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| The inevitable end-result of dance moves as a concept. |
The Hit
A naked bass line gets “Cool Jerk” started, and the instruments come in one by one as if designed to get the next part of your body moving. It’s a good tune with a better groove – it comes from Motown - the perfect one-off summer single in some ways. Like, uh, more than one song from that era, The Capitols wrote their hit in 1966 hoping to grab the coat-tails of a popular dance of the day, “The Jerk” (which (probably) looked like so). Where does the “cool” come in? A Detroit-area spin on the move inspired the name, but everyone involved didn’t want to risk getting the single pinned under a censor’s stamp by naming it “Pimp Jerk.” Because I’ve got space to fill, enjoy some potential apocrypha on where the “pimp jerk” came from:
“The story goes that there were neighborhood pimps who were too cool to dance the jerk like everybody else at the clubs, so the joke was that they did a pimp jerk.”
The Rest of the Story
The only people the Internet forgets are the ones that too many people forgot before the Internet existed. To rephrase the issue, you can’t get interviewed in the Internet age if you died before the Internet. Unfortunately, two-thirds of The Capitols died before even dial-up: Richard Mitchell (back-up vocals/keyboards; born Richard McDougall) died of “unknown causes” back in ’84, and Samuel George (vox/drums) died in 1981 from getting stabbed in a “domestic dispute” The band’s third member, Don Storball (back up vocals/guitar; born Don Norman), is alive (at least the last time a Wikipedia editor checked in), well(?), and working for the Highland Park, MI police department. He seems the likeliest subject for an interview, too, given that he wrote not just “Cool Jerk,” but also the band’s first swing at fame three years earlier with “Dog and Cat” (which didn’t take because something about “juvenile lyrics,” about which...not inaccurate).
The band had actually broken up the time Storball wrote “Cool Jerk,” but they decided they had something after they worked it up. The American music market agreed, the single took off, and industry people rushed to cash in by recording not one, but two albums in ’66 alone: Dance the Cool Jerk and We Got a Thing That's in The Groove. I can fill in the “what happened next” with in a phrase, and one that’s worth isolating:
“...both [albums] featuring mostly covers of popular Motown and soul songs.”
I have no doubt that The Capitols' fall had multiple causes, but, to float some big ones. On the one hand, this isn’t the first time in this project that I’ve seen a one-hit act grasp to stay in the spotlight by crapping out covers; whether the decision came from band or management, the “standards era” was over (i.e., when it was OK for everyone to reinterpret the same set of songs), so anyone who tried to live by covers had to knock said covers out of the (fucking) park (they didn't). The other hand points to a harsher reality – i.e., that Storball didn’t have any more hits in him, except the one that he landed with both feet. Nothing about their other originals - “We Got a Thing That’s in the Groove,” “Zig Zaggin’” or (assuming it’s not a cover) “I Got to Handle It” – sounds like anything you can’t miss. To get really harsh, those singles contrast badly against the covers they recorded, songs with better structure and catchier melodies; it had the effect of showing how much better The Capitols could be with better material (e.g., “Hello Stranger,” “Knock on Wood,” even freakin’ “Working in the Coal Mine”; I don’t know a lot of versions of “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” so this one works very well, TY).
For what it’s worth, I’m trying to be more honest about how I talk about the bands and artists I review, but without being a dick about it, or even unfair. Based on what little I know about The Capitols, they sound like a story as old as recorded sound: competent musicians form a band and try to take it somewhere; only the good ones get to (and by a variety of paths), and that leaves the rest – i.e., competent musicians with only an idea or two on how to stand out. The Capitols were a middling Motown band and my response to that is, big deal, I’ve seen dozens of middling punk/indie-rock bands in my days, maybe even scores: I don’t begrudge anyone a shot at it. If you get famous, God bless, just don't expect me to like it.
…but now I feel compelled to mention that Motown Records used its in-house session band, the Funk Brothers, to record The Capitols only hit. Yeah...
With that, I want to close on a high. David Hajdu, the author Love for Sale (good book, btw), passed on a great anecdote about the interplay between music and life. “Cool Jerk” was his jam as a kid, all the way down to nicking his (much) older sister’s 45 out of her room (because, as a fan, he deserved the better copy), and slum-recording the song onto his “cruisin’ jams” mixtape. Real soundtrack-of-your-life stuff, basically, or, in Hajdu’s words:
“Without aggrandizing my teen years, which were eventful only by the standards of a teenager, I can say that ‘Cool Jerk’ was part of the soundtrack of multiple occasions memorable to my high-school friends and me. How could I capture the place that the song held in our lives?”
I have…dozens of songs (scores?) that play that exact same role in my life, but that doesn't mean I'd vouch for the raw quality of half of ‘em (and that misses how music works in a lot of ways). The Capitols had their time, did their thing. It’s a shame they’re sort of vanishing from the historical record (not even the Go-Gos cover saved them!). And, on that level, I’m glad I caught ‘em.
About the Sampler
Because there’s neither a lot to get excited about, or some inspired second act (e.g., Brenda & Herb), I didn’t create a sampler for The Capitols. I’ll throw out a link to Cool Jerk: The Best of The Capitols on twitter/Spotify. For everyone else, I think I gave a fair enough sampling of them in the above.
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