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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.”
