A few years ago I wrote a blog post about the one-hit wonder band Unit 4+2 and their hit song Concrete and Clay. It was one of the more popular posts I have written, and I always appreciate it when the Internet pays off one of the peculiar rabbits I chose to chase.
To my amazement, since I wrote that, yet more versions of the song have surfaced on YouTube, including a minimalist take by one of my all-time favorite bands, They Might Be Giants, during their early Dial-a-Song days.
Here’s a pair of Spanish ladies known as Baccara, taking their shot:
Fun fact: Baccara first found fame in the Eurovision Song Contest…representing Luxembourg.
Staying on the international scene, a clean cut vocal group from down in Australia called The Thin Men did a very buttoned-collar version for all the nice kids to dance to:
Tangentially, The Thin Men did a version of Mrs. Robinson that I find sort of obscenely catchy. It’s like the two sides of the 60’s cultural divide trying to have awkward makeup sex.
Sweden bought a ticket to this dance through their pop hitmakers The Lee Kings. The vocals have that trademark appealing Scandinavian slur.
The Bob Crewe Generation, an instrumental side project of Four Seasons songwriter/producer Crewe, produced this Herb Alpert-adjacent crack at the tune:
It was Crewe’s record label that released the soundalike Eddie Rambeau version of the song whose success prevented Unit 4+2’s original from realizing its full chart potential in America. Crewe was also the co-head of the best-named band of the 70’s, Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes.
Jerry Lewis’s son Gary led his group The Playboys in a contemporary stylistic cousin that sounds like it’s trying to woo Annette Funicello:
Uhhhh, Finland? I think?
I won’t say this song is idiot-proof – hell, Yesterday isn’t idiot-proof. But it sure is elastic. Here’s a version from a New York comedy club with an unusual arrangement – four vocalists and a coffee wrapper.
Bonus invasion by Tom Jones song.
And if you want to talk about weird convergences, here is a cover version by Björn Again, which is (follow me here), a tribute band from Australia* otherwise devoted to covering ABBA, the pop group from Sweden* which is to this day the most famous winners of the Eurovision Song Contest*. If you told that to the guy from A Beautiful Mind I think his brain would explode.
One hit wonders are a special source of joy to me because they seem like miracles – where a singer or band so preposterously overachieves in creating a moment of joy that a higher power could be at work (maybe the one responsible for magnets.)
These aren’t even all the versions I’ve found. It’s a mystery to me how a song can be at once catchy enough as to be this ubiquitous while remaining, to a certain degree, still ultimately obscure to the world at large. It’s as if it just floats on the edge of our pop consciousness, a perfect mirage of a thing that never resolved into true fame. It remains so striking to me as this little thread running through the tapestry of pop music, one that produces more surprises every time you tug at it. And clearly many people are compelled to tug.