R. Dean Taylor, "Indiana Wants Me"

I used to make a lot of mix tapes - for myself, for friends; as gifts, as mementos. My dual-cassette boom box got quite a workout over the years. Some songs came from my tape collection; far more were recorded off the radio. (Sorry if I've upset the apple carts of the copyright police by admitting this. It's not like I haven't spent thousands of dollars on the music industry.)

One of the interesting things about recording songs off the radio was the segues you'd wind up with before and after: sometimes the intrusiveness of a DJ, more often the abrupt shift of one song beginning its fade into another having just kicked in. The best such crossfade I ever created was a happy accident: Frankie Valli's vamping wails on the Four Seasons' pop psychedelicacy "Tell It to the Rain" magically turned into the police sirens that open R. Dean Taylor's morbid story-song "Indiana Wants Me." Same key and everything, I could swear. I wish I could have found a studio clip of the 4S tune to play them side by side for you.

But that's not the only reason to listen to "Indiana Wants Me." One doesn't want to sympathize with a guy who opens the lyric with his declaration of a revenge killing, yet one cannot help but be touched by such a naked line as "It hurts to see the man that I've become." I heard the Top 10 song hundreds of times on Pittsburgh oldies station 3WS during my formative years (back when "oldies" meant 1957-1970) and have always appreciated the tale-telling effort from one of Motown's second-stringers. My friend Mike just told me he thought it was Simon & Garfunkel on first listen, and I can totally hear that. Too bad Taylor's subsequent efforts, like "Ghost in My House", couldn't find similar footing in our charts or our hearts.