LEE MARVIN – "Wand'rin Star"

Wow – Lee Marvin had a #1! Well, better Lee at #1 in England than Lorne Greene at #1 in America with “Ringo.” How the heck did Marvin snag Nelson Riddle as an arranger, though?

This type of thing, while perhaps an oddity on the charts, wasn’t so much of an oddity in terms of what was in the water at the time. The Band, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Nashville Skyline and so on had opened country music back up as source material for artists who were emphatically not country stars. The closest parallel to “Wand’rin Star” and the Sons of the Pioneers aesthetic is Ringo’s “Beaucoups of Blues,” from the album of the same name, released September of the same year…worth a listen if you like this sort of thing!

Surely the success of this single is almost entirely dependant on the popularity of Paint Your Wagon as a musical rather than the country/cowboy genre connection. It also contains two of the worst vocal performances you are likely to hear on one single. Unfortunately for me I will always have a fondness for it as it reminds me of an outing during my childhood when on a particularly grim rainy day at Herne Bay my Mum and I abandoned the beach for the safety of the local cinema. You can guess what was on.

Sigh…

“trees” not “tress” (bring back comment-edit!)

I’ve heard those Mitchum calypso records he did in the fifties.

Dearie dearie me…

*impersonates Les Dawson impersonating Mitchum walk on Blankety Blank*

The only decent thing about the D-Day film The Longest Day is how everyone clears off the beach right at the end just so that Mitchum can do his walk.

I know he was bothering the country charts in the mid/late 60s and his biggish album of the time was on the Bear Family label, called something like “That Man, Robert Mitchum” (or maybe the other way around). There were others – I’m sure if you google/amazon/ebay him all will be revealed. Wasn’t his biggest country single “Little Old Wine Drinker Me”? Lee Marvin would have loved it.

I heard this before I knew he was a bad singer, and thought he was just a tough roustabout. I like it, and the b-side, very much. The Paint Your Wagon soundtrack is in a charity shop very near you, and I consider it five pence well spent.

Shane MacGowan growled this on one of his Popes albums, IIRC. I have yet to hear the other Lee (Christopher)’s version.

They say Lee had to record it one line at a time, but they say that about Al Green too, and it’s a record not a gig, so that suits me fine.

Is it correct that the British singles chart you’re using – unlike the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. – is (and was) strictly based on sales? If so, that could help explain why oddball and novelty singles get to number one more than we’d expect, though I don’t know if that applies to this particular song. That is, starting about 1968 most fans of a song buy the album not the single, the exceptions being novelties and one-shots and newcomers and teenybopper music (where the kids can’t afford the album, hence go for the single).

Fans of musicals, however, tend to buy the albums. What may have happened here, though, is that the song broke out to nonfans of musicals, who I’d imagine would have bought the single almost exclusively.

Can’t recall hearing this. Will now go search YouTube.

I’d expect that many fans manage to resist the encouragement to buy both the album and the single.

[Forgive me if this is a duplicate post. I keep trying to post this comment, and WordPress keeps refusing it.]

A pleasant surprise. 5 underrates this. There’s nothing wrong with Marvin’s singing (it sometimes goes below his range, so he rough-talks it but with the same basic purr/burr in his throat, which works fine). The tune is a lightweight throwaway, and with a higher-pitched singer would have been given a perkier arrangement. This has got more Riddle busyness than necessary, but Riddle keeps it light enough on its feet.

(I notice that after the track is finished YouTube displays links to Dana and Greenbaum and Thunderclap Newman, etc., leading me to believe that the only people who’ve watched this clip recently are we Freaky Triggerers.)

Just pitching in on this dying thread to mention the sales factor – at this point it was still common even for acts who might be considered relatively album-driven to release non-album singles, although by the time the Seventies roll around this is happening less.

Towards the end of the century, you get a slight decrease in novelty hits because the economics change; record companies can’t make money from singles, so there’s less incentive for them to release something that won’t sell in album form unless it’s tied into something else.
It occurs to me that the greater importance of sales might be part of the reason why we care more about our Christmas Number Ones – but this probably isn’t the right place to make that point.

Anyone listening to this for the first time would be forgiven for losing patience with it, convinced that it was an instrumental, as it takes an absolute age for Lee to start growling his way into this dirge in a voice so low it made Paul Robeson sound like Alan Ball on helium. The interjecting harmonica is just plain irritating as are the sooo manly backing singers. Basically, I thought this was a stinker and I don’t mind saying so. The only thing in its favour is that it was taken up by the intelligensia at Stamford Bridge, who sung:

“I was born under a Chelsea shed,
I was bor-orn under a Chelsea shed,
Knives were made for cutting,
Guns were made to shoot,
If you go down to the Chelsea shed
We’ll all put in the boot…”

Well, it’s fucking better than anything Andrew Motion ever came up with!

I used to be able to burp-sing this when I was 9 years old!

No one has mentioned some wonderful lyrics:
Do I know where hell is?
Hell is in hello
Heaven is “goodbye forever”
“It’s time for me to go”

not to mention “mules are made to pack”

like thefatgit @29 I too used to amuse friends and family with my growly take on this as a 9 year old. Now I like it for the arrangement and the confidence of the vocal that puts me in mind of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’.