Those of a certain vintage will remember Bus Stop, the sparkling example of mid-1960s pop melodicism, but what’s with crediting this other oddly-named combo? Bus Stop was by the Hollies! It was released in 1966! The attached video is the version the Hollies recorded! Hunh?
Well, no, the attached version is not the Hollies, it just sounds exactly like them in every way, courtesy of my beloved Fountains of Wayne, who displayed their extraordinary skills and pop instincts by reproducing the old hit note for note, instrument for instrument, such that you can barely tell it’s not the original. Why would they do that? For the goggle box, of course! Duh. About 20 years ago, from 2002 – 2005, there was a show on NBC called American Dreams, set in the Sixties, in which one of the characters played a dancer on staff at American Bandstand, the famous Dick Clark top-of-the-pops program – a clever gimmick to showcase the contemporary music. Hits of the day were played by modern musicians imitating the original artists, including Kelly Clarkson, Alicia Keys, Chris Isaak, Liz Phair, the group Third Eye Blind, all sorts of luminaries.* Who better to channel the Hollies than Fountains of Wayne? Who else could more fully understand, or recreate so precisely, such a clever, carefully constructed pop gem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dreams
Contrary to expectation, Bus Stop wasn’t written by Graham Nash, but by then up-and-coming songwriter Graham Gouldman, only 19 at the time, who also wrote For Your Love, the first mainstream pop hit for the proto-heavy metal Yardbirds, before going on later to be a founding member of 10cc, a group that enjoyed some success in the Seventies. He came up with the backbone middle eight while he was actually riding a crosstown bus in Manchester, and his Dad supplied the catchy, stage-setting opening lyric, Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say, “please share my umbrella”. Gouldman has said it was one of the rare times that a piece of music came to him all in a flash, as pure inspiration. From SongFacts:
Occasionally you can wait for some magic, like McCartney waking up with Yesterday already written in his mind, which does happen – it’s like a gift from your own subconscious. Or sometimes, it’s like a tap’s turned on. When I’d written most of ‘Bus Stop,’ I was actually on a bus thinking about how the middle eight should go. And this whole, ‘Every morning I would see her waiting at the stop / Sometimes she’d shop…’ that all came to me in one gush, and I couldn’t wait to get home to try it. When that sort of thing happens, it’s really amazing. But that’s rare. Mostly, you have to do the slog.
A song penned by an obscure teenager might never have seen the light of day, except Gouldman lived just a couple of doors down from an old friend (and by some accounts manager) of Graham Nash, one Michael Cohen, who was also married to the sister of Peter Noone, frontman to Herman’s Hermits. It was actually the Hermits who recorded it first, but the Hollies got wind of it too, by way of the sort of legendary show biz happenstance that sounds too good to be factual:
Graham Nash got a call from his old friend and manager Michael Cohen…He was asking for help with a peculiar predicament. “This neighbour of mine says her son writes songs, and she’s driving me f@@king crazy,” he said. “Every time I meet her, she asks if I can make you come over and listen to his stuff. Look, I know he’s probably awful and it’s an imposition, but I like this woman. We’ve been neighbours a long time. So would you do me a favour? Just go down there and see what this kid’s about.”
The story goes that Nash actually visited the kid’s house along with a couple of band-mates, and had him audition the song right there in the living room, after which he didn’t need to be asked twice. Yes, they’d record it. Absolutely they’d record it. They knew a winner when it was handed to them on a platter, and they took to it so readily that reportedly, the recording session lasted only a little more than an hour. The rest is history.
I’ve no idea if any of this is true, but as newspaper man and screenwriter David Simon has said, it’s too good to fact-check.
Bus Stop is certainly a stellar tune deserving of its chart success on both sides of the Atlantic – I’ve heard it described as a “perfect” example of pop craftsmanship – but despite its composer’s bout of inspiration on a Manchester bus, I feel constrained to note that two years earlier, Paul McCartney wrote the extremely similar and not at all obscure Things We Said Today, which appeared on the Hard Day’s Night album in Britain (God knows where it showed up among Capitol’s U.S. “butcher” releases – who cares?). You can pretty much sing the Beatles song while playing Bus Stop on the stereo, and the two mesh almost perfectly, at least in the verses. I attach Things We Said Today above, for your convenience.
As we usually say in such circumstances, hey, there are worse things to imitate.
Here’s the version recorded by Herman’s Hermits, whose rendition was considerably less energetic, and to most ears inferior:
*Makes me sorry I never watched it!
the needlefish 