Bobby Fuller Four: I Fought the Law
Purchase mp3
(Slightly tangential to our theme - a related last minute entry)
If I don’t misremember, most of my
association with the jukebox is vicarious: I read lots of Archie comics and
watched shows like Happy Days. There weren’t any jukeboxes where I grew up, but
that’s probably because the Jukebox was rather American. That’s not to say I had no direct
experience with them, but mine was limited to that period of my life when I had
my own money and was of an age where my tastes would have run in that
direction. I recall a “Wall-o-matic” I ran across in a booth at a diner oncet,
and a couple of full-size Wurltizer kind of things in a bowling alley or maybe
a bar I might have been in.
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| Wall-o-Matic |
When I was in the the USofA for one year in
1965-6 and had just started to listen to the kind of music that would have
likely been stocked in a jukebox, I was just a little too young to be putting my
own quarters into jukes. A few years later, when I next returned to the land of ”Good and
Plenty”, my musical interests had veered toward music like “Long Distance
Runaround” by Yes - clocking in at around 13 minutes and not the kind of
material that was generally used to stock most jukes.
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| my 45 collection |
However, back to ’65, when I had just started
listen to juke-potential music a-la top 20. I was in the habit of using my
allowance to purchase the occasional 45 and had begun to amass a collection of
the things – storing them safely in a case made specially for that purchase (that's mine above). One
of my first purchases was a copy of Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law”. I don’t
recall ever having watched this clip – looks like it might have been made for
TV – but I couldn’t help but grin at how politically inappropriate it must seem
today. In further doing my research, I see now (and wasn’t previously aware)
that Bobby Fuller was dead less than a year after his version made the charts
(and the jukeboxes of America).
Written by Sonny Curtis (who took on Buddy
Holly’s lead role with the Crickets after Holly’s death a few years before
this version came out), the song has since been covered and covered, and is ranked
well up the list in Rolling Stones Top 500 of all time.