This obscure track comes to us from Minneapolis label Candy Floss Records, which released pop and garage 45s during its 1967- 69 existence. The song was recently re-released on this interesting-looking compilation of their music. The only individual performer on it whom my research can identify is Arne Fogel, who would later become a prolific jazz singer and musician.
“Red Rover” is a well-done K&K knockoff and an entry in the subgenre of bubblegum songs based on children’s games. It opens with bouncy, rubbery bass and stabs of guitar, and there’s a call-and-response thing between the main guy and the backup singers doing a variation on the “red rover” ritual chant: “Red rover red rover, I’m coming right over, coming right over to staaaaay! Red rover red rover, I’m coming right over, and nobody gets in the waaaaaaaaaaaay!” A series of two-line stanzas tell a story of adulthood and its discontents: A guy and a girl used to play Red Rover as children, but “then a year later, we’d start to date, and play the game much closer/ You’d give me a call, a ring and hang up, I’d jump out of bed and come over!” A year? How old were these people? There’s a funky soul breakdown presumably. Everything drops out but a propulsive bassline and handclaps, and the singer voices such James Brown-inspired interjections as “UH! Chah! chah! chah! All right!”, presumably indicating the kind of unbridled passion that is unleashed when on 13-year-old booty-calls another 13-year-old in the middle of the night. The backup singers nonsensically interject “red rover is easy, red rover is breezy/ red rover is nifty, red rover is swifty!” This break is actually very well done and reasonably funky-sounding. When the story resumes, it is on a sad note: “Now that we’re older, we’ve seemed to change, we have no time for our games/ But if you feel it, just give me all call, I’ll be over [inaudible] todaaaaaay!”
The singer has a high, nervous-sounding, vibrato-laden tone that I quite enjoy. His slightly strangulated tone may be a result of trying to sing outside his natural range. The narrative offered by the lyrics is appealingly economical: Naivete is followed by adolescent sexual awakening and, finally, adult disillusionment. Songs in this vein, such as “1-2-3 Red Light,” tend to focus on a speaker’s frustration that a girl isn’t following the rules of a game she played with the speaker as a child. Presumably trope this is an expression of displaced nostalgia for a time when courtship proceeded according to well-defined rules (or at least, it was imagined to have done so), and thus women’s behavior was easier to predict and control. However, “Red Rover” tweaks the formula a bit by having the lady be in charge of their encounters, leaving the speaker in the emasculating position of waiting for the phone to ring.
“Red Rover” has everything you could want from a Kasenetz-Katz-style pop song: catchy bassline, melismatic chorus soaring over the bouncy instrumentation, bridge featuring a silly homage to a more legitimate genre of music, impactful production, and a runtime of under 2:30. 3 stars.
Bubblegum Reviews 