I Knew I Couldn't Fake It Any Longer

Jay & The Americans — "Shanghai Noodle Factory" (1967)

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

Just a quick heads-up before we get down to today’s business: I’m currently trying to finish up Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, The World’s Coolest Band — a book I’ve been working on with Jeff and Steven McDonald for Fall 2024 release — so my newsletters won’t be hitting your inbox at quite their normal rate for the next month or so… and those that do show up may not be quite as lengthy as what you’re used to. But as this book is a true labor of love that I’m honored to be part of, and I really want to make it sing, it’s going to require some serious focus in the home stretch. I’m sure you understand…

However, I guarantee that the JTL posts you do receive will still be as entertaining and informative as ever, and that there will still be some special goodies in the pipeline for my paid subscribers, such as the Replacements-centric Episode 2 of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast, which went up earlier this week (and can be heard in full by anyone with a paid subscription to this Substack or that of my co-host Tony Fletcher).

---

Tim: The Replacements Hit the Big Time

---

In any case, thank you all for your continued support of Jagged Time Lapse. If you’re relatively new to these parts, please be advised that there are already over 150 previous entries in the JTL archive for your reading enjoyment and enlightenment. And if you haven’t subscribed to JTL yet but would like to — or want to bump your free subscription up to paid — just click this cute little green button…

Now then, let’s all go to the noodle factory…

One of my many pet musical obsessions is the musical sub-genre I like to call “Psychedelic Bandwagon” — i.e., the music made by distinctly non-psychedelic artists as they dipped their toes (or jumped headfirst) into the roiling lysergic waters of the late 1960s. The result of these experiments range from hilariously awful (William Shatner’s overwrought “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) to surprisingly wonderful (Del Shannon’s essential 1968 pop-psych album The Further Adventures of Charles Westover), though they often just fall into the “variety show squaresville” department, a la Eddie Fisher’s cover of The Beatles’ “Fool On the Hill”. But even though the artistic batting average on these efforts tends to be pretty low, I find them incredibly fascinating, and thus always keep an eye out for them when digging through the singles bins…

“Jay & The Americans recorded a Traffic song?!?” was my stunned reaction when I found JATA’s 1967 single “French Provincial” b/w “Shanghai Noodle Factory” in a bin at Amoeba Records back in the early 2000s. The promo 45 was priced at the princely sum of $1.99 — but given my proclivities, I probably would have still taken a chance on it at five times the amount.

The juxtaposition between the two groups could not have been more stark, nor more weirdly enticing. Traffic, of course, were the groundbreaking British band formed by Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, Dave Mason and Chris Wood, who famously rented a rural Berkshire cottage in the spring of 1967 to “get it together in the country” — i.e., smoke a shitload of hash, wear caftans and explore an innovative mixture of psychedelia, pop, folk, soul and jazz.

Jay & The Americans, on the other hand, were a bunch of uptight-sounding Jewish guys from Queens, whose long string of pop hits had all been written by professional tunesmiths like Leiber & Stoller, Boyce & Hart, Wes Farrell and Neil Diamond. They wore matching turtlenecks and double-breasted blazers, and didn’t look like they smoked anything headier than Lucky Strikes.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I friggin’ love Jay & The Americans, and once even covered their 1964 hit “Come A Little Bit Closer” in one of my bands. But hip and groovy they decidedly were not. Their aesthetic (and, for me at least, their enduring appeal) can be summed up by this absurd radio spot they cut in the mid-1960s for H.I.S. Jeans:

“Hey, Jay — you look SHAHP,” some unidentified goombah tells lead singer Jay Black (born David Blatt), who responds to the compliment with the unbridled enthusiasm of a man who’s just shotgunned a couple of liters of Pepsi. They then discuss the benefits of “that trim H.I.S. look,” while Jay’s overdubbed voice soars wordlessly to operatic heights in the background. They will clearly not be “getting it together in the country” any time soon, unless it’s a country club in Westchester County.

The choice of “Shanghai Noodle Factory” as cover material was apparently suggested to/foisted upon Jay & The Americans by future Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller, who was already working on the self-titled second album of their United Artist labelmates Traffic when he apparently drew the short straw to helm the next JATA single. The original version of the song, recorded by Traffic during those sophomore album sessions, would not actually be released by until late 1968, when it appeared on the flip side of that band’s “Medicated Goo” single. JATA’s version, recorded for the B-side of their October 1967 single “French Provincial,” wound up seeing the light of day over a year before Traffic’s.

And what a strange — and even perverse — choice it was. The lyrics, written by Wood and Winwood, are a metaphor for the Traffic members’ escape from the soulless churn of the music industry, where the workers are molded to be “tiny cogs in one big wheel”. “I had to make a break,” the song explains; “I knew I couldn’t fake it any longer.” Jay & The Americans, on the other hand, were the very epitome of cogs in the music biz wheel, a middle-of-the-road hit-making act whose lack of songwriting talent or distinctive artistic vision put them completely at the mercy of the industry and the prevailing pop cultural winds.

By the time Jay & The Americans recorded “Shanghai Noodle Factory,” it had been over a year since their previous Top 40 hit — a faithful 1966 cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” which reached #25 in the US — and they hadn’t tasted Top 20 success since their 1965 rendition of the Neil Diamond-penned “Sunday and Me”. The pop landscape of 1967 was alien territory for a conservative vocal group that had been racking up hits since the doo-wop era; the Four Seasons, an act in a theoretically similar bind, at least had the patronage of brilliant producer Bob Crewe (and prolific in-group songwriter Bob Gaudio) to steer them back into the charts that year. But “French Provincial,” a propulsive if appropriately fussy pop-psych number penned by Jeff Barry with JATA guitarist Marty Sanders, simply wasn’t hit material; the single missed the Billboard charts entirely, not even “bubbling under” at a lowly #131 as their previous sunshine pop effort “(We’ll Meet in The) Yellow Forest” had done.

But what of its Traffic-penned b-side, the one that caused me to pluck the single from Amoeba’s bin in the first place?

“Shanghai Noodle Factory” is actually one of my favorite things Jay & The Americans ever cut. While I doubt the song would have made much of a chart impression if it had swapped places with its A-side, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun. I have no idea who the musicians on the track are, but the rhythm section grooves hard — props to the bass player for laying down some legitimately funky runs — and whomever that is on lead guitar (could it be Sanders?) has done a nice job of incorporating a touch of British freakbeat aggression into his playing. As much as I dig and respect Traffic’s body of work, whenever I play their lugubrious recording of “Shanghai Noodle Factory” (which runs literally twice the length of JATA’s), I am forced to admit that I far prefer this one.

While it’s hard to tell if Jay Black actually understood the metaphor of “Shanghai Noodle Factory,” he certainly brings his usual degree of heavily-caffeinated pep to the proceedings, and he hits some nice high notes on the harpsichord-laden “My island of dreams” section. And maybe he really couldn’t “fake it any longer” — a year after this record, Jay & The Americans would return to the Top 10 with a sublime cover of The Drifters’ “This Magic Moment,” a song and performance which played to the group’s strengths while jettisoning all pretense of late-sixties hipness.

The psychedelic psurge had left Jay & The Americans behind, and most of their fans as well; with “This Magic Moment” (and Sands of Time, the oldies-filled LP that soon followed), Jay and the boys quite literally went back to find them. If that also meant going back to being a cog in the factory, so be it. I mean, who doesn’t want some comforting noodles now and then?

---