123 Songs: "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" (1976)

The best love song of the 1970s

Today’s edition of “123 Songs” features a tune that sends me in perpetuity. Regardless of age, I never tire of it.

Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” is the greatest wedding reception first dance song ever.

If you decide to spend the irrational amount of money it costs to put on a wedding, whether you want it to be or not, “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” should be your first song.

The song was created for swaying lovers. Bishop may have written it as a monument to the closing-time bar dance, but if you told me that “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” was to be the first song played at your reception, there’s a stronger chance I’d RSVP.

You can’t tell me that when you listen to it that you’d don’t feel an undying devotion to the person with whom you plan on spending the rest of your life.

Yes, it’s gritty, but it’s honest.

If we’re allowed to employ “God Only Knows” with its “I may not always love you” opening line, then surely we’re good with “I must’ve been through about a million girls.”

Dammit all, love is tricky and, to Elvin Bishop, it ain’t about the journey.

It’s about the dadgum destination.

Sittin’ On a Bale of Hay

As much as Elvin Bishop’s work is categorized as “Southern Rock,” he’s a midwestern guy.

If you scroll briefly through his biography, you’ll find that the overalls-clad guitarist was actually born in Glendale, California and raised in Iowa and Oklahoma before moving to Chicago.

It’s like when I found out the writer of the most unmistakable Southern Rock riff ever was from Southern California and played in Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Bishop’s connection to the blues early on cemented his desire to become a guitarist.

As he puts it, “I found out about blues via the radio in Oklahoma, which was about the only way you were going to get to hear any because they had things strictly apartheid…this was the 50s before Civil Rights.”

When he received a scholarship as Bishop puts it, “to go anywhere I wanted to,” he chose University of Chicago as it was the heart of the blues scene in the United States.

There, he eventually met up with Paul Butterfield in the early 1960s and helped him form the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, one of the definitive blues-rock outfits of the era.

In fact, PBBB could be considered a major influence on much of the late-sixties blues-based rock movement that was happening throughout America. Their 1966 album, the aptly-titled East-West, is a road map of sorts that leads everywhere from Macon (The Allman Brothers Band) to San Francisco (Jefferson Airplane, Santana).

This was an era that saw groups like the Allmans, Santana, Love, the Chambers Brothers and Sly and The Family Stone have integrated line-ups.

Paul Butterfield Blues Band was among the first to do this. They never received the fanfare that the above artists did, but they were beloved by those artists all the same.

And PBBB guitarist, Bishop, was not in the company of hacks, either.

He had to share a stage with Mike Bloomfield, a giant among the greats of the era. He essentially had to play Dickey to Bloomfield’s Duane. He was the other guy, but he held his own.

So when he went solo in 1968, it was hard to imagine that a cog in such a massive wheel would actually find chart-topping success.

Throughout the late-1960s and early-1970s, not only did he front his own band, but he was the guy who was called upon to sit in with others.

You can hear him on a Fillmore West performance of the Grateful Dead’s version of “Turn on Your Love Light” as well as on his own song, “Drunken Hearted Boy” with the Allman Brothers on the deluxe copy of their definitive live album, At Fillmore East.

Bishop had cache among his peers, so when he put his band together, he knew he could attract a collection of unknowns ready to be known.

This is how Mickey Thomas came to be.

“…He’s Gotta Better Idea of What to Do With It”

I challenge you to find a vocalist in the pop music era who did more with less notoriety than Mickey Thomas.

You don’t know who Mickey Thomas is. Most of us don’t. I certainly didn’t until about seven years ago when I stopped believing the husky-voiced Bishop was the vocalist on “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.”

He’s credited with the song, but he couldn’t be the singer of it, right? I’d heard him sing before and that wasn’t him.

This is when I found out it was his back-up singer, Thomas: the Georgia boy with a voice from God.

South Georgia, too. Cairo. A city of less than 10,000, grandly named after Cairo, Egypt. It’s basically a gateway to both south Alabama and panhandle Florida. Super duper Deep South.

An area of the country where the fellas think anything short of Merle Haggard is sissy.

And here’s this guy whose voice doesn’t even come close to sounding like Merle Haggard. Or Waylon Jennings. Or Johnny Cash.

Mickey Thomas’ tenor is pronounced, booming and controlled. The most impressive part of any male vocalist’s arsenal is when he can hit falsetto with almost the same power he does with head. Think Sam Cooke or Steve Perry.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that Thomas is in the same league.

When “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” hit, his star (at least within the industry) rose, which put him in the sphere of Jefferson Starship. If you’ve heard “Jane” (think Wet Hot American Summer) or “Find Your Way Back,” you’ve heard Mickey Thomas.

When Jefferson Starship became Starship (with Grace Slick), Thomas sang on some of the biggest hits of the 1980s. Whether you like them or not, you know them: “We Built This City,” “Sara” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” You never knew the singer’s name, but you damn well knew the singer.

Those songs are legends in their own way. “We Built This City” was voted as the number one “Most Awesomely Bad Song of All Time” by VH1. “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” was given a dream of a treatment when Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader lip synched to it in their criminally underrated film, The Skeleton Twins.

For about a decade, Thomas’ voice was everywhere and we were too simple to even ask who the guy was.

The fact that Elvin Bishop believed his back-up singer was worthy of such a beautifully-written tune speaks volumes about the singer.

It Ain’t a Southern Rock Song…

…it’s white-boy soul.

We need to get that out of the way first thing because too many Southern Rock compilation albums advertised on television in the 1990s included “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” along with .38 Special, Blackfoot and Molly Hatchet.

While a lot of Elvin Bishop’s 1975 album, Struttin’ My Stuff has the flavor of Southern Rock, it’s much more than that. Strangely, there’s a number of very danceable tracks on it.

With producer Bill Szymczyk manning the controls (The Eagles, Joe Walsh, James Gang), Bishop and his band were able to explore genres that very few Southern Rock acts were doing at the time.

Listen to “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey” and you’ll hear more-than-subtle traces of reggae with its opening line, “Down in Kingston, I was drinking.” Or their cover of “My Girl” which is almost proto-disco.

“Fooled…” appears at the midway point of an album chockfull of boogie tunes. It’s quite literally the only track on Struttin’ My Stuff with a low beats-per-minute rate.

Track placement is very important with any album and “Fooled…” appearing in the middle of a rollicking collection of songs is intentional.

The title, itself, is a contradiction. Bishop pushes two discrete phrases (“fooled around”, “fell in love”) in the realm of relational dynamics together almost as a joke.

“Get it?? I had sex AND subsequently caught feelings.”

The title also operates as simply another way to say “look what I done.”

The count-off to the song is heard through the one-two-three snare-and-floor-tom hits from drummer Donny Baldwin. It’s a waltz.

In Rock and Roll tradition, the narrator of “Fooled…” is a Lothario. He’s driven by his oversized libido and when the women in his life are ready to get close, he’s out the door.

We never find out why this particular woman has created a sea change in his heart, but it’s happened and maybe we’re not supposed to know why. He’s the kind of guy who’s more than comfortable to kiss and tell, but won’t spare details when it comes to actual emotions.

You never get the feeling that he’s proud of his troubadour past as he’s telling us his story, but he also doesn’t seem thrilled about the present, either. He’s confused, maybe even a little scared.

It also needs to be noted that this is a minor key song.

Love songs with minor chords are going to have a fraught dynamic with the concept of love. And it’s not as if Bishop’s a poet laureate or anything. He has a message and he gets it across simply. That’s why we love it.

As is the case with the best popular music, we relate not necessarily to the message, but its delivery. This is what makes distinctly Southern songs (even when they’re not written by distinctly Southern people) so top shelf in the pantheon.

Yes, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell all cornered the market on observational Southern stories over the last two-plus decades, but even the souped-up guitar rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd had Ronnie Van Zant spinning yarns of the good, bad and ugly aspects of the South’s checkered history.

(This is the reason Drive-By Truckers should be compared to Skynyrd, by the way.)

Skynyrd saw itself as an extension to the British Invasion bands of the sixties like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Cream. These guys were deferential in their love of the blues, but were attempting to carve out a harder path amid the growing turbulence of the era.

Bishop and his crew were more in line with the Allman Brothers in that there was a direct pathway from them to their heroes: Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, et al.

So when I refer to “Fooled…” as “white boy soul” instead of Southern Rock, I believe it to be a purer distillation of its source(s) than something by Skynyrd. It’s not to say one is better than the other, of course; just that they channel their influences differently.

If you listen to Bishop’s guitar throughout the track, you will hear a steady rhythm that almost goes out of its way to blend in with the other instruments. The upstroke “chick” sound from Bishop’s glorious Gibson ES-335 repeats every third beat, melding with a piano that does the soloing in between lines of verse.

Of course, there’s that wistful harmony line played throughout by both Bishop and guitarist Johnny Vernazza, the intent being to mimic a pedal steel guitar. This is very much an Allman Brothers Band move.

Bishop, also, wants his band to create as much space around Thomas’ voice as it can.

The only time we get any instrumental noodling, of course, is during Bishop’s guitar solo.

It’s a gut-wrenching, tour de force of sloppy virtuosity that sits somewhere between the economy of Freddie King and the bombast of Angus Young. He knows exactly which notes he wants to play without knowing which order they’re going to arrive.

This is improvisation at its best and it can only sound this plotted by doing what Bishop did for years with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The man emptied the tank playing with Mike Bloomfield every night. He learned some stuff because he had no other choice.

The melody of the song is what makes it and while Elvin Bishop may not be the star of this particular show, he’s the one that allows for others to shine.

Mickey Thomas Can Belt It

Mickey Thomas shines.

From the outset of the song, he starts at 10. There is no build up to something bigger (maybe prior to the guitar solo). He’s already there.

Consider the second word that comes out of his mouth: must’ve.

“I MUST’VE been through about a million girls…”

First off, this is next level lyricism using a contraction. To hell with your “I Am the Very Model” pablum and give me a guy who needs to get something off his chest right quick.

Maybe it would’ve felt more authentic had Bishop been the guy to sing “Fooled…”, but hearing Thomas immediately wrench that “must’ve” from the recesses of his very being makes one a believer.

Like all great pop singers, Thomas uses his vibrato tastefully. It’s there, but he, along with countless vocalists before him, recognized the main difference between the operatic and the understated was knowing what not to do.

Thomas’ voice is also a testament to how regionality sets Rock and Roll apart from its predecessors. Like when he sings “cried” the very next line, you can feel South Georgia.

No elocution lessons needed. Just a guy who means it.

History tends to forget that the best pop music vocalists are from the South. Name a legendary singer from 1955-1965 and chances are they’re from below the Mason-Dixon line.

Aretha*, Sam*, Ray, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny, Little Richard, James, Wilson*: all Southern born, all with voices born from the soil.

*Moved North early in their lives

I know it’s borderline heretical to invoke the aforementioned artists and Mickey Thomas in the same breath, but I simply don’t believe a guy with Thomas’ preternatural gift can’t be viewed similarly, at least as a vocalist, simply because he was a boy when Rock and Roll took off.

He grew up in a town whose median household income today is $33,000. Small town life is real and if one has recognizable talent, they tend to find a way to make the best of it.

(Jackie Robinson was, also, from Cairo, GA)

There’s something mystical about final verses in rock songs from this era. Maybe I can only think of two: this one and “The Boys Are Back in Town,” but I love the final verse of “Fooled…”

We’re sweaty from Bishop’s scorcher of a guitar solo and here we’re dropped back into the third and final verse as if we never left. As if Bishop interrupted Thomas.

The nerve!

“Free, on my own, that’s the way it used to be/But since I met you baby, love’s gotta hold on me”

There’s something so declarative in the way Thomas sings “free.” It’s succinct. It punches. Again, this goes back to a sense of disappointment, maybe even frustration, in the narrator’s circumstances. Catching feelings was not the plan.

However, when he arrives at “love’s gotta hold on me,” he can no longer keep the joy he feels under wraps.

Whomever Mickey Thomas lists as influences on his singing, I can almost guarantee they exist in the delivery of this line. It comes from years of singing in the church choir while simultaneously listening to Stevie Wonder.

By the time we reach the outro, it’s nothing but the chorus on repeat and vamping from Thomas. Vocal pyrotechnics with many blessings from Bishop.

The call and response of “fooled around” as we fade out of the song is celebratory. Call and responses always are.

The narrator is finally okay. Or at least he will be. He’s still dumbfounded by being a one-woman guy, but aren’t we all a little flummoxed when we fine the one?

And maybe this is why Bishop had Thomas sing “Fooled…” For all the carousing he talks about, it just sounds more palatable coming from a well-heeled tenor than a guttural bass.

It was the right choice.

Do Right By “Fooled…”

Radio programmers really fucked up when they willingly played the sliced-up version of this song.

It’s a common practice, by the way, usually to the detriment of a song’s existence, but, for the life of me, I can’t understand this one.

“Fooled…” is four minutes-and-thirty-five seconds long. This isn’t “Stairway to Heaven.”

And even if you responded with, “You’re goddamn right it isn’t, you just compared Elvin Bishop to Led Zeppelin,” I would say, “Okay, but why am I also being forced to listen to all of ‘Green Grass and High Tides?’”

There’s no uniformity to the process. Do the classic rock stations not remember that FM broadcasting became radio and the artists’ best friend, especially as Rock and Roll took hold in the United States.

More clarity equaled more song.

Regardless of duration, popular music has always adhered to verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. “Please Please Me” is two minutes long and it’s exactly this. Hell, it even has a bridge.

We’re going to punish “Fooled…” for taking its time because that’s what perfect songs do.

I’ve never once liked anything by The Ramones.

The radio edit that stations continue to play consists of a truncated opening, bridge and guitar solo and two verses instead of three. Insipidly, they play the first verse then the second chorus (which leads to the bridge) and castrate the bridge because who gives a shit?

“Fooled…” is a song that makes you anticipate. Hell, it’s a song about anticipation. Even if you told me that the guitar solo’s longer than it needs to be, first off, I’d tell you to go die. Secondly, is an extra thirty seconds really going to affect your day?

Anyway, I’m rambling on and while you’re reading this overlong essay about a dumb Rock and Roll tune, you could be listening to it.

So, do yourself a favor and listen to it.

The four-minute-and-thirty-five-second one.