Do the Loco-Mickey
Look, I don't know why my brain works like this, OK?
An end-of-week note for you, dear Code 47 readers, that's a bit different than my norm. It's split into two — a light and a heavy. We'll start with the light. It's ... weird.
I don't pretend to know how anyone else's brain works, but it often feels like my conscious mind is just riding shotgun alongside the subconscious, which seems to largely run the show. It seems to work out most of the time! But every so often, completely out of the blue, a question pops fully formed to the forefront of my conscious mind, and if I can't figure out the answer, it drives me crazy. The important thing I can't stress enough is how random it is — the stuff just seems to come out of nowhere. Today, I was sitting in my car in the rain, waiting to complete a curbside pickup of some new faucets (more on that in a minute) at Home Depot. I was watching Star Trek clips on YouTube (because of course) and all of a sudden, zap. A fully formed question appeared in my mind:
"Who was the female black singer who had a big hit when she was very young, very young, and the song was then covered decades later by another woman and became a huge smash pop-chart-topping sensation all over again?"
And I'm sitting in my car, and I just sigh. Like whatever little peace and quiet I'd been enjoying was gone. If I didn't figure it out, it was going to haunt me.
I was already exchanging texts with my dad at this time, and he knows his music well. I sent him the above and he drew a blank. I thought about just asking the Twitter hivemind, but my curbside pickup was taking a while, so I had time to indulge in a little brain exercise. I had two instincts right away, but I also knew both were wrong. But they were in the ballpark. I kept thinking that the singer was nicknamed Little Miss Dynamite. But I also knew that that was wrong — that was Brenda Lee's nickname, and she's as white as I am. I had a very clear image in my mind of the singer, and she was black. I could picture her dancing! But even though I knew Little Miss Dynamite was Brenda Lee, that was stuck in my mind. I put it to the side and tried to think of what else I could come up with about the singer. Not much else bubbled up — I was absolutely certain that she was black, and was very young when she had her big hit. I also had a pretty strong sense that her success was either before the Civil Rights milestones of the 1960s, or perhaps during it. She had had mainstream success and popularity even with whites before that was commonplace, or at least when it was still relatively new.
I was totally confident in that. Could I remember her name or the name of the song? No.
I decided to focus on the song itself. I kept coming up with the chorus of "Hey Mickey" — you all know it. "Hey, Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey." Again, this felt like it was in the ballpark, but not quite right. I didn't think "Hey Mickey" was a cover of an earlier song (this was mostly wrong, actually, but I was still right enough for my purposes — I'll explain in a minute). I kept trying to come up with the chorus of the song I actually was thinking of, but "Hey Mickey" was now in my head.
So that wasn't going to work.
My new faucets came out then, and I was off to my next errand — a stop at the grocery store. As I was pushing my cart around, I kept bouncing off the same walls. "Little Miss Dynamite" — but no, that's Brenda Lee. "Hey Mickey" — but not that, just somehow like it. I knew that the singer was a black woman, and that she'd been very young when she'd had her hit, and that it had been in the late Fifties or the very early Sixties. At the latest.
I couldn't get anywhere.
I finished shopping, put everything into the trunk and began driving home. And I was almost there when I blurted out loud, "'The Loco-Motion'! Little Eva!"
It had been there in my brain all along, I guess. It just took a while for my brain to call up the right files. But as soon as I did, it all fell together. Not Little Miss Dynamite, but Little Eva (Eva Boyd, photo, above). Little Eva was indeed a black woman, and indeed had a hit with "The Loco-Motion" in exactly the time period I was thinking — it was recorded in 1961, when she was only 17, and released a few months later, in 1962, when it topped the charts in the U.S. and Canada and hit No. 2 in the U.K. And yes, this was only a few years after the first time a black artist had chopped the U.S. charts — not unheard of for Little Eva, but new, as I'd felt.
"The Loco-Motion" was then indeed covered by another woman decades later, specifically, Kylie Minogue, in 1987, when she herself was only 19. (It's been covered a bunch of other times, but that was the one I was thinking of.) The "Hey Mickey" thing was undoubtedly just my brain reaching for a female singer with a big, high-energy pop hit in the 80s — "Hey Mickey" was a few years earlier, and contrary to what I thought, was indeed a cover, but of a relatively little-known song from 1979, "Kitty," by British pop band Racey — American singer Toni Basil turned it into a hit with a modified cover in 1981.
Anyway, to be honest, none of this had much of a point. This is just how my mind works. I have no idea whatsoever why I suddenly needed to recall the name of both Little Eva and "The Loco-Motion," but this ate about an hour of my afternoon.
And that, friends, concludes the light portion of today's performance. I hope you enjoyed it. The heavy portion will be comparatively brief.
As I mentioned above, this whole little musical history journey began when I was sitting in my car waiting for a curbside pickup off some faucets. The ones we had in the master bathroom were barely trickling out water and rather than bring a plumber in, at significant cost and pandemic-related hassle, I decided I could probably do it myself. (I was successful. This is not relevant to the point, but I wanted that on the record.)
I'd ordered the faucets at dinner hour on Thursday. I'd limited my search for ones available at my local store, to minimize shipping delays. They were ready for pickup about 22 hours later.
And recall what I did next — I went grocery shopping. Ever since the pandemic began, I now instinctively size up any supermarket I'm in to check for shortages — you all remember those first wild months when global supply chains were reeling and you just couldn't find certain things. Today, things looked good! Didn't notice anything out of place.
Stable supply chains. Effective real-time inventory management. These are things that we expect from our hardware stores and supermarkets. We usually get them. When we don't, we get angry.
We do not expect these things from government, and we should get angry about that. Examples have abounded this week. I wrote a column in the Post about a damning federal auditor-general report into management of PPE before the pandemic, and during the opening months. It wasn't good! Speaking of not good, Ontario has been stumbling about in a panic trying to get tens of thousands of AstraZeneca doses into pharmacies before they expire on Monday. I doubt they'll make it.
We do not have the capacity in our government that we take completely for granted from our retailers. This is a problem. We should do something about this.
Anyway, as per the new routine, check out this Twitter thread below for what I did this week. Click the tweet below and scroll down, or click this link.
Otherwise, have an amazing weekend. We'll talk again next week.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney