Another song that I had previously never heard due to having left it off the CDs I burned to listen to in the car. Girl group/soul-pop number released on Kama Sutra in 1968. These five ladies are the Teri Nelson Group:
I can’t seem to find any information about Teri Nelson or this group, but I would guess they were a real band and not a studio concoction. “Sweet Talkin’ Willie” was released as the single for Sweet Talkin’ Teri, their only LP release. The song is credited to Elliot Chiprut, a Brooklyn-born songwriter responsible for scores of Music Explosion, Ohio Express and Fruitgums tracks, including “Simon Says.” In fact, he got his first break after sending a demo of “Simon Says” to Jeffrey Katz, who was a childhood friend. According to this profile, his post-bubblegum life was fairly interesting. He got into writing music for TV, made a pile of money, and retired to Virginia (no, I don’t know why a rich person would choose to live in Virginia) before having a spiritual awakening and realizing that materialism is bad. “Finding his higher self, Chiprut, who moved to DeLand [Florida] in 2012, wrote ‘Practical Wisdom from Kabbalah and Edgar Cayce,’ which he published [in 2013].”
“Sweet Talkin’ Willie” is a genially paced number warning the ladies about a player with “one thing on his mind.” It has a girl-group sound kind of in between the Butterflys’ “Good Night Baby” and the Fabulettes’ “Try the Worryin’ Way.” Teri Nelson has a sweet, appealingly girlish voice with a hint of huskiness in it. The sound is pretty sparse, with a lot of space in the mix. Opens with a jaunty r&b piano riff, and is based on a simple, driving drumbeat and bassline. The group members hoot “doo-doo-doo-doooo!” and back up Teri with pretty harmonies. The sound is very well done — doesn’t rock very hard, but it doesn’t try to, instead using variations in line length, rhyme scheme and metrical foot to hold the reader’s attention.
The song lacks conventional verse-chorus structure, instead opening with a pair of six-line stanzas with an ABCCCB rhyme scheme:
Girls, let me tell you bout Willie
He’s such a sweet-talkin’ guy
He’ll give you the moon
And he’ll croon
You will tune (?)
But he soon will bring tears to your eyes
As you can see, the verse shifts midway from a (roughly) trochaic to an anapestic foot. At the end of two such “stanzas” a high-pitched piano arpeggio joins in, and the lyric transitions into a slowed-down rhyming triplet:
He acts kind of cool
But he’ll make you his fool
If you listen to all of his lies
He’ll make you cry
Girls, watch his lies.
Then there’s a bit where the guitar builds tension by playing the same note repeatedly, like right before the “do you love me” part in the Dave Clark Five’s “Do you Love Me,” and a trumpet solo that reprises the vocal melody. There’s another set of two stanzas, the last of which abandons the anapestic rhythm in favor of a series of couplets:
Willie’s like a sailboat, so smooth
Like a wild wolf that’s on the loose
If you just ignore him, you’ll find
Willie won’t be wastin’ your time
Then the opening verse repeats, and it all starts to fade out at 2:05. This song makes good use of irregular rhythms and sounds to suggest the inconsistency of Willie’s behavior. Its overall “restrained” sound, which eschews the cathartic release of a chorus, suggests the internal restraint that must be employed when dealing with Willie, and the final stanza’s more even line length, rhythm and sentence structure enact the greater tranquillity that will be achieved when Willie’s target learns to “ignore him.” I don’t know if Elliot Chiprut’s Kabbalistic wisdom is legit, but he had one hell of an ear for prosody. 3 stars.
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