the chordal guitar hook that would later drive the Bobby Fuller Four's biggest song, "I Fought the Law":
Both the relentless hammering (accented by a tapped bottle, another contribution of Randy Fuller) and the three-against-four feel subtly serve a lyric that, in the new version, sketches a clear love triangle: Our singer is watching the girl he danced with "just yesterday" get down with "a brand new love affair." "Well, let her dance with him/Let her dance all night long," he concludes, with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for schadenfreude that gives the song's ebullience a hard glint, and makes that obsessive "dance dance dance" feel a bit like an eyes-closed, ear-plugging "la la la, nothing to see" chant. Compare that to somewhat confused lyric of "Keep On Dancing," the lament of a guy who's flailing around the dance floor because he can't find his date (though her mother seems to have shown up? The plot thickens).
But above all, compare the tepid sock-hop arrangement below to the rafter-raising "Let Her Dance" above. Accept no substitutes, especially not the original:
The opening guitar-and-bass figure is one of those earworms that surpasses a song's own vocal chorus for catchiness, a la "Day Tripper," "Satisfaction," "Walk This Way," "How Soon Is Now," etc. And its genius lies in its odd, circular, three-against-four chord changes, which manage to suggest both insistence and dancing-in-circles dizziness:
But above all, compare the tepid sock-hop arrangement below to the rafter-raising "Let Her Dance" above. Accept no substitutes, especially not the original:
I grew up listening to my Dad's 45 of "I Fought the Law," but was shocked and awed when I purchased a greatest hits album as an adult and realized he has a ton of great songs! This is one of the best.
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