Oscar's Picks: Tom
The handsomest cat ever faces off against Tom Jones' self-titled 1970 LP
When my impossibly handsome cat Oscar passed away this past November, I started going through all the pics I’d taken of him during the 11 years or so we spent together. (He spent the last three years of his life in the loving care of my ex-wife, who made sure to update me regularly on his shenanigans.) In doing so, I discovered that I had taken dozens of photos of Oscar enjoying various albums with me — usually from his perch atop my turntable, where he could really dig the vibrations as the record spun.
I’ve decided to use these pics as the basis for “Oscar’s Picks,” a semi-regular series of posts which will be a nice way to keep his handsome memory alive, as well a prompt to write about some of my favorite records. I previously wrote about him digging deep into Side Three of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti; this time, we’re flashing back on the most perfect album side that Tom Jones ever waxed…
I’m not sure when it was that I first became aware of Tom Jones. Oh, I definitely recall hearing the hip-thrusting “Whoa-ah who-ah whoa”s of “She’s A Lady” while driving to or from Baskin-Robbins in Ann Arbor in 1971 — for some reason, ice cream runs were about the only times my folks had the car radio tuned to the local AM pop stations — but I know I didn’t put them together with Tom Jones the man, the myth, the Pontypridd Powerpack until much, much later.
I remember seeing ads for Tom’s Vegas gigs in the L.A. Times circa 1979 — often featuring him sporting a large crucifix over a semi-bare chest, and gazing meaningfully into the camera like he was fixin’ to fuck the lens — but having no real idea of what he sounded like, or even what exactly it was that he did.
“Who is Tom Jones?” I asked my Mom one Sunday morning while leafing through the paper. “Ewww!” was her succinct reply. Now I was mildly intrigued…
At some point, I guess I kind of twigged that he was a lounge singer — the Vegas residencies and all — but I can’t recall actually putting his name and voice together until the summer of 1984, when my friend Jason and I discovered Parrot Records’ 1967 compilation The Greatest Hits from England, which included Tom’s breakthrough 1965 hit “It’s Not Unusual”.
While we were initially more stoked about find Them’s “Gloria,” Los Bravos’ “Black Is Black,” The Nashville Teens’ “Tobacco Road” and Unit 4+2’s “Concrete and Clay” (a song I’d been searching after for years) on that record, something about the swinging horns and swaggering vocals of “It’s Not Unusual” got under our skin — and we dug the song even more once we somehow learned that Jimmy Page had played the guitar solo.
But what really turned on the ToJo tap for us was a short MTV News interview I saw with him in late 1988, right as “Kiss” — his collaborative Prince cover with Art of Noise — was climbing the charts. By way of establishing that Tom had been making hits for nearly a quarter-century at this point, the MTV interviewer asked him about opening for The Rolling Stones back in 1965. “The kids in the audience didn’t know what to think,” Tom chuckled in his soft Welsh brogue, “Because they had never seen anyone quite so MASCULINE before!”
I just about spit up my 36-ouncer of Colt 45, or whatever I was using to chase my afternoon bong hits. This guy was clearly on his own trip, and I loved it. I immediately resolved to start tracking down his 1960s and ’70s albums, just as I’d begun doing with Herb Alpert. Entry to a whole ToJo-tastic world must surely await me in my neighborhood thrift shops, I figured…
Unfortunately, I quickly realized that his albums weren’t that great. Much of his ’70s output seemed to be mainstream country, which I wasn’t into at all, and his ’60s records suffered from the curse of the all-around entertainer. As I would later discover with Lou Rawls, another singer possessed of an incredible voice and little in the way of artistic vision, Tom’s albums seemed designed primarily to showcase his versatility; along with his latest hit (often penned by Les Reed and Tom’s manager Gordon Mills), there would be showtunes, treacly ballads, items from the Great American songbook, some Reed-Mills throwaways, and a smattering of classic soul and R&B covers. He sang his ass off on everything, of course, but the lack of quality control or a defined focus made for a frustrating listening experience. (His 1966 album A-Tom-ic Jones is a perfect example, containing the incredible “Dr. Love” but little else of lasting value.)
And then I discovered his 1970 album Tom, staring out at me from the shelf of some dingy thrift shop on Chicago’s Halsted Street. It was the day after my band Lava Sutra had played our first-ever gig (opening for The Dangtrippers and God’s Acre at Lounge Ax in January 1990), and I’d spent the afternoon digging for records in a celebratory haze. My search hadn’t turned up much of interest… until now.
Tom’s name wasn’t even on the cover, because he’d become such a pop culture icon by the time of the album’s release — his variety show This Is Tom Jones was in the midst of its two-year run on ABC — that only his face was apparently required. His hypnotic gaze (which followed me around the shop until I gave in) commanded “Take me home”… and, after flipping the album over to look at the track selection, I did just that.
Because while this one was stocked as usual with Broadway numbers (“If I Ruled the World” from Pickwick and “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha), Tom’s latest hit ballad (“Without Love”) and ballads by other hit artists (The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” The Bee Gees’ “Let There Be Love”) and a bombastic country belter called “Can’t Stop Loving You” which isn’t to be confused with the far superior Ray Charles song of a similar name that Tom had previously covered, someone at Decca had the brilliant idea to push all of those songs on to Side Two. Side One, on the other hand, was reserved for hot rock-’em sock-’em ToJo action from start to finish.
To this day, I’ve always wished that Tom had done an album made up entirely of soul covers, and Side One demonstrates why. It’s bookended with rip-roaring versions of Stax/Volt classics — Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose” and Sam & Dave’s “I Thank You,” both of them cut at breakneck speed with the help of a killer band led by British session guitar legend Big Jim Sullivan, and both of which are positively soaked with Welsh chest sweat by the time they’re done.
Big Jim also comes through with some serious chicken-pickin’ on a cover of Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie,” a rendition which features a hilarious ToJo intro rap aimed at “Some of y’all who never been down south too much” — like, to the Vale of Glamorgan? — and a performance that’s as cartoonishly volcanic as Tony Joe’s is laconic. Even after over 35 years of familiarity with this version, my jaw still drops to the floor at the moment where ToJo berates Annie’s brother for stealing watermelons out of his truck patch.
Roots rock evidently being squarely in his wheelhouse, Tom then takes a solid swing at Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” a rendition which is only let down slightly by its variety show production number vibes and the fact that John Fogerty’s line about “I cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis” is witlessly transformed here into “I’ve seen a lot of places like Memphis”. What’s the matter, Tom? Don’t hunky Welshmen do dishes?
Up next is “Sugar, Sugar,” a massive 1969 hit for bubblegum studio group The Archies — but Tom takes the song back to Soulville with an arrangement modeled on Wilson Pickett’s recent hit cover. Of course, ToJo being ToJo, he can’t resist getting overly insistent when it gets to the “Pour a little sugar on me, baby” refrain…
The real wild card on Side One is the cover of Shocking Blue’s recent worldwide hit “Venus,” a song which has neither soul or country roots, but which Tom manages to take a lusty, gator-sized chomp out of nonetheless. The TV show horn section suits this one to a “T” (or perhaps a “V”), lighting up the sky over the song’s churning and burning rhythm section as Tom melts with priapic perspiration in the presence of the titular goddess; you can practically see the full-on ToJo gyrations happening in conjunction with the killer drum break at 0:49. But the best part of all comes during the instrumental break at 1:42, where our lad gets so worked up that he starts wailing like a muezzin in a minaret — or whatever the Welsh version of that would be.
I snapped the photo at the top of this post about four years ago, when I was still living in North Carolina. I’d just scored a rare (at least in these parts) German copy of Tom for a buck at a local bookstore, and I was in the process of A/B-ing it against the US copy I’d found in Chicago all those years ago when Oscar jumped up on the turntable. Clearly, this was a once-in-a-lifetime “handsome-off” — with Oscar matching his tuxedo’d elegance against ToJo’s South Wales smolder — so I just had to take a pic.
The German pressing, unsurprisingly, sounded much better than my old US one, so I kept it and passed my first copy of Tom on to someone else who was in need of accepting ToJo into their life. Equally unsurprising was the fact that, while Oscar had enthusiastically hopped up onto the turntable for Side One, he didn’t come back after I shooed him off to flip the album.
I’ve come around to enjoying Side Two on its own ballad-heavy terms, but it admittedly doesn’t pack anywhere near the nonstop Wendell-waving wallop of the album’s first half. Maybe Oscar just wasn’t digging it, or maybe he figured he’d already totally smoked Tom in the handsome-off and saw no need for a rematch. In any case, Oscar, I thank you for being such a wonderful (and wonderfully handsome) companion for so many years…
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I love your mom's "Ewww"! Meanwhile my mom, in-between stacks of Parrot label Englebert Humperdinck albums, would get some Tom Jones in there, many years later she moved over to "eww, what was I thinking?!" when I shared my TJ cds with her that I was digging.
Though I do for you and at at a non-sneezing distance for Oscar’s looks, I have no soft-spot for Tom Jones.
This takes me back to my Fulbright year, living in a “bed-sit” in Cardiff.
Last call at the pubs was 11, but drinking clubs—open on weekends—could serve booze and have live entertainment until 2 a.m.
One was right behind my bedroom. I didn’t realize that until 4 days after I’d signed the lease.
For my entire “academic”year, every weekend meant local would-be Tom Joneses belting out his most ardent hits at max volume until the wee hours Then the bottle cleanup.
I never forgave him for all those sleepless nights.