One person’s view: “Horrible, whiney, sad, miserable. … I mean to each his own, but I’m pretty sure Satan plays this song on an endless loop in Hell.” – bobrocks @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.62 / 5.00
This is the inaugural entry in The Bad Top Tens. If you’ve seen my Bad #1 Hits project, you already know what is about to transpire. I describe a song from the past that was once very popular but has since been skewered by the critics and dismissed by modern listeners. I evaluate whether the song’s poor reputation is deserved. Usually it is. This blog’s first victim is Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her”, a gleeful little melody about a guy named Tommy dying in a wreck during an automobile race.
“Tell Laura” is one of the foremost examples of a death disc, an entertainment genre that dominated the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and that has occasionally been revisited since. A haunting death disc needs to be both gory and sad, and this one does not disappoint. It scores points with its descriptions of the blaze that consumed Tommy’s car and of Laura pining in the chapel for her lost love. We are left to assume that she took a vow of celibacy and became a nun. Some Catholic school kid is probably getting whacked with a cane by a bitter 90-year-old woman right now, just because Tommy was foolish enough to think he was going to win that $1,000 prize.
All of this makes for a fine epic, but there is one weak line that undermines the narrative: “No one knows what happened that day.” This is a missed opportunity to give an interesting explanation for the accident. Perhaps another man coveted Laura’s attention, so he sabotaged Tommy’s vehicle? Or maybe a scary moth got into Tommy’s car and made him plow into the concession stand? I’m not saying that every story song has to go into depth about every detail. It’s just lazy writing, however, to say that nobody knows what happened at the key moment in the plot. Imagine if other death discs tried to get away with this. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” might have been titled “Grandma’s Autopsy Was Inconclusive”.
At its core, “Tell Laura” is a parable about the random injustices of the universe. The lyrics suggest that Tommy was a novice racer who had the misfortune to be killed on the one and only occasion that he participated in the sport. Totally unfair. It’s like getting tennis elbow the first time you play, or being forcibly signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates after a scout saw you pitch two innings at your company softball game. Listeners can cheer a well-earned fatality like the one in Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel”, which resulted from the title character’s stupidity and recklessness, but Tommy’s only apparent sin was naïveté. It’s impossible to derive any pleasure from his demise.
While no singer is talented enough to make me want to hear this depressing tale more than once or twice, I give Ray Peterson credit for trying. His vocal style reminds me of Roy Orbison, and even a second-rate imitation of Roy Orbison sounds better than, say, the genuine Phil Collins. I appreciated Peterson’s emotional performance more after hearing Ricky Valance’s less memorable remake of “Tell Laura”. Valance recorded this for a different label after Peterson’s British distributor, Decca Records, deemed the maudlin lyrics offensive and refused to release the original version in the U.K. Decca then clumsily backtracked on this edict – after destroying the entire first pressing of Peterson’s single – only to find that the competing record by Valance had already satiated the country’s demand for the song. It was a huge misstep, but the label soon had an opportunity to recover when an unknown band called the Beatles showed up for an audition. Unfortunately, Decca declined to sign them, as that would have diverted resources from such promising young acts as Kenny Hollywood and the Tony Osborne Orchestra.
Ricky Valance’s version hit #1 in the U.K., an occurrence that one British music blogger calls “a national embarrassment up there with Brexit”. Ray Peterson’s original reached only #7 in the U.S, and that seems about right.
My rating: 4 / 10