Double Feature — “Baby Get Your Head Screwed On”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — March 25, 2024

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,155) Double Feature — “Baby Get Your Head Screwed On”

Here is a mod-tastic A-side cover of a track off Cat Stevens’ first album — “gritty vocals combine with R&B guitar, percussion, cello, organ and horns in a superb production . . . that made pirate radio station Radio London’s Top 10.” (Jon Harrington, liner notes to Halcyon Days: 60s Mod, R&B, Brit Soul & Freakbeat Nuggets) The “short-lived Birmingham-based duo . . . added wailing fuzz guitars and ELO-style cello to a Cat Stevens pop-soul composition”. (Vernon Joynson, The Tapestry of Delights Revisited) I find DF’s version far superior to Stevens’ “trippy Donovan-esque ballad[]” (Bruce Eder, https://www.allmusic.com/album/matthew-son-mw0000198640), which is marred by a totally out of place “oriental” accompaniment.

23 Daves opines that:

Cat Stevens’s track “Baby Get Your Head Screwed On” . . . is given a particularly soulful psychedelic rendition here (or should that be psychedelic soulful rendition?) complete with parping [a new word for me!] horns, proto-Electric Light Orchestra styled string solos, and a gritty, gnashing vocal.  Whilst there’s very little doubt that the track is actually quite ahead of its time, it falls just short of being brilliant by dint of the fact that the tune gets rather repetitive once they’ve set out their stall within the first minute.  There are very few fuzzy, psychedelic records of this era which will tempt you on to the dancefloor in a similar way, however, and for that reason alone it deserves the share of attention it has since had from aficionados.

https://left-and-to-the-back.blogspot.com/2011/03/double-feature-baby-get-your-head.html

Martin Crookall goes to town in his review:

Whereas Stevens’ original version was simply another pop song, a nice melody, sung in a slightly more laidback fashion than his own hits, with basically standard instrumentation, The Double Feature took a much more adventurous approach to the song. Stevens’s version is, frankly, bland. The instrumentation is light, strings heavy without being obtrusive, underlaid by piano, but it slips away from the ears, painlessly, essentially a filler track.
The Double Feature take a very different approach. To begin with, their version emphasises the percussion, driven by bongo drums, its vocals are more rasping and impassioned, and the overall sound leans towards R&B and to a lesser extent freakbeat. The instrumentation is sparser, coming in individual bursts through the first half of the song, a single cello sawing away at the seven note riff between verse and chorus, a rumbling fuzz guitar underlining that chorus, individual blasts of horn, an R&B organ driving though, a bongo solo accompanied only by the bass guitar, and then, as the song steams into its final verse, the whole ensemble coming in in force.

https://mbc1955.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/the-infinite-jukebox-the-double-features-baby-get-your-head-screwed-on/

Those with new girlfriends — be forewarned, do not play this song for them! Crookall advises that:

Lyrically, ‘Baby Get Your Head Screwed On’ is a bit of an oddity. Technically, it’s a love song: she’s lost her boyfriend and the singer is counselling her – the bit about getting her head screwed on – but his counselling is along very familiar lines, namely, Baby let your favourite daddy see you through (the missing word here is probably ‘sugar’). Oh yes, let me move in, let me take over, I’ll lift your spirits for you . . . . [It’s] a bit dodgy, a touch of the predator there, moving in on the vulnerable girl. Stevens’ laidback performance on the original undercuts the meaning of the words, but the Double Feature’s lead singer is definitely hot to get involved. It’s a lot like The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ being mistaken for a song about devotion when it’s really about stalking. Yet the sound of the record, its air of freshness, its urgency still attracts me, not to mention that little cello riff that makes the song sing in my head. But it’s best to remember that this might not be the love song you’d want to play to your new girlfriend, even if she is into the obscure songs of the late Sixties.

https://mbc1955.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/the-infinite-jukebox-the-double-features-baby-get-your-head-screwed-on/

Here’s Cat Stevens:

Here are the Legends:

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