Mose Allison – "I'm Not Talking" (1964)

If I said things is splendid

Someone would be offended

If I said things were awful

It might just be unlawful

I'm not talkin', it just don't pay

Mose Allison had it right.  You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so you might as well just keep your damn mouth shut.

Allison was born in 1927 on a farm near Tippo, Mississippi.  He took piano lessons when he wasn't picking cotton, and wrote his first song when he was just 13 (which happened to be the same year electricity came to Tippo).

After earning a B.A. in English at LSU and spending a couple of years in the Army, Allison moved to New York City in 1956.  He performed with jazz artists like Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, and Zoot Sims before forming his own trio.

Mose Allison then

But he is best known for his blues records.  He is such a convincing blues performer that Jet magazine asked him for an interview because they thought he was black.

Allison, who is 88 years old, only recently retired from live performances.

I had never heard of Mose Allison until I ran across the Yardbirds' cover of his "I'm Not Talking" a couple of weeks ago. 

Mose Allison now

A few days later, his name popped up in Merritt Tierce's 2014 novel, Love Me Back. 

One of the characters in Love Me Back is Jimmy, the pianist at an expensive steak restaurant in Dallas whose patrons usually request show tunes or hits by Elton John or Billy Joel. 

Jimmy's tastes run more to Chopin and great jazz pianists that the restaurant's customers have never heard of, like Allison:

[W]hen Jimmy stepped out for his break at nine . . . [h]e would sit in the driver's seat [of his minivan] with the window rolled down, listening to Mose Allison.  

Mose Allison wrote some very good songs.  He was a voracious reader, and his song lyrics were always intelligent and often quite witty – one critic called him "the Mark Twain of jazz."

The musicians who have covered his songs include the Who, the Clash, Leon Russell, and Elvis Costello.  In 1996, Van Morrison recorded an entire album of Mose Allison songs.

"I'm Not Talking" (which was released on the 1964 album, The Word from Mose) is one of Allison's best original compositions.  Allmusic's Matthew Greenwald has written that the song "is a veiled threat of pure attitude, something that the author was never short of."

Here's Mose Allison's recording of "I'm Not Talking."  In the words of the late Stuart Scott, it's as cool as the other side of the pillow:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

The Misunderstood – "I'm Not Talking" (1966)

I'm not talking

That's what I've got to say

Dude, think about those lyrics.  The singer says, "I'm not talking."  But he IS talking, isn't he? 

It's like when that old guy Ulysses sharpened a wooden stake and used it to put out the single eye of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who was about to eat him, and then told Polyphemus that his name was "Nemo," which is Latin for "Nobody."

Ulysses blinds the Cyclops

So when the rest of the Cyclopes asked Polyphemus who had blinded him, he answered "Nobody," so they all thought Polyphemus was crazy and ignored him.

The Misunderstood has been called "The Greatest Lost Band of the 1960s."  

They were a psychedelic/garage band who got together in Riverside, California, in 1963, and moved to London in 1966 after being discovered by John Peel, who later became a legendary BBC radio DJ.

John Peel

The Misunderstood managed to record only seven tracks in London before they broke up.  Several of the band's members had issues with their UK visas and work permits, and lead singer Rick Brown returned to California after he got drafted.  (Brown hightailed it from Army bootcamp rather than go to Vietnam, and ended up in India, where he became a Hindu monk.  In 1979, he returned to the U.S. and was granted amnesty.  He is now a gemologist and jewelry designer in Bangkok.)

But despite having left behind so little in the way of recorded music, the Misunderstood are considered one of the greatest psychedelic bands of all time.

The Misunderstood

As Classic Rock magazine put it, 

The truth is that this band were so far out on their own, so individual and innovative, that you can only wonder at the set of circumstances that conspired to prevent them from becoming the iconic name that was surely their destiny.

The Misunderstood's cover of "I'm Not Talking" is out there.  It opens with a brief tape-played-backwards intro, then gives you a little psychedelic sitar and a double-time blues figure.

The tempo abruptly slows when Brown starts singing, then goes back into double-time for the instrumental breaks.

The Yardbirds' cover of "I'm Not Talking" had unpredictably herky-jerky rhythms, but I'm sure the band carefully sketched everything out in advance.  In their version of the song, The Misunderstood appear to be on the verge of a complete loss of control.

That's an illusion, of course – it's what they wanted you to think.  There's a fine line between a band leaving the impression that it has lost control, and actually losing control.  The Misunderstood didn't lose control when it recorded "I'm Not Talking" – not for a second.

Click here to visit the official Misunderstood website.

Here's the Misunderstood's "I'm Not Talking":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Yardbirds – "I'm Not Talking" (1965)

The things I say at midnight 

I ain't gonna say in daylight

(Actually, it's not the things I say at midnight that I worry about – it's the things I say at one in the morning, or two in the morning, or sometimes even later.)

The next nine installments of 2 or 3 lines are going to be all about the music.  (That's right – no tales of my misspent youth, no travelogues, no windy philosophizing.)  You think 2 or 3 lines is just a wildly successful pop music blog, and that it is.  But it's also a high-concept piece of performance art.

We'll feature three versions (the original and two covers) of three different songs.  (Three times three is nine, of course.)  One song is going to lead to the next, which will lead to the next . . . until we're back where we're starting – with the Yardbirds.

The original Yardbirds (1963)

The Yardbirds were ahead of their time . . . which wasn't necessarily a good thing for them.

They had five consecutive top-20 singles in the U.S. between April 1965 and June 1966 – all of which still sound great today – but none of their albums cracked the top 50, and they were miles behind the Beatles and Stones in popularity.

A few years later, the rock music landscape looked very different.  Rock groups focused more on albums than singles, and heavier, blues-inspired bands like Cream, the Jeff Beck Group, and especially Led Zeppelin were all the rage.

Cream's lead guitarist, Eric Clapton, got his start as a member of the Yardbirds.  He was succeeded as the band's lead guitarist by Jeff Beck, who was in turn replaced by Jimmy Page – the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, which he formed in 1968 when his fellow Yardbirds decided to pack it in.

Beck, Page, and Clapton

Clapton, Page, and Beck are #2, #3, and #5 (respectively) on Rolling Stone's "100 Top Guitarists List."  All three have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame more than once – Clapton as a member of the Yardbirds, as a member of Cream, and as a solo artist; Beck as a member of the Yardbirds and as a solo artist; and Page as a member of the Yardbirds and as a member of Led Zeppelin.  

"I'm Not Talking" was a cover of of a 1964 song written by jazz pianist/singer Mose Allison.  The Yardbirds' version was the second track on their first studio album, For Your Love. 

Most of the tracks on that album featured Eric Clapton, who had left the band several months before the album was released in June 1965.  But three of the tracks – including "I'm Not Talking" – were from Jeff Beck's first sessions with the Yardbirds.

"I'm Not Talking" has a devilishly irregular rhythmic structure.  I've spent considerable time trying to count it out, but it's been all for naught.  (If you think you've figured out how to notate it, please tell me what you've come up with – I'd love to see it.)

The next 2 or 3 lines will feature an even more complicated cover of "I'm Not Talking," and then we'll look at the Mose Allison original.  That will lead to a post about a Mose Allison cover of a different song, another cover of that song . . . anyway, we'll eventually get back to the Yardbirds.

So sit back and prepare to enjoy three full weeks of 100% narcissism-free 2 or 3 lines posts . . . promise!

Here's "I'm Not Talking" by the Yardbirds:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: