Herman's Hermits – "I'm into Something Good" (1964)

I asked to see her next week

And she told me I could

Something tells me I’m into something good

At the recent Pourhouse Trivia playoff finals, the host played snippets of three pop songs, and asked us to identify the women who wrote each of them.

The first clip that was played was an excerpt from the 1964 Herman’s Hermits recording of “I’m into Something Good.”

One of my teammates threw out Carole King’s name as a possible answer.  That made sense – King and her then-husband Gerry Goffin wrote a number of hit songs in the sixties, and “I’m into Something Good” sounded like it could have been one of theirs.

But King and Goffin were a team, and I understood the question to be looking for a solo female songwriter – not a male-female songwriting duo.  

Carole King and Gerry Goffin in 1959

After she divorced Goffin in 1968, Carole King moved from New York City to Los Angeles and eventually recorded her legendary Tapestry album, which included a number of songs she wrote by herself.  But I knew the Herman’s Hermits song dated from the time when King and Goffin were still married and writing songs together.

As it turned out, Carole King was the answer they were looking for.

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Later that day, I fired up Wikipedia and learned that Carole King and Gerry Goffin had, in fact, co-written “I’m into Something Good.”  

I wrote to Pourhouse Trivia to point that out, and got this response:

We were aware of this fact when creating the audio question, which is why we used the phrase “credited as a songwriter” in the question.  All three songs from that question were co-written by teams comprising men and women.  I don't understand why your team assumed that the answer needed to be a solo songwriter.

The questions at the Pourhouse Trivia playoff finals were read by the host.  But they were  also printed on slides that were projected on a large screen so all of the fifty teams that were competing could see them.  

Here’s the slide with the Carole King question:

The question does ask for “the woman credited as a songwriter” – not “the woman credited as the songwriter.” 

On the other hand, the question’s headline – which was printed in a larger font than the rest of the question, and was also in all caps – was “SHE WROTE THAT,” which implied that a woman wrote each song by herself.  

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I spent the first third of my legal career working on consumer protection matters at the Federal Trade Commission, and the rest at a law firm with the biggest advertising law practice in the country.

My bread-and-butter work at my law firm was reviewing advertising copy and telling my clients whether it was at risk of being challenged as being false or deceptive.  If I thought it was problematic, I would suggest appropriate revisions to reduce the legal risk. 

If the Carole King question had been an advertisement that a client had sent me for review, I would have suggested that he revise its language to make its meaning clearer.  

Here’s one possible revision:

QUESTION 1: SHE CO-WROTE THAT

For each of the following songs, identify the woman credited as a co-writer of the song.  Please note that none of the correct answers is heard in the clip.

Here’s another possible revision that would have taken care of the problem:

QUESTION 1: THEY WROTE THAT

For each of the following songs, which were written by male-female songwriting teams, identify the female co-writer.  Please note that none of the correct answers is heard in the clip.

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Most of my clients pushed back when I advised them to make changes in their ad copy.  They might defend their original language, or propose minor edits that didn’t go as far as my suggested revisions.

Let’s imagine how the discussion with the client might have gone if I had proposed the changes noted above:

Client:  I don’t understand why you think the question needs to be changed.  We ask people to identify the woman “credited as a writer” of the song.  Carole King was “a” writer of the song – we didn’t say she was the only writer of the song. 

Me:  I agree that the “credited as a writer” statement is literally true.  But I think the government would view your language as deceptive.

Client:  But you just said the “credited as a writer” line is true.  So how can it be deceptive?

Me:  The government focuses on the overall net impression of what you say rather than just its literal truthfulness.  They would evaluate your question based on what claims they believe the average person would take away from it.  The government would view the question as deceptive if its total impact was misleading – even if every individual statement in it was technically true.

Client:  It’s not our fault if people don’t read the question carefully and end up misunderstanding it.

Me:  The government would say that if people misunderstand your question, it is your fault – not theirs.  You need to write the question so it’s the meaning is clear and unambiguous.  

Client:  How do they know how people interpret our language?  Wouldn’t they need evidence that people are actually being deceived?

Me:  Not really.  They view themselves as experts on how the average person would interpret the question – so they don’t need actual proof of deception.  You could try to gather data that proves them wrong, but that’s not easy to do.  And one more thing: keep in mind that you might still lose even if your evidence showed that the majority of people understood the question correctly.  If a substantial minority of people are confused, that’s enough for the government to win its case.

Client:  So why did you suggest the changes you did? 

Me:  The big problem with your question is its heading: “SHE WROTE THAT.”  I think that the typical person who read that would assume that the song was written by a single female – not by a team, and especially not by a team that included a male.  That’s why I suggested changing that language to either “THEY WROTE THAT” or “SHE CO-WROTE THAT.”

Client:  But we really like “SHE WROTE THAT” for the heading.  Can’t we throw in a disclaimer of some kind in a footnote?

Me:  As I said, the government looks at the net impression of the question as a whole.  So it might be possible to add a disclaimer that cures the possible deception caused by the “SHE WROTE THAT” heading.  But that disclaimer would have to be clear and conspicuous.  In other words, the qualifying language must be clear and unambiguous in meaning.  You can’t use confusing “legalese” – and you can’t bury the disclaimer in the fine print at the bottom of the question where it might go unnoticed.

Client: What about if we stuck with the “SHE WROTE THAT” heading and changed the rest of the language as you suggested – “For each of the following songs, identify the woman credited as a co-writer of the song,” or  

“For each of the following songs, which were written by a male-female songwriting team, identify the female co-writer.”

Me:  That would be a step in the right direction.  But the government could still argue that the meaning of the heading wasn’t consistent with the meaning of the rest of the question, and that the overall net impression of the question as a whole was confusing.  If the heading is misleading, that’s hard to overcome.

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Pourhouse Trivia runs trivia contests seven days a week, with a different set of questions each day.  That means they have to generate thousands of new questions each year.

Generally speaking, their questions are very good.  But no one’s perfect, and occasionally a question that’s worded in a somewhat confusing way slips through their screening process.

I think that the wording of the Carole King question was a bit ambiguous.  But at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter.  

We only lost one point by not answering that question correctly.  So it wouldn’t have made any real difference if we had gotten it right – we were still destined to finish out of the money.

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“I’m into Something Good” was first recorded by Earl-Jean McCrea, who had previously been a member of the Cookies – a New York City-based R&B girl group who had their biggest hit with “Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby),” another Gerry Goffin-Carole King composition.  

It seems that Goffin and Earl-Jean had had an affair while he was still married to King that resulted in her becoming pregnant and giving birth to a daughter.  (King stayed with Goffin for several years after the affair came to light, eventually divorcing him in 1968.)

Earl-Jean’s version of “I’m into Something Good” made it to #38 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in early 1964.  Herman’s Hermits covered the song that summer.  Their version was #1 hit in the UK, but peaked at #13 in the U.S.

Click here to listen to Earl-Jean’s “I’m into Something Good.”

Click here to buy the Herman’s Hermits cover of “I’m into Something Good” from Amazon.

 

Republica – "Ready to Go" (1996)

I’m standing on the rooftops shouting out

“Baby, I’m ready to go!”

I’ve never had a cool nickname, and I’m envious of anyone who does.  (I know a guy who goes by “Ace,” and I would love it if people suddenly started to call me that – hint, hint!)

The next best thing to having a cool nickname would be to be a member of a trivia team with a cool team name.  I didn’t get to choose the somewhat boring names of my trivia teams – those teams got their starts before I joined them, so they already had names.

A lot of trivia teams have tried to come up with cool names.  But most of them failed – there are a lot of very lame trivia team names out there.

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For example, the team that’s won the last three Pourhouse Trivia championships is called “What Would Snake Do?”  That’s a takeoff on “What Would Jesus Do?” but substitutes the “Snake” character from the The Simpsons (who’s a career criminal) for Jesus.  (Obviously it would not be wise to make one’s life choices based on what Snake would do if he were in your situation rather than what Jesus would do.)  

Snake from The Simpsons

Another very successful local team called itself “Dave Martinez School of Management” during Dave Martinez’s seven-year-plus tenure as the manager of the Washington Nationals.  When Martinez was fired last summer, that team changed its name to “Miguel Cairo School of Management” in honor of the man who replaced Martinez as the Nationals’ interim skipper.  (Blake Butera was hired as the Nats’ permanent manager last fall, but those guys haven’t changed their name to reflect that development yet – they seem to be sticking with Miguel Cairo, who’s now a coach with the Baltimore Orioles.)

One of my favorite team names – “Equatorial Guinea Pigs” – requires a bit of explaining.  Most nights, we have a “last word/first word” question.  The correct answer to such a question is a combination of two names or phrases that have a word in common – the last word of one is the first word of the other.  For example, if you were asked to combine the name of the star of the City Slickers movie with the name of an object often used by fortune tellers, the correct answer would be “Billy Crystal Ball.”

The “Equatorial Guinea Pigs” took their name from a last word/first word question that asked you to combine the name of the only African country to have Spanish as an official language (Equatorial Guinea) with the name of the herbivorous rodent belonging to the Cavia family that is a popular household pet (guinea pig).

Finally, here’s a team name that I do not approve of: “Does This Handkerchief Smell Like Chloroform To You?”

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My trivia team calls itself the “Einsteins” – which probably strikes you as kind of dull.

Technically, our team wasn’t named in honor of Albert Einstein.  Rather, it was named for a fictional trivia team that was named in honor of the inventor of the theory of relativity.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the eleventh episode of the eighth season of The Office – which was titled “Trivia”:

Andy Bernard, worried that he will not be able to meet the 8% quarterly sales growth figures that [his boss] asked for by about $800, proposes that everyone in the office buy paper to alleviate some of the burden, but no one is willing.  He then asks Oscar Martinez to make a rounding mistake in the books. Oscar tells Andy that he does not have time to make the mistake because he is leaving for a trivia contest with a $1,000 prize in a bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Andy, encouraged by Darryl Philbin and Jim Halpert, decides to take the entire office to Philadelphia in an attempt to win the money and make up the sales growth difference. 

At the bar, which turns out to be a gay bar called the Liberty Well, Andy divides the office into three teams: the “A-Team” consisting of Jim, Darryl, Andy, and Ryan Howard, the “B-Team” consisting of Stanley Hudson, Phyllis Vance, Creed Bratton, and Cathy Simms, and the “Just For Fun” team consisting of Kevin Malone, Kelly Kapoor, Erin Hannon, and Meredith Palmer. . . .

Initially, the Dunder Mifflin “A-Team” does well but soon falters.  However, the "Just For Fun" team does much better than expected . . . . [They] and eventually win thanks to Kevin's correct answers. 

If you watched The Office, you’ll immediately get that Andy assigned the four people that he thought were the dumbest of his co-workers to the “Just for Fun” team.  Once that group surprised their co-workers by winning the competition, they changed their name to the “Einsteins” – hence, my team’s name.

The Einsteins from The Office did pretty well until they got a question about who was responsible for the famous E=mc² formula.  All the other teams knew that the answer was “Einstein” – but despite being named after him, the Einsteins answered “Thomas Edison.”

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They say that life imitates art.  And whoever “they” are, they are right.

Several years ago, our trivia host asked the teams who were playing that night to identify Time’s “Person of the 20th Century.”  

We wondered if the correct answer might be a World War II-era leader like FDR or Churchill (or even Hitler).  But Time’s choice was Albert Einstein, of course – whose name had never entered our mind.     

Since then, we’ve had two other questions for which Einstein was the correct answer.  We missed them both.

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The last 2 or 3 lines featured Elastica’s “Connection.”  Today, we’re featuring Republica’s “Ready to Go,” which was released in 1996 on Republica’s eponymous debut album. 

I’m not sure I realized until recently that Republica and Elastica were different bands.  They were both active in the mid-1990s, both had female singers, and both broke up after a couple of albums – so it was an easy mistake to make, especially for someone who is very busy on a number of important projects!)

Click here to listen to “Ready to Go.”  It’s bangin’!

Click here to buy “Ready to Go” from Amazon.