The Shingaling Ain’t the Thing

• Marsha Gee, “Peanut Duck”

Ah, let’s bring back the days of the attempted dance craze. It’s hard to believe anyone involved with this record actually thought the Peanut Duck had a chance of “sweeping the nation,” but God bless ’em for pretending, anyway. In many ways this is typical calculated trash-pop (which, hey now, is not necessarily a bad thing), but that shoulder-shaking piano riff is better than most, and plus, what the hell is up with the singer? I reckon she betrays herself as stoned out of her mind with her delivery of the line “Everybody’s doing the Peanut Duck,” not to mention all the laughing & the quacking. (That’s right, I said quacking.) And then there’s that – well, I dunno what that is that closes out the song. Some rough devolved form of scatting? Is she having a stroke? Whatever it is, it’s something to hear, and this is a song to listen to over & over.

It’s on One Kiss Can Lead to Another, a four-disc comp of girl-group singles from the 1960s, which was under my Xmas tree this year (thanks S!). You can buy it here. And you can read about dance-craze records in this here article, which mainly focuses on the classic “Land of 1,000 Dances.” (And I of course now have the urge to put on Patti Smith’s takeoff of same, “Land,” which blew my head into many small pieces when I was 16.)

One Kiss was reviewed on Slate by Charles Taylor a year and a bit ago, and he starts off by singling out “Peanut Duck.” It’s worth reading and it’s here. Taylor often irritates me, but I must admit that when he writes this –

the rock 'n' roll faithful understand that more of the secrets and the mysteries of the universe are contained in nonsense syllables ... than in third-rate high-school poetry like “I Am a Rock” or “Both Sides Now”

– I’m all right on, brother, testify. A wop bop a loo mop a lop bam boom.

Non Sequitur Corner: Ate last night at a fine hole in the wall on Gerrard called Simon’s Wok, a vegetarian Chinese place that quixotically insists on serving mock meat dishes of all stripe (mock beef, mock pork, mock duck, mock goose, mock scallops, mock shrimp, etc.). And when the fortune cookies came around other people got the usual vague aphorisms but I got the most weirdly specific fortune I’ve ever gotten: “A nice cake is waiting for you.”