Lost Songs: "Hooch"

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This is my first entry to Lost Songs since the opening of Thubstack (subscribe) and so perhaps it’s worth mentioning that a) all the previous entries exist at Thutopia and b) the original entry in this series is now over a decade old. Which, like most something-is-a-decade-old discoveries, is startling.

Anyway. We either get old or we die.

And I guess if I’m still hearing songs that I haven’t heard in over three years, I’m getting older and older still.

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My internal jukebox is filled with songs that I haven’t heard for years and may not even like. Believe me, if I could swap out “Hooch,” I would. But I sing it at least monthly, certainly fortnightly, probably weekly, sometimes daily.

I’m going to assume that if you’re old enough to remember this song, you don’t, and if you aren’t, you’ve never heard it before:

 

I don’t think I’ve heard this song since the first half decade of the millennium. And all I remembered, before hearing it last Thursday, was the lines “Who got da hooch? Who got da freshy-freshy? Who got the only livin thing around?” and that, in information discovered by an intrepid Daily Universe reporter/columnist whose identity has, over the years, been combined with that of an erstwhile restaurant/movie reviewer at the Californian, the bassist or the drummer or something is/was Mormon.

Asides on the guy at the Californian who is, incidentally, still at work:

1. I’m old enough to remember when the Californian decided it couldn’t afford its own movie reviewer anymore and moved entirely to syndicated columnists.

2. I loved how, when the Californian would print pictures of their staff, he would wear a paper bag over his head to keep his identity secret from restauranteurs. I’ll bet that’s not tenable anymore.

Anyway, I heard the song last Thursday, as I mentioned, and everything else I remembered about the song was wrong. I missed the opening which, listening to now, I think I had right, but the instrumentation as a whole and the entire vibe of the song I remembered thoroughly incorrectly. It’s pretty chill stuff with some mellow sax and I think some organ and some other stuff that’s way more laid back and much less garage.

Also, I didn’t quite have the lyrics in the right order.

(And the ones I didn't remember are less dumb than I thought.)

And since it’s no longer a ubiquitous earworm and I’ve been forced (by two decades of experience) to accept its existence in my brain, I guess I can also be okay with it.

If you want to see them live, the band, with a deeply pre-Google name, is playing shows this summer.

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