Thursday, January 1, 2015

Spiders & Snakes (1974)

Performer: Jim Stafford                                          Writer: David Bellamy
Highest US Chart Position: #3                               Label: MGM Records
Musicians: Jim Stafford, Richard Bennett, Alan Lindgren, Emory Gordy and Dennis St. John

Before there was Wal-Mart there was K-Mart. And before there was K-Mart there was Payless. Before there was Payless there was Pay-n-Save. And before there was Pay-n-Save there was House of Values. Like the A&P in the Midwest, House of Values was the first of a kind of store that would now be called “big box” in our town when I was growing up. It was a marvel at the time. Sure, we had a couple of grocery stores that carried a lot of things, but this place had entire departments. There were cameras, sporting goods, furniture, camping gear, home furnishings and, most important of all, a record department. My associations with Jim Stafford’s “Spiders & Snakes” are from walking through the House of Values and hearing it playing overhead from the store speakers. I’m sure I must have heard it on the radio prior to that, but something about it made me really listen that day and from then on I would really tune in whenever it came on the radio. Though in content it is essentially a novelty number, something about my grade school brain gave me a frisson of excitement that I couldn’t explain until much later. After Stafford’s big hit he briefly became a household name as he landed a television variety show that aired in 1975, and appeared as a guest on many other shows throughout the decade.

The song begins on the downbeat with a distinctive mildly distorted guitar line, part funky wah-wah and part country twang. After once around it goes up an octave and then the group vamps for a couple measures on the turnaround with the guitar descending into the verse. Stafford doesn’t sing the song so much as he speaks it, something that made him stand out on the radio but wears extremely thin on his albums. The lyrics recount a schoolboy’s encounter with a girl named Mary Lou who wants to sneak off with him and get romantic. They wind up down by the swimming hole and she says, “Do what you want to do.” Stafford’s lecherous laugh is a bit of misdirection because he suddenly turns juvenile and shakes a frog at her. This leads to the falsetto chorus, and female background singers, with Mary Lou saying she doesn’t like spiders and snakes. The second chorus takes place maybe a year later but while he’s still in school, and with similar results. The backing track is tremendous, as Richard Bennett gets sort of grinding feel with the wah-wah pedal, and mutes the strings for a rhythm break at the end of the chorus. The lyrics are also great in that they can be taken completely innocently or looked at symbolically, with the spiders being hands and the snake being . . . you know, and Mary Lou wanting something else besides just sex as proof of his love. My favorite line in the song is, “I was nervous as you might guess, still looking for something to slip down her dress.”

Stafford, while not a country artist per se, was certainly a part of a crowd that worked along the fringes of country. His early musical experiences found him performing with Gram Parsons, who would later become part of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, as well as Bobby Braddock and Kent LaVoie who would become founding members of the folk-rock band Lobo. After working as a comedy writer for the Smothers Brothers in the late sixties, his first hit single was “Swamp Witch,” which managed to crack the Top 40 in the summer of 1973. That single, as well as its follow up, were produced by Lobo’s Bobby Braddock. But "Spiders & Snakes" has yet another country connection, being written by David Bellamy who, along with his brother Howard, hit number one on the charts in 1976 with “Let Your Love Flow” as The Bellamy Brothers. Incidentally, the B-side of their hit was written by none other than Jim Stafford. Stafford’s single was released on November 10, 1973 and began a gradual ascent up the charts, peaking the following spring on March 2, 1974 at the number three spot. On the B-side is a real throwaway tune called “Undecided” that, for the most part, simply has Stafford moaning and shouting over a bass guitar playing a slow blues. It wasn’t until this chart success that he was able to go into the studio and record enough songs to fill out an album that included his prior singles on his self-titled debut. But "Spiders & Snakes" will always have big-box department store and symbolic sexual associations for me.