Along Comes Mary

One of my pet peeves is when a lyric is noded and attributed to the wrong artist... is the concept of research alien to lyric noders?...

Anyway, to set the record straight, the song Along Comes Mary was not originally done by The Bloodhound Gang on their maturely titled Hooray For Boobies album, as the writeup above claims. It was originally done by The Association a good thirty years earlier.

The song was originally written by a young unknown named Tandyn Almer . However, it was submitted to the band as sheet music, not as a demo, and producer Curt Boettcher, at that time just starting his career, couldn't read music.

As a result, he got the backing band (standard session players of the time, mostly members of the Wrecking Crew) to play a head arrangement he came up with based on a more complex version of the chord sequence Almer had written, and then improvised a new melody over the top, but retaining Almer's rather incomprehensible lyrics.

As a result, Boettcher should have got a 50% writers' credit, but never got credited, and Almer's name remains the only one on the record.

Although the record was banned by many stations ('Mary' was thought to be a reference to marijuana), it was still a huge hit, and rightly so, as it was one of the all time great psychedelic pop singles.

The Association went on to have numerous hit singles such as Cherish, Windy, Come on In and Never My Love (the second most played track on US radio of all time), usually in a soft-pop mode, rather than the psychedelia of their breakthrough hit.

Curt Boettcher moved to Gary Usher's Together Records, where he worked on a number of extraordinary albums that didn't get released until after his death, and earned his living doing Levis commercials.

Tandyn Almer made one appalingly bad solo single before his record label realised he didn't have the ability to write a hit single. He later did lyric rewrites on a few Beach Boys tunes in the mid-70s, but essentially his career was over before it began.

And Along Comes Mary ended up being better-remembered as an album track by a bunch of talentless comedy pseudo-punks than as the minor masterpiece it is.

"Along Comes Mary" is a 1966 song by pop music group The Association, written by Tandym Almer (who was not in the group). The song was commercially successful, reaching #7 on the Billboard charts.

It is hard to describe, in either technical or non-technical terms, what "psychedelic" means in terms of music. Many songs that have nothing in common musically feel "psychedelic". That being said, this song is psychedelic. The bass line growls while the rest of the music and vocals seems to twist and swirl around. The lyrics change from a staccato chant to a soaring chorus. They do suffer from being hard to understand, except for that chorus:

Along comes Mary...and my empty cup is as sweet as the punch!

As for what the lyrics are about---take your pick. A lonely man encounters either a girl named Mary, Marijuana, or The Virgin Mary. Coming out in 1966 with its "trippy", "groovy" feeling, it seems likely it could be a weed song--but then, of course, so can anything.

What is most interesting to me is how this song managed to become a victim of the chasm between "Rock and Roll" and "Rock Music". There was a short period---barely from 1965 to 1967, when the love songs with a good beat were turning into something more introspective and experimental, but that would soon be eclipsed by hard rock. I encountered this song on oldies radio, where it was an upbeat singalong for commuting moms, even though this song is much closer, in time and feeling, to Jimi Hendrix, than to Elvis Presley. Like much of the music from this short time period, it fell through the cracks of being taken seriously.