Some songs capture the zeitgeist in just a few words. Such was the case when Sonny Curtis, a first generation rock ‘n’ roller and a member of Buddy Holly’s group The Crickets after Holly’s death, came up with the irresistible couplet, “I fought the law, and the law won.”
Curtis’s song “I Fought the Law”went on to become a classic rebel yell of rock via The Bobby Fuller Four, and then again in the punk era thanks to The Clash. It remains a set text for almost any aspiring guitar-based combo and has been recorded dozens of times, and associated with real-life tragedy and crime along the way. Yet for some years, it lay in relative obscurity as an album track.
“I Fought The Law” was first recorded by The Crickets, on the album they completed after Holly’s 1959 death in a plane crash at the age of just 22. In Style With the Crickets, which became widely admired by rock ‘n’ roll devotees as a seminal LP, contained other Curtis compositions including “More Than I Can Say”, which became a hit for teen pin-up Bobby Vee.
On “I Fought the Law”, Curtis conjures a simple but effective crime-doesn’t-pay scenario of a man who needed money. His brief reign of lawlessness, “Robbin’ people with a six-gun”, ends with his incarceration and ruthless punishment: even as the song opens, he is forlornly breaking rocks in the hot sun. To make things worse, he’s lost his girl along the way. A cautionary tale indeed.
But even with its appealing energy, and Curtis playing forceful guitar in Holly's stead, The Crickets' original never made the charts on either side of the Atlantic. In 1961, and only in the UK, it was one side of the final single from the In Style With The Crickets album, backed with “A Sweet Love.” Another year on, a version by Paul Stefen and the Royal Lancers became successful in their home town of Milwaukee, but failed to trouble national chart compilers.
But late in 1965, “I Fought the Law” didn’t just get out on parole, it was given a full pardon. It was revived by The Bobby Fuller Four, who were starting to gain attention beyond their origins in El Paso, Texas, fronted by a young man who had already been releasing independent singles for four years. “Law” had long been a trademark of their live shows, and after an all-night recording session, it was released as a single and blew up on radio stations across the US. It only scraped into the UK top 40, but it had some notable British admirers: in an early 1966 interview, George Harrison called The Bobby Fuller Four his most listened-to group.
Fuller was to die in never-explained circumstances, found in a petrol-soaked car a few months later, aged just 23. The cause of death, first described, improbably, as suicide, was later changed to accidental. His flagship version of “Law” would live on: the song was covered in the 1970s by Roy Orbison, as a B-side by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakersand, perhaps most incongruously, as a duet by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge.
Then, in the summer of 1978, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of The Clash were in San Francisco, recording overdubs for the band’s second album Give ’Em Enough Rope. Hanging out at the Automatt studio, and pumping the house jukebox with quarters, they played Fuller’s single repeatedly. Such was its impact that they were moved to cut the song with The Clashfor the band’s 1979 EP “The Cost of Living”. It remains one of their best-loved and most-aired tracks. The song has since been revived as a Green Day single, a PoguesB-side featuring Joe Strummer and on a Bryan Adamslive album.
In 1987, punk figureheads The Dead Kennedysrecorded it in reaction to an infamous double killing in 1978 in which San Francisco politician Dan White shot and killed the city’s mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. White was subsequently convicted of manslaughter, rather than first-degree murder, and the band changed the lyric to, “I blew George and Harvey’s brains out with my six-gun! I fought the law and I won”, thoroughly subverting Sonny Curtis’s enduring tale of ill-starred rebellion.
We are keen to hear from our readers. Which version of ‘I Fought the Law’ is best? Do you have particular memories of the song? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits:G Point Entertainment System, Warner Music Group - X5 Music Group, UMC (Universal Music Catalogue), RR Live Recordings, A&M, Sony Music UK, WEA, Virgin EMI, Manifesto Records
Picture credit: Alamy