“During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me. I don't really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the 60s I never thought in terms of ‘love’ again.”
—Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

“Strike…and cure his heart.”
—Lou Reed, “Venus in Furs”

“Uhhhh.” With this sexual grunt, Tommy James begins his classic single, “Crimson and Clover,” the second Tommy James single to hit #1, charting at the top spot to begin the shortest month of 1969. This song initially entered the Hot 100 the same week of December ’68 as Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” charted number one. The monosyllabic nature of “Crimson and Clover” is a porn film’s vocabulary. The psychedelia of the song, especially the extended instrumental break of reverb at the song’s center, is the soundtrack to the metaphoric money shot.
The first verse suggests the singer’s attraction to a woman, a love for her based on physical attributes, given that the singer “don’t hardly know her.” The second verse begins with “Ahhhh,” a sound implosion of pleasure—actual or imagined, felt or anticipated—induced by the sensory experience of the title’s crimson and clover. The singer hopes she’ll “come walking over,” because he’s “waitin’ to show her”—what? His love for her? His dick—exhibitionist? What he says is “crimson and clover.” The line breaks of the song—“Now I been waitin’ to show her / Crimson and clover”—suggests that the crimson and clover is a representation, perhaps, for his love, or the red cape that he hopes will draw her to him, give her the sense of reverb his heart and soul experience as expressed by the guitar in the instrumental section.
The final verse juxtaposes the line “My mind’s such a sweet thing” with “I wanna do everything.” The sentiment of the second line, that sense of wanting to do everything, has a carnal edge. Perhaps Tommy James is attempting to tap into the Sixties’ sense of sex as magical release, as one more sensory experience that takes you on a magic carpet ride to bliss, to redemption. Even the rhythm guitar is creating something of a carnal bridge between the second and third verses; the rhythm is played as a clicky, chunked chord, the proverbial sound of train wheels that propel the phallic symbol into the vaginal tunnel. Sex rather than love in the second verse, because the love of the song’s first verse is only conditional, expressed as “I think I could,” whereas the final verse is an expression of naked desire, “I wanna do everything.” And the singer wants to “do everything / . . . over and over,” continuously, repetitively, just as the orgasmic guitar and vocal sound washes through the song’s conclusion, an effect achieved by plugging the vocal mic into the guitar amp.
This ending is both dreamy and propulsive. There is a vampirism or mesmerism at play in both lyrics and music, a sense of a pop trope that won’t die, that needs new blood to drink so as to sustain itself another year, another decade. Is the crimson of the song the blood of the singer? The blood the singer hopes to draw from the woman?—a “beautiful feeling” if you’re Charles Manson and one of his followers but that’s not asking Sharon Tate for her opinion. Or is the singer hoping she’s a virgin still, clover green for the singer’s plucking and sexual business? —he’s feeling lucky, four leafed and sweet smelling, the funk on his dick evoking possible thoughts of love. Tommy James would not enjoy #1 bloom again.
My memories of the song are simpler. I watched the band perform nationally on The Ed Sullivan Show, the same evening as one of my athletic heroes, Joe Namath, whose Super Bowl performance with the New York Jets, a victory over the Baltimore Colts, had riveted me just two weeks earlier. I loved the song when it played from the car speakers, and I bought the single to play over and over, listening to what raised a beautiful feeling in my head and spirit. That was the time when bubblegum pleasures still tasted sweet, songs like Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” and 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Indian Giver” the purchases that filled my bedroom with soundscapes and that occupied my preteen soundtracks for spin the bottle and going steady—all of which, ultimately, I felt inadequate to enjoy properly. I knew there was something that I was supposed to be doing, that kiss that was to be given during the halftime walk from our high school’s basketball game to the corner market for an iced soda, but I felt distanced from the stories or romance and embarrassed by the living girls who seemed willing to suffer my attentions. In my head, all was at play, even as I didn’t understand the reality of what I desired, but face to face, the confusions and longings left me uncertain about my role, no script in hand, merely emotionally washed out and spent. Easier to hit someone wearing football pads or jab an elbow for position on the basketball court. Or the games of kickball into the evening or the touch football games on weekend afternoons with the girl who was my going steady interest for maybe two or three weeks. Those were understandable expectations and actions easy enough to produce. Romance? Desire? These songs weren’t taking me there or making what I felt easier to accept. And maybe it’s because what the songs promised underneath the surface was a claim I wasn’t ready to stake.
The times were different. As Marie Howe’s poem, “The Letter, 1968,” reminds us in her opening lines: “That he wrote it with his hand and folded the paper / and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it with his tongue”—simple carnal excess in our current times of removed electronic communications. The physicality of those days, the touch and effort, so many body parts and senses at play, stuns when compared against a pad or screen. And patience—we knew patience then: “he brought it to the box and slipped it through the slot / so that it might be carried through time and weather to where / I waited on the front-porch step.” Howe’s words and line breaks force the reader to journey with the mail, to wait for the delivery, to practice patience for where this poem might be sending us besides the persona’s stoop. Howe forces additional patience in the next lines: “(We knew how to wait then—and it was what life was, much of it.) So, when the mailman came up the walk and didn’t have it, / he might have it the next day or the next”—and I’m impatient in this world that expects a response yesterday to the text. How did we manage before?
Howe’s poem does end its journey. Finally, she has the letter that “bore the mark / of his hand who had written my name, so I might open it and read / and read it again, and then again and look at the envelope he’d sealed, / and press my mouth to where his mouth had been.” My. And I might have understood something about the feeling of that closing line in those days at the end of the Sixties. (Let us hope future generations might share in these emotional and tactile experiences.)
But the future, our future, “Crimson and Clover’s” future, is approaching, already in play before Emily Witt’s own Future Sex. The film Venus in Furs, making use of the novella of the same title by 19th century writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose name gives us masochism), released in 1969/1970, two years after the classic Velvet Underground song on their debut album, whose La Monte Young-like drone anticipates shoegaze, plays off these Tommy James images. It’s a film in which the characters “wanna do everything.” The stage is set early: in the midst of erotic hijinks at a jet set party, a woman is whipped by another woman and then a playboy, Klaus Kinski, who has watched the whipping, cuts the whipped woman and drinks his crimson fill. The film’s setting shifts to Rio, and the color scheme, dreamy and surreal, appears to be an inspiration for scenes from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series. The film’s trumpet-playing protagonist, a Chet Baker or Miles Davis equivalent, constantly questions who’s alive and who’s dead—questions raised by the song and by the themes of a novel published in ’69. Life and death, flesh and blood, hammer and nail(les) tumble from the screen and pages and music like so many clothes from a dryer.
Former student and writer Alison Fields, interested in my writing about “Crimson and Clover,” wrote me a letter in which she bristles at the song, but admits to being inspired to “[re]consider what [“Crimson and Clover”] must have sounded like in 1969. Not to the hippies, committed hipsters or rock snobs of the world, but to an average teenage girl in a suburban bedroom, light years removed from Woodstock (even if that suburban bedroom happened to be in upstate New York).” Or in Bullet Park. John Cheever’s novel of the same name was published in ’69. The novel is a David Lynch-like expose of the tawdry, materialistic, suburban nightmare, “the legions of wife-swapping, Jew-baiting, booze-fighting spiritual bankrupts”: characters adrift in their houses and at their parties amidst cigarettes and booze and pills; teenage boys with their nude cutouts hidden in dictionaries; fathers against sons; Hammer against Nailles. These are characters restrained by their propriety from giving in to their imagined love affairs (Didion in ‘67: “the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire”) and engaged in heroic, saintly battle with beasts from the bog (a snapping turtle).
The proper wives are repulsed by the progenitive members displayed in progressive musicals like Oh! Calcutta! and by the Anglo-Saxon realities of the musical’s language. Bullet Park is where bad breath withers erections, where life’s grand “climax” and “finest hour” is “[m]outhwash, fire trucks, chain saws and touch football!” These Bullet Park characters are, in the words of Hammer’s mother, planting the seed of Hammer’s purpose that provides the novel’s narrative arc (for what purpose does a Hammer possess without its Naille(s)?), examples of “ ‘[lives] lived without any genuine emotion or value.’ ” The utilitarian value of the hammer is only realized if it can drive soundly its nail, “over and over.” A “beautiful feeling,” indeed. And the sexual tropes keep on coming.
Early in Cheever’s novel, Nailles’s teenage son, Tony, takes to his bed for over three weeks because he’s sad. Medical science—a general practitioner, a psychiatrist, and a sleep specialist—proves ineffective in determining what ails Tony or how he might be helped. Amidst the things of his room, including the tape recorder with his commentary on his parents’ sexual lives and a particular disgust for his father’s sexual energy, Tony atrophies, a more concrete expression of a spiritual and cultural malaise that afflicts his parents and their Bullet Park associates who “have less dimension than a comic strip.” Or, who may serve as parodies of a comment in which Didion, in a 1966 essay titled “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” quotes Joan Baez: “ ‘The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people’. . . . ‘The hardest is with one.’ ” Substitute “at a cocktail party” for “with ten thousand people” and add person after “one”—there is the psychological world of Bullet Park. From his bed, heard on a plastic transistor radio or played on the record player in his room, Tony would have listened to Tommy James’s single, “over and over,” and who knows what thoughts would disturb him or deepen his sadness. Relationships that exist in the confines of a pop single don’t always translate easily to flesh and blood reality.
A year later, Oh! Calcutta! takes the stage, though its earlier approximations have been foreshadowed in Cheever’s novel’s pages, when Nailles’ wife, Nellie, Tony’s mother, attends a Village production for a class on “modern theater.” A cast member undresses as part of the production, and Nellie, though “[s]he intended to be a modern woman and to come to terms with the world,” nonetheless finds herself disturbed: “If these were merely the facts of life why should her eyes be riveted on his thick pubic bush from which hung, like a discouraged and unwatered flower, his principal member.” She leaves this play “unnerved” by what she knows grows crimson amidst pubic clover.
Nellie’s off Broadway play has moved mainstream with Oh! Calcutta!. This 1970s Broadway smash, with skits, songs, and dance numbers written by the likes of John Lennon, Sam Shepard, Edna O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett, had a twenty year run. Exploring the sexual revolution, the musical was performed mostly in the nude. One scene has a Jack and Jill sequence that reframes the listener’s reading of the Tommy James male narrative. Amidst the sounds of bubblegum music and dressed in children’s bibs and attire, Jack and Jill, the folk tale couple, engage initially in childish games, though the language is far more adult. For example, Jack tells Jill, “I have an imagination and a cock.” Jill responds by telling Jack, “I’m scared of you. . .because you’re a boy.” And because he’s a boy, Jill tells Jack, “[you] just want me for petting and playing.” When he’s tired of playing with her, she says, he’ll “find a new girl.” But eventually, after a game involving a ruler and whether he’s longer or she’s deeper (Jill wins, ha ha), Jill tells Jack, bound by their tale, that she’s in love with him. So, Jack, of course, forces himself on Jill. Afterward, Jill lies inert, comatose after the rape: “Hey, baby,” Jack asks, “what’s your name? You never told me your name.” Jill comes tumbling after, indeed. Or that love she had professed falls down. And down.
Then Jack begins to manipulate Jill, who continues to lie inert as a doll might—or as a dead woman would. (It’s as if Susanna Moore is finding inspiration in the conclusion of this scene in her dark, tragic novel, In the Cut, a novel about language and words and a perverse, psychotic desire to kill and then mangle—life achieved in the cut that causes death.) He opens her eyes; he forces her lips upward into a doll-like smile: “I wanna do everything.” He has opened her sexually, toyed with her, and now he treats her like the (sexual) toy she is to him. “What a beautiful feeling” it has been.
In a song perhaps about fantasies, Fields, continuing in her letter, feels some sadness for those of her imaginary teenage girl. Fields lingers in the girl’s suburban bedroom: “I can imagine her reclined across her bed, listening to Tommy James’ breathy, girlish vocals transformed by tricks of reverb. She probably won’t notice that the song, behind the veil of psychedelic cliché, was not so far removed from Brill Building pop. Speed up the sluggish tempo and you’re not too far from Del Shannon or Gene Pitney. Add more vocals and you could have doo-wop. Replace the instrumentation with acoustic guitars and you’re almost to the Everly Brothers. But my teenage girl only hears that morning after tempo and the repetition of Crimson and Clover, conjuring the glamour of a red and purple velvet world she’s too young to get into and too naïve to realize is just an illusion.” An illusion that the AM songs of ’69 keep on bringing, though the grittier timber of, say, Sly Stone speaks to a more realistic, broader, and less self-absorbed world.
And maybe that’s true when Joan Jett, this rock jukebox of covers, cuts her own version of “Crimson and Clover” (recent runner up as a 4 seed in the March Faxness tournament, David Turkel’s essay a compelling personal adventure through the lens of Jett’s version), in the early 1980s, for her 1981 album I Love Rock ‘n Roll. (Ironically, both the album’s title song, itself a cover, and her cover of “Crimson and Clover” chart in the Billboard Top Ten.) Ronald Reagan is serving his first presidential term. The optimism inherent in the Sixties has given way, post Watergate, post Iran hostages, post Carter Presidency, to a malaise and funk—and to a revival of activism in music as the 70s came to a close. It’s a time when the Specials and Clash and other bands are raising political and cultural awareness as they take on topical issues and bring a wider array of world musical styles to their ska and rock palette. It’s the advent of hip hop: Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow and all of the Wild Style elements unleashed.
Jett, however, doubles down on rock roots. The Arrows, Gary Glitter, The Dave Clark Five, Lesley Gore—these are among the bands she mines for songs in the initial years of leaving the Runaways. (She’ll continue in this vein, covering songs by the Sex Pistols and the Replacements and the Rolling Stones, among many others, over the years. Indeed, she’ll cover another #1 classic from ’69, “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone. Jett could release a double or triple cd of cover songs.)
This bubblegum hit, with a dark, sexual subcurrent, fits into the image of the former Runaway guitarist. She’s a “Cherry Bomb” tossed into the midst of the middle class and to social expectations, Bullet Park or otherwise. And in “Crimson and Clover,” Jett maintains the gender lure of James’ original: seducing a woman straight up when “[she’ll] come walkin’ over,” staking her claim that she “want[s] to do everything.” Let the wah wah and reverb begin.
“Ahh,” she starts, and the guitars, low and rumbly, respond, this call and response between singer and rock’s thrill. Two verses and it’s romantic and dreamy and we’re lulled into a vision: “I don’t hardly know her / But I think I could love her.” It’s infatuation. She looks good. Now we need a spider’s web to capture her if she’ll just get closer, closer, closer for the crimson and clover.
And, close, finally, enough, one minute into the song, the musical pace quickens as does the pulse, heart quivering, or lust, for fifteen or twenty seconds, before pulling back from the kiss or the entangled skin. “Yeah,” Jett almost sneers at the start of the next verse. The look Jett gives in the video, knowing and over-the-top, as she sings that she wants “to do everything,” both emphasizes the carnal subtext and ridicules it. It’s her crimson, engorged lips and genitals that promise a “beautiful feeling” for both. And here, two minutes in, the band lets loose, to pull back into reverb and fuzz and the title “over and over,” until the final measures are just the band rocking to the Tommy James tune.
What would Fields’ teenage girl in her suburban bedroom do with Jett’s remake? For Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill riot grrrl, Jett’s cover was a revelation: gender expectations undercut, a gal rocking with a voice that might make Mick Jaggar envious, and the willingness to entertain a same gender sexual encounter. Hanna would take from Jett’s performances permission to stake stronger claims, with “Suck My Left One,” “Carnival, and “Daddy’s Li’l Girl” taking all the clovered illusions of romance off the table, pulling the curated insta curtain aside to show there’s no magic but mere base crimson monstrous desire at the heart of too many so-called love songs.

J. W. Bonner has been a musical junkie since the 1960s. These days, he teaches at Asheville School (Asheville, N.C.) and writes for various publications, including essays for March Xness.