The Juke Joint

Back in the time before I discovered my musical inclinations, there was always 90.5FM as played by my dad in the car and in the house, and there was this one filler song that they always played, the kind of instrumental that gets thrown in between when there’s nothing else to play. I first heard it when I was still in primary school, probably late 80’s early 90s.

The thing about this song is, it had such a jazzy and catchy riff that it simply stuck in my head, and even in those days when I didn’t know much about jazz I could already hum it from memory. That was probably my first exposure to the rhythm of the blues and the sounds of jazz. As I became a big time fan of the blues, my curiosity about that song just grew stronger and stronger.

The problem was, I never knew what it was called. Due to its rather anonymous nature, the radio DJ never bothered to mention who it was or even the title of the song. Much as I liked the song, I couldn’t find it anywhere and I had to be content with being reminded of its existence only when it played on the radio. Searching through the discographies and sound clips of composers like Ennio Morricone and Henry Mancini, whom I thought would have composed something along that line, were futile.

They played yet again the other day, and this time I somehow had the presence of mind to ask my dad what it was called. He didn’t quite know either, except that the song name had the word “Tijuana” in it.

So off to the Internet I went, going in circles all around this huge mess of what Mick Jagger had unknowingly prophesised in Satisfaction as “useless information”. Without going into the gory details, my intensive detective work paid off at long last.

“A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass.

It was bold and brassy, with a groovy walking bass line and a driving shuffle. The melody was by no means flashy, just a simple line played by a lead trumpet backed by a brass section and interspersed with the kind of tremolo-drenched electric guitar found mostly in surf tunes or spaghetti westerns. In fact, after listening more intently it had a distinct mariachi brass feel (the clue is in the Tijuana part) rather than a jazz big band sound.

The whole combination oozed 60’s vibe, but then again that’s because it WAS in the 60s. The sound of that era was also firmly etched in my mind by The Shadows (especially this song) and The Ventures. It seems to me that was truly the age of instrumentals, a time when an instrument could carry the whole song without vocals simply by playing a memorable melody that could paint a picture in the listeners mind. It could have been a trenchcoat-wearing sleuth walking the sleazy streets, a spy threading through the corridors of his nemesis’s large castle, a slicked-up bachelor cruising the highway in a Cadillac or a surfer-dude (before they were called dudes) riding the waves on the beach to win the adoring gaze of bikini-clad and immaculately-coiffed girls.

And perhaps, that’s influenced the way I approach music. Less fancy notes (I couldn’t play them even if I wanted to anyway) and more meaningful lines, the kind that I can hum in my head.

I’m not sure many of today’s songs would have lasted that long in my memory if they were playing back then.