The year is 1975. The place: The Kensington, a seedy pub in west London. On a small stage in the corner, a band are playing. They are young, scrawny, geeky, spotty, energetic, fresh. They are Eddie and the Hot Rods, they have a residency here, and they are playing “Gloria”. Its three chords ripple while singer Barrie Masters belts out the chorus, “G-l-o-r-i-a, Gloria!”
Eddie and the Hot Rods are part of a thriving pub rock scene, which in turn heralds the first flickerings of the punk idea: stripping music back, returning it to its rock’n’roll roots, playing sweaty pubs and clubs rather than sterile arenas. Being authentic.
Across the Atlantic in New York, later that year, Patti Smith is in the recording studio. Smith, punky and scrawny too, has been a feature of the city’s poetry, performance art and music scene for several years and now she is stepping up to another level, with Velvet Underground legend John Cale producing her first album, Horses. The album’s opening track begins with Smith singing “Oath”, which she has been performing as a poem for some time. It begins with the line: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins — but not mine”, before morphing into an extended, exhilarating version of “Gloria”.
What drew these two acts to “Gloria”, a song that dated back 10 years?
To begin at the beginning: by the age of 19, Van Morrison was already a vastly experienced performer and recording artist. His first band, The Monarchs, formed when Morrison was 15, had toured Europe in the early 1960s, often playing at military bases. Morrison had also played with local Northern Ireland showbands, playing guitar, keyboards, sax, and singing.
Then came Them, a band that started out playing mostly covers of the kind of songs Morrison grew up with; he had spent his formative years steeped in his father’s enormous collection of imported jazz, blues and R&B records. One of these covers was the Delta blues classic “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, inspired by John Lee Hooker’s 1949 version, which was released by Them in 1965 as a single. On the B-side was a song that Morrison had had knocking around in his head for a year or so: a lascivious three-chord trick called “Gloria”.
The song tuned into two elements in the mid-1960s musical zeitgeist. The first was the appetite for authentic-sounding blues — Morrison brought a Delta growl to his vocal delivery. The second was the rise of garage rock, the raw music played by US groups such as The Kingsmen (“Louie Louie”). With its simple chord sequence — E, D, A — “Gloria” could be played by almost anyone.
“Gloria” became a hit in its own right and a staple of Them shows, with the band spinning it out for minutes on end. Radio stations in some parts of the US were offended by the lyrics, in which a woman comes into Van Morrison’s room around midnight; this opened the door for US band The Shadows of Knight, whose version had the amorous woman “call out my name” instead. (A hilarious video on YouTube, filmed with the band aboard a boat in a marina, shows their singer using a fire extinguisher as a “microphone”.) Meanwhile the rudimentary, proto-punk quality of the song’s riff resonated among bands with a certain attitude and energy. The Bobby Fuller Four, the young bucks who had had some success with their version of “I Fought the Law”, incorporated “Gloria” into their shows. The Doors played it regularly between 1968-70.
And a few years later, it resonated with the nascent pub-rock and punk scenes in London and New York. Patti Smith and Eddie and the Hot Rods captured its pulsing energy, its sexuality. Smith kept the subject of the song female (“Oh, she looks so good, oh she looks so fine”), not, she has subsequently explained, because of any sexual fluidity on her part, but because she liked singing it from the point of view of another, male character.
She continues to sing it today. And Van Morrison has regularly returned to the song: in 1993 in a casually cool version with his old hero John Lee Hooker, in his live shows, and on his classic live album, ..It’s Too Late to Stop Now... Others such as Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi have covered it live. These are all fine and dandy, but they are missing the essence of the song: it’s for the young, the scrawny, the hungry.
What are your memories of ‘Gloria’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Skydog; Arista/Legacy; Legacy Recordings; Rhino Atlantic; Rhino; Rhino/Elektra
Picture credit: Dezo Hoffman/REX/Shutterstock