Today’s classic song of the day is more obscure than most, and I expect that many readers of this blog won’t know it. But if you do, you probably love it.
The tune is “Hammond Song” by the Roches. The Roches were a new-folk group of three sisters (Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy) out of New Jersey who hit the scene in the late ’70s and kept going through the ’80s and into the ’90s and mid-2000s. Their voices and harmonies were unique, to say the least, but that’s what made fans fall in love with them. They were sort of a punk-folk group, often singing a cappella, who wrote quirky songs in stunning three-part harmony.
“Hammond Song,” written by sister Maggie, is “a song about leaving town.” It was inspired by the sisters’ reaction to what was their first big break in the music business. Maggie and Terre had met famous musician guy Paul Simon when they crashed his songwriting class at NYU. He subsequently enlisted them to sing backup vocals on the song “Was a Sunny Day” on his 1973 album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Simon’s record company took an interest in the duo but proved too intrusive for the sisters (including asking them to wear “hipper clothes”), inspiring them to skip town and head south to Hammond, Louisiana (not Hammond, Indiana, as I originally thought). Sister Terre relates what transpired:
“We were humiliated… We wanted to get out of the whole situation. We had a friend in Hammond, Louisiana, who was running a kung fu school. We gave up our apartment and told the record company, ‘We’re not going to promote the record anymore; we’re going away for a while.’ This was two weeks after the record came out. Maggie wrote the ‘Hammond Song’ about the whole experience.
The Roches started out as a duo with eldest Maggie and middle sister Terre; they released their first album, Seductive Reasoning, in 1975. Younger sister Suzzy joined the act when she graduated from high school, and they released their self-named debut album in 1979. Robert Fripp produced that one and contributed some wonderful electric guitar backup to the group’s distinctive vocals.
The group first got widespread attention when Phoebe Snow recorded Maggie’s tune, “The Married Men,” and performed it (with Linda Ronstadt) on Saturday Night Live. The Roches themselves were invited to perform on the November 17, 1979, episode of SNL, which is where I was first exposed to their magic. For the show, they performed the song “Bobby’s Song” and their own unique a cappella interpretation of the Hallelujah Chorus; that was back when SNL actually broke new musical acts.
“Hammond Song” was a standout on that first album, although there’s not a bad track on the disc. The Roches continued performing and recording through 2007, releasing a total of eleven albums as a trio. Maggie and Suzzy released two further albums as a duo, Suzzy released two solo albums, and Terre released three albums on her own. Suzzy also released three albums with her daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche. (Yes, Lucy’s dad is singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, making her the half-sister of fellow musicians Martha Wainwright and Rufus Wainwright.)
I got the opportunity to see the Roches twice in concert, once at a small club in Bloomington, Indiana, in the early ’80s, and again at the Vogue in Indianapolis a few years later. That intimate concert in Bloomington was and remains one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended. I was entranced throughout their entire set; it was magical.
Maggie Roche, unfortunately, passed away from breast cancer in 2017, aged 65. Terre and Suzzy continue to perform on their own in and around their home of New York City.
If you still don’t know enough about the Roches, check out their musical introduction to themselves in the lead track from their The Roches album. The song is called “We” and, as the lyrics humorously state, they are Maggie and Terre and Suzzy—they don’t give out their ages and they don’t give out their phone numbers. Sometimes their voices give out, but not their ages or their phone numbers.
And here’s your daily bonus video of the day, the Roches performing “Hammond Song” live at England’s Loughborough University of Technology in February of 1981. (That’s Terre on the left, Suzzy in the middle, and Maggie playing guitar on the right.) This one kills me every time.
